Gun Control: Answering the L.A. Times Editorial against gunsby John Longenecker, AMLA Gun Rights Examiner
December, 2009The L.A. Times has again unholstered its own big guns in an
editorial against guns instead of crime. The Times goes into high altitude again about the wrong issue as most gun control misunderstanding does. As gun control claims to take aim at violence and winds up hitting innocent bystanders, their editorial disparages gun ownership instead of
the man who shot four officers in Washington state.
In today's top editorial, the Times draws down on gun owners by mocking ‘..America's love affair with guns."
Following the execution-style murders of four Lakewood, Washington police officers – Mark Renninger, Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold, and Greg Richards – the Times does what we call dancing in the blood of the victims by exploiting the case not for a call against violent crime -- or misguided commuted sentences or against early release of prisoners as many states are doing soon --- but against guns.
The editorial has its regular mockery of the so-called gun show loophole, Americans' "fascination with firepower", and how other countries somehow manage to live with gun control. All three are untrue; there is no gun show loophole, Americans have a love of freedom, not firepower, and other countries are not faring well in gun control. The Times forgets that England's crime rate soared since its 1997 ban, and that the U.K. now punishes self-defense and not thugs. The Brits ban knives, too, but the criminals still get them. The Philippines is in trouble, Canadians are getting sick of paying billions for registrations that haven't stemmed a thing, and oh, one more thing: we're not them, we're America. It's silly to compare the failures of other countries to the successes of our sovereign safeguards. Not a very good comparison.
The worst mockery of all was this: "The murdered officers were armed, well trained in the use of their weapons, and wearing bulletproof vests. It didn't save them."
I have news for you: sidearms do save police lives, vests do save police lives, and one of them got off a shot. As of this writing, the person who shot them was located and killed by police last night.
The final issues or call to action of the editorial is this: "Americans could stand to be less gun crazy and more willing to stop crazy people from getting guns."
You never have and you never will stop the criminals from obtaining guns, because they will ignore the law no matter what law you write. It's a very silly and unrealistic goal even to mention. Insulting Americans for being gun crazy, a love of firepower and admonishing us to stop crazies from getting guns is impossible. Gun control is already utterly humiliated by the public's awareness that laws cannot even stop known prohibited persons from obtaining weapons. How are you going to stop crazies from getting weapons as if it were some lower, more serious level of danger? You never will. So why be so willing to hit more innocent bystanders who can legally possess a gun?
This is self-destructive to the community, not to mention the United States. Armed citizens stop a crime about every thirteen seconds, we know. This is only one of the powerful reasons why there can never be any such thing as a sensible gun law. It might be better, then, to stop interfering with the citizen's ability to stop those crimes when police aren't around. The best way to stop the crazies isn't by goading the readership to attempt the impossible, but to do the possible: every thirteen seconds.
Gun control does not stop crime, it stops the people from fighting crime.
Safer streets won't come without official respect for the sovereignty of the citizen first. As long as the citizen is blocked, the thugs are not. And where citizen sovereignty is respected — forty-eight states affirm the right to be armed — you can run down most of the origins of those every-thirteen-seconds cases.
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt_and_politics/article_187f6d16-aa8f-5473-ba70-2fefa4003720.html
