President Trump has initiated a ban on “bump stocks,” a device used to transform a legal semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. Such a ban is low-hanging fruit, given that it simply closes a loophole in our existing ban of private unregulated ownership of machine guns, but is welcome nonetheless.
That ban should be immediately presented to Congress and voted on, if for no other reason than to let constituents know which of their representatives need to be immediately replaced.
Trump has also expressed support for setting a minimum age of 21 for the purchase of military-style weapons, another piece of legislation that should be immediately put to a vote for the reason stated above. We already require juveniles to undergo hunter safety training before going afield, and restricting the purchase of assault-style rifles by our youth can only be a good thing.
These laws will not stop mass shootings any more than age restrictions on tobacco and alcohol have stopped under-age abuse and addiction, but they will at least give those sworn to serve and protect us two important tools to fight the scourge of killings.
The president's broadly expressed suggestion of “arming teachers” was poorly expressed.
Having worked around teachers throughout my professional life, I was among those horrified at the idea of them carrying guns as Trump suggested. News reports out of Afghanistan neatly expressed my reasons: When teachers were armed as a response to school attacks by the Taliban (a word literally translated as “student”), tragedy followed almost immediately. According to a report out of Afghanistan broadcast on National Public Radio, a teacher was cleaning his gun in the break room when it went off and killed a 12-year-old student passing in the hallway.
Trump has since qualified his broad suggestion, with an emphasis on weapons training and expert qualifications for those allowed to carry weapons within the “gun free zone” of a school.
This idea has merit: Teachers (or security guards) should not carry weapons in schools out of fear, but as a well-trained, front-line initial response team. As such, they should have up-to-date weapons and response training that is incorporated into the “active shooter” drills that are now part of our school system.
Such a system needs to be thought through, however, as there are a lot of questions to be addressed: For example, if a teacher is assigned to respond offensively to a shooter, who is going to be in their classroom, guiding and supporting students as they lock themselves into a secure space?
Armed defenders are not in and of themselves a solution, as was tragically demonstrated in the recent attack, during which an armed sheriff’s deputy stationed himself outside the building but failed to enter. Perhaps he was a coward, as some suggest, or perhaps he was following the “pre Columbine shooting” response protocol, which called for staging of law enforcement outside prior to engagement with the shooter.
I personally witnessed training in the new protocol, which calls for immediate entry in an active shooter situation, years ago. I almost got “shot” by a deputy — I was pointing a camera at him — and came away with a better understanding of how hard it is to respond in that environment. Guns alone don't save lives, any more than they take them.
Arming teachers is a horrible idea. Arming defenders has potential.
Congressional action will require debate and that debate will be no less full of rhetoric than it has been in the past. I'll address only one point, made this past week by an NRA spokesman, that an assault-style rifle is “just a rifle” that happens to look like a machine gun.
Not true: A youth planning an attack today is imagining himself in the role of the warrior with a machine gun, and it is his imagination — not a literal or legal definition of what is or is not a “rifle” — that we have to guard against. Those planning these attacks are not just going hunting.
— Mark Gibson
John Adams has proven prophetic with this quote in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The current and usual gun control debate following the mass shooting at a Florida school fails to take into account the scope of the chaos besetting America since we began turning away from traditional values.
Democrats are howling again for tougher gun laws and that cry has been taken up by unwitting teen pawns, who demand that the issue not be political — while they make it political by bashing the National Rifle Association, which supports Second Amendment rights, as a “terrorist organization.”
Republicans, predictably, are caving to the political pressure by vowing to look into tougher background checks, a possible ban of bump stocks and raising the age to purchase guns.
Getting little media attention is that 98 percent of school shootings take place in gun free zones, making these institutions a vulnerable target. Or the fact that Baltimore and Chicago, two cities with strict gun control laws, have the highest homicide rates in the nation. Shouldn’t these bastions of liberalism be the safest places in America?
This fight isn’t about gun control, it’s about people control. Specifically, it’s about a class war: liberals hating rural gun-owning America and wanting to curb their independence (and pay them back for voting Trump).
Plus, it’s much easier to control unarmed citizens, which is the first move of every dictator when democracy dies. The minions of the Left refuse to see the agenda of statists.
If crime in America is a “gun problem,” then Switzerland should be a bloody battlefield. There are more fully auto assault rifles per capita in Switzerland than in any Western nation, yet the Swiss have one of the lowest homicide rates in the world — far lower than England, which has the strictest gun laws in Europe.
The entire conversation about guns fails to deal with the root of the growing problems we face as a culture.
Homeless camps are growing (Seattle now has more than 400) because more and more people can’t cope with the complexities of our society. Many of these people have mental health disorders that are untreated because we changed the laws to not force medication and now they wander hungry, cold and confused through the streets. How is that kinder?
We have an opioid epidemic as more and more people self-medicate with either drugs or alcohol to fill the emptiness within. Millions are on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medicine to cope.
Marriages are breaking down at a faster rate than ever, if people even bother to take vows, and feminists from broken families insist that fathers are not important; indeed, too many men now skip out on their responsibilities altogether.
Parents have to fear government intervention if they spank or take corrective action that is not deemed acceptable in the eyes of the government. Or parents treat their children as demi-gods and these little nightmares grow up totally self-absorbed.
Billy Graham, who was dubbed “America’s Pastor,” died last week and it seems fitting to quote from the speech he gave in 1996 after being presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award by Congress: “America has gone a long way down the wrong road. We must turn around and go back and change roads. If ever we needed God’s help, it is now … After World War II, we had the opportunity to rule the world … Something has happened since those days and there is much about America that is no longer good … The list is almost endless … We have confused liberty with license — and we are paying the awful price. We are a society poised on the brink of self-destruction...”
Graham said America had lost sight of the principles upon which it was founded. Our culture is disintegrating and millions want license more than they want to deal with reality and truly turn things around.
— RaeLynn Ricarte
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