The Politics of Gun Control
I’m a big skeptic of Gun Rights. And I’m a big skeptic of Gun Control, too. I don’t like being on the fence, but here I am…
Like most subjects of main stream media sensationalism, the MSM talking idiots have worked the gun control/gun rights issue overtime the past week…hyping our fear, playing to our mass emotion instead of our mass intellect.
Innocent people dying on a public campus — be it college or the Johnson Space Center — pinches an emotional nerve. We should relish the fact that it shocks us, because that’s a clue we’re still human. When the murder of innocent people no longer shocks us (over 500 innocent people die in Iraq in an average week, too), then we should reassess what type of species evolution is making of us.
Good Guns, Bad Guns
There were other gun deaths last week that most people in America didn’t hear too much about:
- Tuesday night, two regular guys walking home from a bar in Minneapolis were robbed of their wallets, then totally unnecessarily made to get on their knees and shot execution style in the head.
- On Wednesday night, three armed robbers stormed into a home in Kansas City. The owner managed to kill one of the robbers with the criminal’s own gun.
- At 9:37 Thursday night, 22-year-old Allen Joseph Hicks II walked into an Oakland pizza parlor, pointed an assault pistol at the owner, and said, “This is a robbery.” With his wife, son, and two daughters looking on, the owner pulled out his own pistol and killed the robber.
- Friday morning in Portland, a 75-year-old man shot his wife. He’d always taken good care of her while she suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. He called 911, then shot himself before police arrived.
- Early the same morning, Baylor University senior Charles Franklin accidentally shot himself to death at an off-campus party.
Gun Fight or Flight Response
National headline gun violence seems to trigger a societal fight or flight response. So many people are either begging their government to take everybody’s guns away, or begging everybody to carry a gun as a deterrent. But simplistic emotional knee jerk reactions often waste a lot of time and energy, and cause a lot of people to jump through hoops and suffer without solving the original problem. Many times, poorly planned reactions make the situation worse.
The Gun Control camp can show tons of statistics linking gun ownership to increased American death rates.
The Gun Rights camp can provide a ton of equally valid statistics showing why gun ownership is a good thing.
There are many sides to the gun issue, and I don’t see a hands-down winner.
Sometimes, School Massacres Just Happen
Remember the good old days when American kids prayed in school, didn’t sneak in drugs or guns, and were always as safe as a Norman Rockwell painting?
If you do, you’re forgetting the deadliest act of mass murder in U.S. school history: The Bath School Massacre in Bath Township, Michigan. On May 14, 1927, an upset school board member detonated dynamite inside the school, killing 45 people — mostly children in second to sixth grades.
Sometimes a tragedy just happens. Sometimes there’s no feasible action anybody could have taken to predict or prevent it.
Read More: gun control, second amendment, Bath school disaster
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