I can’t even begin to get my head around what happened yesterday in Connecticut. Watching it unfold on TV made me literally sick to my stomach, while fighting to keep myself from bawling in front of a room full of guys. But I suspect they all felt the same way. Normally a talkative bunch, we were all remarkably subdued. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that most of us are parents of small children who were in school at that moment.
And by the way, I don’t want to hear a single damned word about gun control: Gun Violence up 89% in the UK
The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year – a rise of 89 per cent.
In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.
In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled.
Note that this is in a country which has some of the most onerous gun laws in the world.
Gun control is an attempt to impose a mechanical solution on a cultural problem. Our society is sick, and disarming the law-abiding is not the solution. I know that’s not what gun-control advocates think they’d be doing, but that’s what the end result would be. The only way it works is by the fantasy of completely eliminating every single firearm from the face of the Earth. Otherwise, bad people will find a way to get their hands on them.
As has been said about universal nuclear disarmament, one cannot put that genie back into the bottle.
To my mind, there are two fundamental steps that would go a long way toward preventing more of these outrages (“tragedy” would imply this was somehow accidental):
1. Roll back the liberalization of mental health laws that make it nearly impossible to commit the truly ill. I know why it was done, but would submit that we are far worse off having so many people on the streets who would’ve been hospitalized 40 years ago. I have some personal, painful experience in this area and it is by the grace of God that things didn’t turn tragic.
2. Allow concealed-carry permit holders to exercise their licenses. A little plastic “Gun Free Zone” sign by the main entrance does nothing to deter a psychopath bent on mayhem, but a stable adult packing heat might. It certainly seems to have worked in those states that allow it, though like any other statistical analysis I’ve seen it abused from both directions. I will say this: every time CCW is allowed somewhere it hadn’t been before, none of the wild-west violence predicted by the anti-gun crowd ever happens.
If you’re afraid of guns, I get it. I’m afraid of them, too: it’s called having a healthy respect for stuff that can kill you. However, I’m far less afraid of the one in my own hand than the one in somebody else’s. All of this gun-control blather is pointless anyway: we have a right to ownership protected by the Constitution. And for the moment, that still counts for something. If you want to change it, circulate a bill to repeal the 2nd Amendment and get it through the Constitutional process: 2/3 majority vote in Congress and 3/4 ratification by the states.
Hey, I didn’t say it’d be easy. In the meantime, here’s more food for thought from Vox Day:
Say what you will about homeschooling, but if your child is taught at home, he’s not going to be shot there by some disgruntled school employee, student, or parent. And the idea that gun control laws will make any difference whatsoever with regards to this sort of thing is risible, given that it is already illegal to carry guns onto school property, to say nothing of shooting people there.
And this may be worth keeping in mind when the inevitable push for gun control begins: “The worst mass school murder in American history took place on May 18,1927 in Bath Township, Mich., when a former school board member set off three bombs that killed 45 people.”
We live in a depraved world that doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Watch your six, people.
12/16 UPDATE: Via Ace of Spades, a mother’s anguished account of life with a mentally-unstable child: I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.
The Chiles Files 