Knee Jerk Reactions
17 April 2007Predictably, following the horror on the Virginia Tech campus yesterday, there are numerous calls for more strict gun control. The claim is that if we can just get guns out of people’s hands, senseless violence like this can be averted. This is a typical knee jerk reaction fueled entirely by emotion rather than reasoned assessment.
Ironically, a bill in the Virginia legislature, HB1572, never made it out of subcommittee. Virginia’s concealed carry laws exempt state college campuses from the right to carry a concealed weapon. HB1572 would have eliminated that exemption. Had HB1572 been passed into law, students and faculty who had concealed carry permits would have been able to carry a firearm on campus and very likely this crazed gunman would have been stopped long before he killed 32 students and faculty.
Gun control advocates operate under the assumption that gun control can somehow remove guns from the hands of criminals. The facts, however, contradict that assumption. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns. We don’t have enough information at this juncture to know whether the gunman at Virginia Tech had a legal gun but the statistics say he probably did not.
The NRA‘s magazine, The American Rifleman, has a column every month dedicated to recounting how legal gun owners stop crime. Case after case is listed where someone legally carrying a gun stops a crime and often kills a violent criminal before that criminal can harm innocent people. The statistics say that people who legally obtain and license hand guns either never use them against another person or use them in the prevention of a crime. It virtually never happens that a person with a legal gun uses that gun in the commission of a crime.
Conversely, criminals are not deterred by gun laws. The old saw is true that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. A gun in the hands the right person yesterday could have easily stopped this gunman before so many innocent students and faculty were killed or injured.
The calls for more gun control will continue for some time. The Democrat Party will attempt to use this horrible tragedy to advance their political agenda and increase their power. This event will be shamelessly politicized to an enormous degree.
If you want to see the true results of gun control, watch this YouTube video of congressional testimony.
This woman watched her parents be killed by another deranged gunman with an illegally obtained weapon while she was helpless to do anything about it because her right to carry a weapon had been abridged. She said she’d rather be in jail on a gun charge with her parents alive than free with her parents dead. I fully agree. An armed citizenry is the best defense against this kind of senseless violence. Don’t let this horrible tragedy goad you into the knee jerk reaction of more gun control. That is not a solution. It only makes us less safe.
We are taught that the police are there to protect us but in truth, the police cannot protect us and if pressed, they will admit as much. The police are in the business of solving crimes that have already been committed, not crime prevention. If we are to be safe in our schools, our neighborhoods and our homes, we must have the ability to protect ourselves. That is far more difficult if we are disarmed.
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Tags: Constitution, Government, Gun Control, Gun Violence, Idiots, PoliticsRelated Posts
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