While the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was a terrible and tragic event, to put it most mildly, it has caused a national debate on gun control, not safety from mentally ill people and their propensity to perform extreme devastation. As is almost always the case with many politicians when something of this magnitude happens, they tend to politicize the tragedy and fail to take into consideration what the facts reveal.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who initiated an assault weapons ban in 1994, which lasted for ten years, has felt led to take the initiative once again to attempt a ban on assault weapons, even though there has been little or no debate on the advantages of assault weapons. Further, gun control proponents have ignored facts that prove that in areas where there are strict gun control laws, there is a high crime rate. This data is apparently of no use to anti-gun and gun control proponents. They fail to see the logic in the fact that when citizens are able to arm themselves and their families, they are indeed safer from criminals who would do them harm.
While Feinstein and others ignore concrete facts, the odds of more instances like Sandy Hook happening become more likely. If handguns and assault rifles are taken out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, as Feinstein would like, they will be doing the opposite of what really needs to be done right now. And her decisions will have the opposite effect of what she is trying to achieve.
In the case of Sandy Hook, it was a mentally disturbed person who had access to firearms who is primarily responsible for that massacre. With the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, it was another mentally disturbed person who had access to firearms. The Gabby Giffords shooting in Tucson, Arizona was perpetrated by a mentally disturbed person who also had firearms. Can you see a pattern here? It is not firearms that are dangerous. It’s a mentally disturbed person with a weapon who is dangerous. It is a criminal with a gun who can be dangerous. And it is a tyrannical government that wishes to take away our arms and Second Amendment rights, that is very dangerous.
When Wayne La Pierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA), proposed having armed guards or officers in schools, the anti-gun crowd and mainstream media went mad. Before even considering the facts mentioned above, they were quick to dismiss the idea as something that would make kids feel unsafe. But the NRA offers a viable solution. There are plenty of trained personnel who could fit that position perfectly. Retired law enforcement officers, ex-military and other trained security guards would be well equipped to do the job of keeping kids safe at school. This would not make kids feel unsafe. Again, the opposite is true.
Jumping on the liberal bandwagon of gun control, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) proposed and passed a law in his state that prohibits a gun owner to carry more than seven rounds of ammunition in the magazine. This is simply ridiculous. How did he come up with the number seven? While in a hysterical speech he gave to his choir, he stated that no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer. Wrong, Governor. You do not know that to be a fact. It very well may take more than ten bullets to kill a deer and it very possibly may take more than ten bullets to stop one or more criminals who try to invade another’s home or property.
A shooting in Georgia made headlines when a woman encountered a man unlawfully entering her home while she was alone with her two small children. Fortunately, with coaching from her husband over the phone, she bravely fired five rounds into the invader, who was stopped but able to leave the house and drive down the street until crashing his car. So prohibiting a gun owner from carrying more than seven rounds in his/her gun is reckless on the part of Governor Cuomo and ignores logic and reality.
Those who want firearms out of the hands of all people, not just criminals and the mentally insane, may be well intentioned, but they are terrifyingly naïve. One cannot just disregard the lives saved when a gun is used on a criminal by a law-abiding, armed citizen. For some reason, though, the mainstream media does not want to report those incidents. That would go against the agenda they’re trying to push, and it would prove their whole narrative incorrect.
When one looks at the facts, one finds that 2.5 million guns each year are used for self-defense purposes. In a study done by criminologist and researcher Gary Kleck, of those 2.5 million gun owners, 400,000 of them stated that they would likely not be alive today were it not for the gun which was used successfully to save them, whether the gun was fired or not.
Still, the media, politicians on the left, including President Obama, choose to ignore the facts. Our founding fathers figured it would come to this. That’s why they wrote the Second Amendment. And there is nothing President Obama, Senator Feinstein, Governor Cuomo, the liberal media or anyone can do to disarm American citizens by taking away our Second Amendment rights. Not even by executive order.
