The American Statist Left is constantly droning on about how the key problem driving mass killings such as Columbine, Aurora, Tucson, and Sandy Hook is "the easy availability of guns". That is demonstrably a lot of twaddle.
I have memories going back to when I was 10 years old of looking at the Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail order catalogue. There were ads in there for pistols such as the Beretta "Minx" (Fires nine shots as fast as you can pull the trigger!) and M-1 carbines in .30 caliber (Has about the kick of a pussycat). Ten year old me could have ordered a Colt .45 Single Action Army revolver and had it delivered by parcel post back then, and the only thing that stopped me was (1) I didn't have 25 bucks in my piggy bank (This was an era where a salary of nine grand a year was considered "Upper Middle Class") and (2) my dad would have blistered my butt so that I could sit on a coin and tell if it was a penny or a dime.
Then Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy with an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano bolt action rifle that he ordered and had delivered in the mail, and buying firearms by mail order was quickly outlawed.
But for a good part of my boyhood, firearms were "easily available", and I had pals who lived on large wooded tracts; and their folks allowed us to go out in the woods with some .22 rifles and pistols and do a type of recreational shooting called "plinking"; ie; shooting at cans and bottles on the ground, that sort of thing. Some of us even went to the dump at night to do some "rat shooting". Even into my teen years, any of us could have gotten hold of a gun, walked right into school with the thing in a jacket pocket or a bookbag or gym bag, and killed the bully who had been tormenting us and his whole damned clique.
That's right. We had bullies back in those days of the late 60s and early 70s. And they didn't just "bully" by snide remarks, either. These guys were honest-to-badness hoodlums who would humiliate someone by beating the crap out of them. What Harris and Kliebold went through at Columbine that allegedly sparked thier lethal rampage was nothing compared to what a target of a bully at my high school went through. Yet no one, but no one ever carried a firearm into the school, let alone kill anyone.
In the interests of full disclosure, one of my classmates, Bill Hilgeford, did die of gunfire. He and some fellow footballers took their fake IDs and went out drinking at a Dayton nightclub called "The SHE". They got whiskey-brave and started some crap with a guy who had a bunch of friends, and wound up fleeing at high speed while being shot at from the pursuing vehicle. Finally they were trapped at a red light, the attackers pulled up alongside them, and Bill was riddled with bullets from what I remember as being described as a .22 revolver. He bled to death internally before help arrived.
That was a tragedy, and it shook the entire community of what was then Wayne Township, Ohio. But nobody went thumping the tub about "getting rid of guns". Most of the talk was - correctly - focused on parents keeping tabs on what the kids were up to.
If the problem consisted of the "easy availability of guns", then Colunmbine and Sandy Hook would have happened nearly half a century ago. Firearms are much less easily gotten now than then, and yet now we have this phenomenon. And had the Aurora killer or the Sandy Hook killer or any of the others just thrown an improvised explosive/incendiary device(s) and ran, the carnage might well have been even greater.
And you can pass laws until you are blue in the face, and still you will have no assurance that the person walking toward you does not have a firearm on his person and malice in his heart. But he will be assured that you are incapable of resisting whatever evil designs he may have.
"High-capacity magazines"? The Browning "Hi-Power" 9mm semiautomatic pistol has been available to the civilian market since World War One. It holds 13 rounds plus one in the chamber. High-capacity magazines are not a new thing.
"Assault rifles"? Leaving alone for the moment that any weapon that is not capable of fully automatic or "burst" fire is NOT AN "ASSAULT RIFLE", more killings were done last year with bare hands than were committed by the use of any rifle, "assault" or not.
The problem, I believe I have shown more than adequately; is not "easily available" firearms, nor is it "high capacity magazines" and neither is it "Assault rifles". THE PROBLEM IS THE CULTURE!!
When I was a young kid, personal responsibility was drummed into us, as it should be. There were consequenses - bad and good - attached to everything we did. Talk about a "level playing field" would have been laughed to scorn back then. Everyone knew that different playing fields had different advantages and disadvantages - such as Boston's infamous "Green Monster" wall - and that what was important was that everyone play an uneven field by the same rules. It was accepted that human proneness to error meant that once in a while the referees and umpires would make a wrong call, and that human nature would engender outright cheating every so often, and that this was an unavoidable fact of life that had to be dealt with.
Somewhere along the line, however, the notion took hold that it was possible to create a "perfect society". This notion was not a new thing (nothing really is); Plato posited it in "Utopia" before Christ was born, and Karl Marx regurgitated it in "The Communist Manifesto". This notion presumes that it is possible for a human being to be perfect. Maybe not ALL human beings, but that an elite of "enlightened" humans can lead the rest of us dimwits to Paradise on Earth.
In the late 1970s, this Utopian fantasy was joined and exacerbated by the "Me" decade. Here in the Washington Metropolitan Area, there was an organization promoting individual therapy called "The Total You"; which aimed at convincing people of their own self-worth whether it existed or not.
Three generations, each more influenced by this garbage, now walk the Earth. Especially in these United States, people look to their government as the provider of the solution to all their problems. During the last presidential campaign, the Left ran an ad showing a fictional woman called "Julia" having all her needs met from cradle to grave by a benevolent government kissing every widdo boo-boo life dealt her.
That is what every one of these mass murderers expected. And when they did not get everything according to the paradise they expected was their birthright, they lashed out in lethal tantrums. Their parents, their contemporaries, and the "professionals" they had contact with were all blinded by their dependence on the government to take care of everything, and/or their suppositions that it is possible for imperfect humans to forge a perfect society.
Do you suppose that Lee Harvey Oswald would have never killed President Kennedy had mail-order rifles been banned in that day? Do you think that my classmate Bill Hilgeford would be alive today had "handguns" been banned? I have news for you.
YOU WILL NEVER GET RID OF FIREARMS. Firearms are ancient technology. Even the submachine gun is technology that is more than a century old. Clandestine cottage industries using less than $20,000 dollars worth of machine tools can turn out dozens of fully automatic weapons each per day. If firearms are the problem, then there is no solutiion.
The solution is simple. Parents, watch your kids. Columbine killers Kliebold and Harris had an astonishing arsenal of firearms in their bedrooms well in advance of the Columbine massacre, yet the parents did not notice this??
And stop depending on "the government" to take care of every single incidence of nisfortune that falls your way. Once everyone does this, the price of AK clones and AR-15s will fall through the cracks.
And we gun owners will NOT sit still for this nonsence. Wamt to start the American Civil War II?
Then come for the firearms. "Coming for the firearms" is what engendered the first shots fored in the American MIlitia.
Guns are NOT the problem. The culture is.
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