Gun Defenselessness Laws: Feeling more safe, being less safe

The other day a bunch of indoctrinated school children marched out of class, probably with adult encouragement, to demand more Gun Defenselessness laws. They claim only more Gun Defenselessness laws will keep them safe.

Since people willing to break the law in a mass shooting are also willing to steal guns or buy them illegally if they have to, the Gun Defenselessness laws only affect the kind of people who would defend people from a mass shooter. One early school shooting was stopped by a teacher who went out to his locked car to retrieve his hunting gun. That action would now be illegal because of gun-free school laws.

Some people think that schools can be safe if armed police officers are forced to run into shooting scenes without knowing if they are running in to the line of fire. There is not enough money in the world to force police officers to do that. Nor will they be willing to search all American homes to search for guns— the only way Gun Defenselessness laws will affect the gun supply. You can’t pay people enough to sacrifice their lives uselessly.

Several mass shootings have taken place in buildings that proclaim themselves gun-free zones. Of course. Shooters don’t care to be shot back at.

Another proposal is to demonize people who have ever sought therapy of any sort, since they might be ‘mentally ill.’ Most mentally ill people are not dangerous, and a military veteran who went to marriage counselling should not lose his right to hunt and to protect himself with guns.

Statistics show there is actually more ‘gun crime’ in locations with a lot of gun defenselessness laws. Places where a lot of law-abiding people own guns have less ‘gun crime’ and violent crime. Because criminals are afraid of getting shot.

Gun Defenselessness laws make people less safe, even though they may feel safer because they have been indoctrinated. Let us hope that the indoctrinated children will somehow learn how to think logically and check their facts before they get to voting age.

There is no screening for Future Bad Acts

When certain things happen, some people thing rigorous screening (of other people) will save us. We should screen refugees, would-be immigrants, mental patients, people with a history of violent behavior— and if we do it right, we are all 100% safe from everything.

Except that kind of screening isn’t possible. We can screen people on their histories, and on their current associations and intentions. We can’t determine what they will do in the future because even they don’t know it yet.

People change. Think of the ardent young atheist who goes off to college and becomes a Christian. Think of the young psychologist who thinks he can change everyone through therapy who ages into someone who thinks ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ about most criminals.

Some bad changes even make sense. Imagine some person of faith— Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim— who comes from a more innocent part of the world. He is thrown into an American big city where he learns he must support homosexual behavior and homosexual marriage to keep his job, and if he is in the medical profession must support abortions and dole out abortion-causing pills— or else. He sees blatant prostitution on every street corner and learns that the schools will teach his kindergarten child about homosexual relationships and his teenage child that not having sex before marriage is weird and a possible sign of mental problems. Isn’t all that enough to drive a guy insane, possibly in a messy, violent way?

The United States has a long history of imperfectly screening immigrants. Even before the US was a nation, the people that came to these shores were not carefully screened, in fact, some were send as a punishment for criminal acts. And the Indians and the Pilgrims didn’t screen one another particularly well, or they probably wouldn’t have tried to live in close proximity.

We survived. And we will continue to survive. Because it’s not really unscreened immigrants who might or might not have terrorist ties that are the big risk we face. We could save more American lives by getting 10% more people to use their seat belts than we could by banning all new immigrants. We could prevent more mass shootings by giving 10% more law-abiding citizens the opportunity to get concealed-carry firearm permits.

But what really does endanger us as a distinct and mostly-good nation is when we let fear or propaganda persuade us to give up American values and American personal freedom in favor of measures that not make us safer, merely more supervised and controlled.

Wicked Guns or Wicked Hearts?

It’s funny. Whenever there is a mass killing and the killer used a gun, all the mainstream media wants to talk about is the gun. Where did the gun come from? Was the gun an ‘assault weapon?’ Why wasn’t the gun kept locked up in some gun shop that shouldn’t be allowed to actually sell their guns?

No matter how many gun control laws there are, demands are made for more gun control. More classes of people are to be defined as unfit to own guns. Obama even wants to take gun rights away from some Social Security recipients. No more deer hunting for you, grandpa!

But wait a minute. Have you ever heard of a gun going on a shooting spree all by itself? No, there is always a person involved. It’s not the gun that is wicked, it’s the heart of the killer. And if that killer’s heart is wrong and he cannot buy, steal or make a gun, he will kill with other tools. Knives. Bombs. Poison. Chainsaws. Rope. Cars. Once I read of a killer who strangled a woman with her own bikini. Use a bikini, go to prison?

One thing has changed radically in the world during the course of my lifetime. Not the availability of guns, which is restricted in more places and for more people. But in my childhood in the early 1960s, the attitude on matters of right and wrong was far different.

People believed that right and wrong were distinct and ought to be know to everyone. People still believed that the Nuremberg Trials were right because the Nazi officials on trial knew in their hearts that killing Jews, Gypsies and disabled people was a moral wrong, no matter what the Nazi government said about it. And that people had a positive duty to do the morally right thing, even if the government had given the order.

It seemed that when I was a little girl, almost everyone who had children made a point to send their children to Sunday school or other religious education regularly. At the Presbyterian church I remember best, there was a religious education hour between the two church services. There were Sunday school classes for adults as well as children. Sunday school went on 52 weeks a year. Attendance was recorded, and if we went for 52 Sundays, we got a year pin. There were additional pins for additional years of perfect attendance. My family didn’t go every week, so it took me about two years to get my one-year pin.

Sunday school was serious. We memorized a Bible verse every Sunday. We were taught how to find a specific verse in the Bible. Sometimes the first child to find the requested verse got to read it out loud.

We were also asked to invite other children to our Sunday school. Most parents who would never take their kids to a Sunday school still permitted their children to attend a Sunday school with their friends.

Though there was an ill wind blowing and most of those kids, as teens, would learn to reject notions of right and wrong, there was still at the time of my childhood a consensus: some things are right, some things are wrong, and it is possible to tell the difference between the two. And even the irreligious people mostly approved of people following the teachings of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

Flash forward to today: in the Presbyterian church body that I went to as a child, it is no longer required to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God or the Savior of mankind. Abortion rights and marriage equality are the important beliefs at denomination headquarters these days.

Kids today are highly likely to come from broken homes of various types rather than the home of their married biological parents. And loud atheists are demanding that kids learn that religions are all bad and that the charities performed by religious bodies don’t exist, somehow.

You cannot say something is right or wrong these days without being loudly contradicted by someone who proposes a whole different scheme of right and wrong. Everyone to their own taste, even when it comes to moral views.

And so people who might be inclined to kill have a much easier time of it, when they decide to justify their murderous choices. After all, if respectable representatives of the more well-to-do political party can say it is OK to kill the unborn, the terminally ill, the people with brain damage such as Terri Schiavo and that stroke victim who begged for food and water, only to have a court rule she was not competent to make that request; well, how is some sociopath or person with mental illness to know it’s a big deal when the decide to kill the people they don’t consider really human?

The gun control advocates are just distracting us. The real problem is that our society is no longer together on following a set of rules about right and wrong and passing it on. And that just ensures that there are going to be more wicked hearts out there, set on doing wrong to others. The solution is not to punish guns, it is to educate people. And punish the ones who break the laws with imprisonment, even if prison cells cost money.