December 17, 2012

We need more laws

The politicos and media whores are jerking their knees like a frog hooked to a battery in biology class. Laws! Rules! More!

Laws against murder did not stop the nut job in Connecticut, nor did prohibitions against firearms in a school.  More of the same will not stop the next guy. Some frantic woman on TV talk yesterday was foaming at the mouth about limiting egress points into schools. Why yes, why don't we get rid of the windows, doors and put up a fence? School feels like a prison for many students anyway.  Oh yeah, the killer came in through the front door.

Look, all of the metal detectors in the world will not stop a guy hell-bent on murder.  An armed cop is no guarantee.  Police officers are killed every day by criminals with quicker triggers and single-minded intent.

This time, by all accounts, evil visited our children not with an scary "assault weapon", but with a pair of ordinary handguns. He could have accomplished his task just as easily with a shotgun or a mixture of household chemicals. Guns are no more to blame than the gas in a Molotov Cocktail.

How do we prevent such tragedy in the future?  I don't know. Human history is replete with examples of man's inherit cruelty. Ask the citizens of a medieval village about the loss of their children after a visit from the local warlord or the Mongol Horde. Ask a frontier family about loss after a raiding party of Comanche destroyed everything, or the Cheyenne after Sand Creek. Ask the citizens of a Mexican border town about gun violence. As I said Saturday, there is evil in this world.

Tens of millions of us own guns and never resort to mayhem and murder. The old adage is true; when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. Every home in Switzerland has an assault rifle, yet that nation has a remarkably low crime rate. It is not the guns, it is the culture. Chicago, Washington DC and New York have some of the strictest gun control laws, yet the equivalent of a Sandy Hook takes place every weekend in those cities.

I do not have answers, but panic and knee-jerking is not a solution.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dec. 17, 2012

Law enforcement officials said that Adam Lanza was armed with four firearms when he started his rampage at a Connecticut elementary school Friday that ended in the deaths of 20 children and seven adults, but nearly all the killing was done with just one of the guns: a .223 caliber Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle.

Big difference between this and a shotgun's results

Joe said...

Yes, you are right, a shotgun would have done even more damage to the kids huddled in closets.

More to the point which gun law do you think would have stopped Lanza?

After all, the worst school massacre in US history was done with bombs.

Before this crime, the worst school shootings took place in Britain and Germany, two nations with very strict gun laws.

I am not saying we do nothing, I am saying knee-jerk reactions are rarely good ones.

Anonymous said...

Guns don't kill people.

Seriously screwed up people kill people.

Joe said...

"Yes, you are right, a shotgun would have done"

please edit to read "nutcase with a shotgun..."

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