On December 14, 2012 a 20-year old madman slaughtered twenty children and six adults in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut. It was an act so heinous, the mind struggles to comprehend it.
In the aftermath, while the outpouring of grief and support to the families of the affected continued, the anti-gun forces saw another of what Rahm Emmanuel called “never letting a crisis go to waste.” Their solution was ban, ban, ban…not caring at all whether what they proposed was a cure or a placebo.
Let’s examine the actions of Adam Lanza that day and let’s see if we can tally up the crimes he committed before he even set foot inside the school.
- He murdered his mother, shooting her multiple times in the face.
- He stole his mothers guns, which based on value was grand larceny
- You have to be 21 years old to get a handgun permit in Connecticut and since Adam Lanza was only 20, we can be sure he didn’t have one, so once he took the handgun into his possession, another law was broken
- When Adam Lanza got close enough to school grounds he violated the Federal Gun-Free School Zone act of 1990
- Upon reaching the front door, he found that it was locked as was the new policy of the school’s principal. Not to be deterred he shot out the glass and stepped through the door which caused a second violation of the Gun-Free School Zone Act of 1990 by actually firing a gun on school property.
- Vandalism
- Breaking and entering
- Illegal discharge of a firearm
Having already committed at least eight crimes before he pointed the gun at a single individual, why do our elected officials think passing another law is, in any way, going to prevent a future Sandy Hook?
There is one thing that would have kept Adam Lanza from committing that horrific act, being committed to a mental institution before he did it. There is one thing that could have mitigated that horrific act once put in motion and that is another bullet from a good guy. Yes, by all means, call 911 but the police rarely get there in time to stop the crime. When seconds count the police are only minutes away.
Panderer-in-Chief
So President Obama surrounds himself with children as props, props for propaganda, and calls again for banning “assault weapons”, limiting the number of bullets in a gun’s magazine, and calling for national registration of all guns, which would make them easy to find when the government is ready to put the final touches on a dictatorship. There are mountains of evidence that prove gun bans don’t work, or other bans for that matter.
Did the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution succeed in banning alcohol? Or did we have to wipe the egg off of our faces by passing the Twenty-First Amendment to repeal the Eighteenth. Isn’t cocaine a banned substance? Isn’t heroin? Do we not have a massive drug problem? Are our prisons not filled with drug offenders?
The Purpose of Laws
Laws basically have two purposes. First, is to affect the behavior of law-abiding citizens. Second, is to provide a basis of punishment for criminals who don’t believe in obeying the law. Laws didn’t prevent Sandy Hook. They provided punishment for Adam Lanza after the fact, but Adam Lanza took care of that too, as these mass killers often do.
In 1976, Washington, D.C. passed a law that prohibited anyone other than the police from having a gun, even in their home. The murder rate in Washington, D.C. rose from 188 homicides in 1976 before the ban to 454 in 1993, after the ban. The federal assault weapons ban that the left keeps pining for was in place for ten years from 1994 to 2004. The massacre at Columbine High School happened in 1999, right smack in the middle of the ten-year ban. It didn’t work then, why would reinstating it work now?
You have to ask yourself, what the hell are these politicians thinking? The bans don’t work. No matter how much Governor Cuomo of New York braying at the moon saying you don’t need ten bullets to kill a deer, bans don’t work. Do we want solutions or posturing, photo ops, and surrounding cynical politicians with children as props?
We have to look at how we deal with the dangerously mentally ill. We have to look at the effects of psych drugs that are related to a number of these cases of mass killings. We have to look at violent video games that desensitize kids against the naturally ingrained aversion for one human being to kill another.
Banning guns, or limiting magazine sizes will not curtail this violence. Violence will increase when the bad guys know with a gun, they are wolves and the people are sheep. If these politicians really believe that another piece of paper will make us all safer, put your life where you mouth is. Dismiss the Secret Service, say goodbye to the U.S. Capital police, get rid of Governor Cuomo’s security detail and Mayor Bloomberg’s as well regardless of whether it is publicly or privately funded. When our pompous politicians are as defenseless as they want to make us, maybe they will re-think this. Better yet, let them go first. After five years of giving up their 24/7 praetorian guard, then if they are still around, maybe we’ll believe that bans work. In the mean time I’ll protect my family.
That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.
