YET ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING AT A "SOFT TARGET"

Good grief. Here we go again, and it is horrible. An elementary school in Connecticut is entered by a person with evil and mayhem on his mind. Shots are fired, and when it was over, more than a score of grade-school kids lay dead or dying and the shooter turned his weapon on himself.  There are reports that the shooter's mother was found dead in her home and that his dad was found dead elsewhere. 

 

But the story keeps changing. First the shooter was named Ryan, then it was Adam, then Ryan and Adam turned out to be brothers and were seen together; and then they were a hundred miles apart. The police are still, even as this post is being written, trying to piece together exactly what happened.

 

And even though the situation is still quite murky, the anti-gun people of the Left have wasted no time in dancing in the blood of these innocents and calling for everything from a ban on "assault weapons" to an outright total abrogation of the Second Amendment.

 

For our part we wonder why the people who make the laws and rules for firearms in schools seem to care less about the kids than a sheep owner cares about his sheep. Shepherds out West carry rifles, and not "assault rifles" either, but .30-30 and .44 Magnum lever-action rifles, in case of wolves or bears.  A teacher armed with a .38 revolver might well have stopped this maniac before he was able to inflict as much carnage as he did.

 

There are those who say that this would not have been possible without the gun. These people are idiots. If you can smuggle a gun into a grade school, you can smuggle a machete'. In the end, the victim is still dead, but being hacked to death is a lot worse way to go. You can make crude but very effective pipe bombs and satchel charges full of shrapnel with commonly available materials.

 

There are several places on the planet where cottage industries making fully functioning copies of select-fire automatic weapons are mainstays of the local economy. As little as ten thousand dollars will buy  the machine tools needed to produce five or more "grease gun" type sub-machineguns per day. Nobody is getting rid of firearms any time soon.

 

Yet, that's all the anti-gun crowd shouts about.  And this, even though we know next to nothing about what just happened today. What happened today was evil, and that - and not guns - is what needs to be discussed and dealt with.