Monday, January 21, 2013

Why gun-haters can't come up with solutions to violence

This editorial by KC3 co-founder Charles Riggs appeared in the Frankfort State Journal on Sunday, January 20th

The questions that now dominate our political dialogue, whether to protect our children with armed guards in schools and what to do to protect ourselves from maniacs wielding guns, have answers that are simpler than most people realize. But it will be hard to bring them to bear not because gun owners won’t give up their guns, not because of their fear of confiscation, but because of the delusions of the antigun factions in the debate.
For proof of that, we have only to look to Israel. That nation is surrounded by people who hate them, who make daily calls for their destruction and who at one time were in the habit of invading Israeli schools and murdering their children. The Israelis responded by training and arming their teachers and principals. Now those assaults are a thing of the past. The Israelis didn’t take time for endless studies while pining for a cure. They took action quickly and decisively, and their solution protects their children every day from terrorists far more bloodthirsty than any school shooter yet seen in this country.
So it’s plain that the only thing that stops an armed maniac is an armed citizen or police officer, and more often it’s the citizen who does it. According to statistics compiled by the federal government, armed Americans each year kill three times as many criminals in justified self defense than the police do. And there are more of us, at the scene of the crime when personal violence is attempted by thugs.
In this country, when murderers have been confronted by armed citizens they have folded or surrendered, or committed suicide, foiled in their homicidal designs. This was the case at the high school in Pearl, Mississippi and in the mall in Oregon. Armed law students ended a killing spree in West Virginia. The list goes on and on. Yet the gun-banners have done their best to ignore this history or to pooh-pooh it and refuse to admit it. But ignoring reality doesn’t make it disappear, much to their dismay, and they’ve lost control of the media that once parroted only their phobic propaganda.
There is a word that describes these superstitious types. It is “hoplophobe”, derived from the Greek “hoplos” for tool and “phobia” for fear. They fear inanimate objects when they should fear evil, the dark place in the soul of a murderer. Banning guns is far easier for them than coming to terms with the fact that evil will seek them out, and the only thing that stops it is the resolve of a man or woman who possesses the tools, the arms, to confront it.
The hoplophobes have done their best to deprive our children of education about guns because of this fear. The Left wants our kids to learn about gay marriage, premarital sex, drugs and a range of other topics, but not guns, never guns. And why is that? If knowing about drugs is supposed to inoculate kids against their ravages, why isn’t gun safety education equally valid?
It’s because they’re not interested in giving kids objective information about guns, but in demonizing them. Their aim is not to empower but to horrify with the specter of guns that will be used to slaughter them. The fact that more children will die in car accidents and drowning and other daily events of life in any given year than in school shootings is something they ignore or suppress because it doesn’t fit their narrative or bolster their case against guns.
For the anti-gunners to acknowledge that guns in righteous hands are a solution, the proven solution, requires them to abandon their core beliefs.
Lawful gun owners feel obligated to teach children responsibility and safety with firearms. Not so long ago kids brought guns to school in their pickup trucks, and went hunting after school. Boys kept shotguns in their lockers and shot on school teams. So when did school shootings begin to plague our nation? They burgeoned when teachers began to rail against guns, and espouse “zero tolerance”. Thus the seeds for slaughter were sown.
It’s not responsible gun owners who commit these atrocities. It’s the deranged and psychotic. For these isolated lunatics the gun is a sign of power. Their internal dialog says “They can mock me, but this gun gives me power over them. I can destroy the jocks and the brains and the girls who’ve humiliated me, made me miserable. My gun gives me the power of judgment over their lives, gives me what my own failings will not.” and why do they believe this? Because guns have been made into mythic objects, totems of power by the people who fear them.
The very NRA that the Left so loves to malign has been the source of the majority of gun safety training in this country for decades, yet when Mr. Obama unveiled his orders for more gun education he made no mention of the NRA, nor of the successful programs that gun owners have been using for so long.
It’s apparent that his goal is not to solve the problem in cooperation with we who have brought gun safety to the point that gun accidents are at an all-time low in the United States despite an all-time high number of guns in private hands. His purpose is to continue a pogrom that has failed, and cost the lives of too many of our people, not just in schools but in our cities and streets.
It is the teachings of the hoplophobes that are responsible for this mythos, this fascination with guns. The anti-gunners who’ve taken reasonableness out of the discussion, who’ve dumbed down our children about firearms are the ones who’ve created these monsters, and thus they are incapable of solving the problem.
Prohibition didn’t end drinking. Banning guns won’t stop mayhem. We know what works. Fighting back, refusing to be victims, is the only course of action that will stop evil.

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