Pulling the trigger on gun control
My take on the debased exploitation of the slaughter of children by a madman:
DEFENDING THE WEST
Obama’s selective sympathy concerning the Newtown massacre is political exploitation at its most cynical and debased. Where were Obama’s concern, his empathy and his calls for a thorough investigation of the Fort Hood and Benghazi massacres?
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| Pamela Geller |
Obama’s knee-jerk opportunism, trying to exploit the horrible deaths of these children to pursue his political ends (harmful gun-control legislation), is in sharp contrast to his response to the Fort Hood mass murder. When Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13 Americans in the name of jihad, Obama attempted to silence concerns about jihad, declaring that no one should “rush to judgment” – despite the fact that Hasan was wearing the garb of the shaheed the morning of his jihad, was giving out Qurans that same morning and was screaming “Allahu akbar!” while mowing down Americans.
And now he is trying to destroy the Second Amendment. This is the poison fruit of the left’s decades-long war on American values and morality. The problem is not guns. The problem is our societal glorification of violence and death. We need to recover love of life and respect for human beings in the society, and teach such things in schools.
Our societal nihilism is what leads to these attacks.
American children are fed a daily diet of violence from early childhood on. A nonstop feed of gratuitous, mindless violence on television, in movies, on the Internet and particularly video games dehumanizes and desensitizes. How many open-chest cavities do we need to see on “CSI” or “Law and Order”? When I was a kid, “The Twilight Zone” and Alfred Hitchcock could scare the living daylights out of you without so much as a knife or gun drawn. Add to that the porn culture, the lack of morality and virtue …
That lurid and amoral violence of Hollywood and the music industry, the breakdown of the family and a reckless abandonment of the mentally ill – all have contributed to this horrifying phenomenon of mass shootings. In the recent past, the mentally ill were institutionalized. But in the late 20th century, psychiatric hospitals got a very bad name; the left decided that the mental institutions were wrong and cruel. Institutionalizing someone became the bogeyman. The hospitals were closed, and we basically tossed our mentally ill onto the street. We medicated them and then threw them to the wolves. Now we’re raising a generation of mentally ill children, with limited mental health resources and a system with hands tied until after the tragedy happens.
Outlawing guns will not deter criminals, who will not hesitate to obtain illegal guns. It will just render the populace utterly defenseless.
In the U.K., where there is no right to bear arms, gun crime has gone up 89 percent in the last 10 years. Gun-control laws haven’t stopped that. The only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun. It is little reported in the enemedia that the Clackamas mall shooter faced a shopper with a concealed weapon who cut his spree short. The Clackamas Town Center, two weeks before Christmas, was teeming with humanity, but the shooter managed to kill only two people. Concealed weapons save lives. John Lott reminds us, “Similar stories are available from across the country. They include shootings at schools that were stopped before police arrived in such places as Pearl, Miss., and Edinboro, Pa., and at colleges like the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. Or attacks in busy downtowns such as Memphis; at a mall in Salt Lake City, or at an apartment building in Oklahoma.”
The NRA‘s Wayne LaPierre said Friday: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away? … The National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired military…We can deploy them to protect our kids now.“
Those who recoil at the prospect of armed guards in schools, and who think banning all guns will solve the problem, should remember that on the same day as the Newtown massacre, a knife-wielding madman slashed 22 kids at an elementary school in China. I guess we’ll have to ban all knives, too.
Also, anti-gun hysteria is ignoring key distinctions. After the theatre shootings in Colorado last summer, Obama said: “AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.” However, the killer didn’t use an AK-47; he used an M&P 15. Lott noted: “The call has frequently been made that there is ‘no reason’ for such ‘military-style weapons’ to be available to civilians. Yes, the M&P 15 and the AK-47 are ‘military-style weapons.’ But the key word is ‘style’ – they are similar to military guns in their aesthetics, not in the way they actually operate.”
Gun-control laws simply don’t work. In Obama’s hometown of Chicago, the murder rate is skyrocketing, despite some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. Everywhere guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up – whether it’s Chicago, D.C., England, Jamaica or Ireland.
What can we do? We need laws that require treatment and supervision of the dangerously mentally ill, so that violent and unstable people aren’t roaming around unsupervised as they are. We need to repeal sections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that – as unbelievable as it sounds – actually prevent doctors from telling parents of mentally ill children the truth about their condition. We need to make sure that hospitals aren’t releasing mentally ill patients solely for reasons of expense.
Instead of doing something that would really solve the problem, Obama is rushing to penalize all Americans and make us all less safe.
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