The blithering from the Statist Left in the wake of the Connecticut massacre continues on and on, with the same tired old baloney rehashed as the lefties fan the embers of emotion shamelessly. This is, after all, how the Left makes every argument they try: by getting people to act on their feelings instead of looking at facts with a level head (see the post "Liberal SIN" for more on this).
The Left does not hate guns. They hate guns in the hands of anyone who opposes them, including United States armed forces when the Commander in Chief is a Republican. (When the CinC is Barack Hussein Obama, they even love the hell out of drones doing missile assassinations of American Citizens without due process of law.)
The Left is well aware of the truth of the saying of Mao Tse-Tung: "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun". (This is possibly the only thing the late Chairman Mao and I would agree on.) Thus, firearms in the hands of those who oppose the Left must be tightly controlled (or ideally eliminated altogether). Chairman Mao's saying was however hardly an original thought. The Founders of this Republic had exactly that in mind when they put the Second Amendment into the Constitution. The power (and therefore the guns and the right to keep and bear them) belong to "the people"; meaning to each individual free citizen. No wonder the Left hates the thought of a common citizen being able to own firearms and carry them.
But the trend for about 35 years has been toward recognizing the right of citizens to keep and bear Arms, and toward loosening the infringements on them that began back in the Depression era. This has been driving the anti-gun Left nuts. Their reaction has been predictable, and time and again they have been shown to be spectacularly wrong.
When Virginia joined the growing ranks of states which stipulate that any citizen who is not otherwise prohibited from possessing a handgun be issued on request - with the exception of persons convicted within the five years preceeding the request of certain offenses such as disorderly conduct or DWI - a permit to carry a concealed handgun, provided the applicant take and pass an NRA-approved concealed carry training course; the Washington Post op-ed page went absolutely nuts.
Rivers of blood running through the streets of Arlington and Alexandria were forecast, especially since those jurisdictions' "three-day waiting periods" and Alexandria's special prohibition against the open carry of a loaded firearm were nullified by the law that was passed.
Nothing even remotely like this happened. In fact, Virginia's (already lower-than-much-less-"gun friendly" D.C. and Maryland) crime rate plummeted. Virginia has had a few - notably the "Virginia Tech Massacre" - mass shootings, but these were committed in places which were among the few places allowed under Virginia law to declare themselves "gun-free" zones.
As Virginia's crime rate dropped, the city of Washington D.C. experienced a rise in particularly gun crimes. Of course the Post and the politicians were quick to blame the "easy availability of guns in Virginia" for their problems. But this just begs the question of why, if we just across the river are so awash in evil guns, we in the Blessed Commonwealth don't have the problem?
Then, the District of Columbia was forced by the Supreme Court's Heller decision to allow (allow??) residents to purchase and keep handguns in their residences, loaded and ready to go. The Washington Post again literally screamed bloody murder. But the result has been a steady decline in the homicide rate.
Meanwhile, Chicago - whose Mayor Daly said a few years ago that he was against loosening that city's gun laws because it would lead to "You got a gun, and I got a gun, let's go out in the street and settle this". Today Chicago has the strictest prohibition on handguns in the country. And last year, 800 people lost arguments settled because the guy who shot them knew his opponent would be unarmed.
Also, consider Vermont. In Vermont, you carry your weapon openly, you carry it concealed, you carry it how you like, when you like, and where you like. Ever hear of a mass murder in Vermont? (And by the way, Vermont is also so far to the Left otherwise that - barring the cold and the absence of firearms restrictions - it could be California with maple syrup.)
Of course there are people who say that the "more guns = less crime" examples here are a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. This is Latin for (roughly) "It happened after this, therefore this caused it". The classic example of this fallacy is: "The rooster crowed, the sun arose, therefore the rooster crowing made the sun rise".
The "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy can be exposed by the simple device of killing the rooster. When the sun rises in silence, the fallacy is exposed.
So you would expect that if some area in a "gun-freindly" place were made "gun-free"; then if nothing bad happened there either; that would mean that other factors unrelated to the presence of firearms in ordinary citizen's hands were responsible for the low occurrence of gun violence. Fair enough.
Look to Aurora, Colorado. In Colorado, citizens may carry concealed weapons into almost any venue that does not specifically prohibit them.
The maniac who shot up the theater multiplex in Aurora bypassed several other (much more conveniently located) theater complexes which did not prohibit firearms. In those places, the rooster of firearms in the hands of citizens was crowing, and the sun of safe and peaceful life shone.
The place where that rooster was killed and failed to crow was a theater which specifically prohibited its patrons from having weapons on the premises. When that rooster failed to crow, darkness reigned, and people died.
The state-controlled media reporters like to respond to this fact with a droning mantra about how if there had been armed citizens in the theater they (choose as may as you like, it's all BS) would have not been able to stop the killer because of his "superior weaponry"/ might have sprayed even more bullets and killed more people/or whatever. But the main usefulness of an armed citizenry in preventing crime (and for that matter, tyranny) is mostly one of deterrence. In Aurora, the killer was deterred three times before he found a place where there was guaranteed to be no opposition to his design.
In the case of the tragic massacre in Connecticut, the lamestream media types have been conjuring visions of "teachers in pitched gun battles" with the killer, had they been permitted to have firearms to defend the kids. The irony is, the killer selected a school full of kiddies for his crime precisely because he knew that there would not be a single armed person there to stop him. Had he known that any adult he encountered just might have a Glock under his or her jacket, he likely would have just stayed home and jerked off.
Firearms are not "the problem". In our next post we will identify the problem and posit some possible solutions.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment