"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." - John Adams, 1776.
Imagine a government that protected its people. Yeah, right.
Let's talk about Jon Hammar. Jon Hammar is a 27-year-old veteran who enlisted at age 18 and served 2 tours and 4 years in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, he was honorably discharged from the marines and sent home. In 2008 he was diagnosed with PTSD. He attended a PTSD treatment facility, the Pathway House, for 9 months and his family saw immediate improvements when he returned home in May of this year. In August, he and a friend that he met at the Pathway House decided to take a vacation in Costa Rica. To do this, they needed to pass through Mexico. Hammar intended to take his grandfather's antique gun with him. He clarified this with a U.S. customs agent in Texas, who advised him to fill out some paperwork to register the rifle with Mexican authorities. So when Hammar and his friend arrived in Mexico, he went to the authorities to hand in his paperwork. They ignored it and arrested him.
Not only did they arrest him, the put him in possibly the most notorious prison in Mexico, known as CEDES, that's used to house violent drug traffickers and gangsters who literally run the institution. Since he arrived there on August 13, over four months ago, he's faced death threats and beatings from other inmates for being part of the American military, he's been in isolation, and he's been chained by the ankle to his bed. His friend, who was released after three days, says that after serving in Bukkah and Iraq he'd never seen anyone chained to a bed. And this man is just getting out of rehab for PTSD.
Now, let's examine the arrest before anything else. Here's the problem with that: he did nothing illegal. He didn't sneak across the border and he didn't smuggle the gun in. He went to the Mexican authorities, like the U.S. authorities told him to, in order to properly register his firearm. Supposedly, the 'crime' that was committed was having a firearm that is used the Mexican military - and this is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Here's the real crime: he's an American. Beginning the week he was arrested, his family began receiving phone calls from the prison demanding money in exchange, not for his release, but for his safety. The Mexican government is corrupt and believes they can use this American hero for their advantage.
The problem with that, of course, is that the American government doesn't care what happens to him. And apparently, as the December 18th, they didn't know what was happening to Hammar for the last 4 months. When asked what the White House was planning to do regarding the situation, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said, "I don't know the facts on that myself."
Seriously? A former US marine is being held captive in Mexico and one of the most powerful people in D.C. doesn't know what's being done to help?
In all fairness to Carney, he probably doesn't know because there's nothing being done. The White House says they've been providing "consular services" since the arrest, claiming that they've been in frequent contact with Hammar and his family. The family says otherwise, saying that they've "repeatedly" been told that the U.S. State Department "can't do anything."
Had the situation been reversed, I guarantee America wouldn't treat a Mexican traveler this way. If Hammar and his friend had entered the U.S. from Mexico, the U.S. wouldn't have cared if Hammar and his friend tried to do things the legal way because the government allows 6.1 million illegal Mexican immigrants - about 60% of total illegal immigrants - into the country every year. Then, when Hammar had arrived, the U.S. government would've provided Spanish commercials during Spanish soap operas instructing him on how to most efficiently use the welfare system - a system that is already used by 71% of illegal immigrants. Then the government would have watched and seen whether Hammar joined the 80% of illegals who commit violent crimes.
So had Hammar been an illegal Mexican sneaking into America, the White House couldn't helped him. But, as it is, he's an American trying to legally pass through Mexico and being tortured so the White House says, "Sorry, we've got other things to take care of - like the illegal immigrants in this country." When Abraham Lincoln was in the midst of the Civil War, he took a day each week to read letters sent from the general public and address their problems. Our President can't do that, though - he's too busy getting ready for his holiday in Hawaii. Our Secretary of State can't do that because she's too busy dealing with the Benghazi flu she's suddenly and conveniently contracted. So Jon Hammar gets to sit and wait in prison as the holidays pass by until his trial in January, when he faces 15 years in a Mexican gang prison because he tried to legally pass through the country.
Since our politicians won't do anything, we can. There are numerous online petitions right now circulating to bring Jon Hammar home. Here's one. #BringHammarHome is one way to bring attention to it on twitter and there's a facebook group too. If nothing is done, Bill O'Reilly wants a Mexico boycott and as far-fetched as that sounds, and although we know our government won't do it, it's a great idea. The U.S. government that spends $269,499,000 million to Mexico in foreign aid so that they can beat and chain our veterans. We boycotted France after they supported Osama Bin Laden a decade ago - this seems like a good enough cause to do the same to Mexico. Bring Hammar home.
God bless America.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person..."
"A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." - Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792.
And so it continues! Five days after the Newtown shooting, the talk of gun control has only increased and today President BO declared that VP Joe Biden to tackle gun control. The good news is this means that it's likely that nothing will ever be accomplished, given who it is we're talking about. The bad news is, in addition to Obama having another scapegoat for yet another inevitable policy failure, some sort of action still needs to be taken.
I've already explained why gun control isn't the answer (in case you need a recap: it's our constitutional right to have a way to protect our selves and, oh yeah, it doesn't work). Something that might prove more effective would be reforming how we treat mentally ill patients. Now, I'm not saying that all mass shooters have been mentally ill (they haven't) or that this would solve all of our problems (it won't), but it's definitely something worth looking into.
Let's take a look at the position of the mentally ill in the United States today, ignoring mass shooters for a moment. It's estimated that about 22% of Americans suffer from some sort of mental illness. As of 2005, that's about 44 million people. Some of these 44 million people live under the care of their families. If you haven't read "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" yet, read it now. I'm not saying that's life for all families, but that's true for some of them. Some of these 44 million are homeless, making up between 20-25% of that population. Some of these 44 million are in hospitals, but more of them are in jail. As of 2005, there were 3 times more mentally ill in jails than in hospitals. 16% of inmates have a mental illness (compared to 6.4% in 1983) and 40% of mentally ill persons have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. And that's not surprising considering the state of psychiatric wards in hospitals: in 1955, 1 of every 300 beds was reserved for psychiatric patients; today, it's 1 in every 3,000.
So, just in terms completely unrelated to mass shooters, something needs to be done about the state of psychiatric treatment in America today. The way I see it, there are two main solutions: abolishing the "institutions for mental diseases" (IMD) Medicaid restriction and implementing Assisted outpatient treatment in every state.
The IMD Medicaid restriction, then. Basically under the current laws these institutes are inpatient facilities with more than 16 beds where more than half the patients have mental illnesses. Federal medicaid does not support patients between the ages of 22-64. The main reason for this is because when Medicaid started in 1965, mental hospitals were funded by the public and the government did not want to replace this funding. That's not how it works anymore, though. Now, adult patients either have to remain in the IMD and not have any federal support, or leave, have their Medicaid reinstated while they're treated in a different medical facility, and then return.
Assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), meanwhile, is a court ordered treatment for individuals with severe mental illness who meet certain criteria, like having a history of medical noncompliance. It's also sometimes referred to as the "involuntary outpatient commitment" because it allows for patients to receive treatment with or without their own consent if others believe they need it for their safety or others. Currently, 44 states enact AOT and it has been proven to reduce the risk of hospitalization, homelessness, arrests/incarceration, and violence while increasing the success of treatment and easing the stress of caregivers in those states. (For those interested in actual numbers, like me, here's a source.) Connecticut is not one of those states. A bill was proposed a few months ago that would have enacted it, but far leftist groups defeated the bill due to protests from "civil liberties" groups, saying it would "severely curtail the privacy rights and liberty issues of people with psychiatric disabilities." I'm not saying that the shooting wouldn't have happened in Newtown if this bill had passed. I'm not saying it wouldn't have either.
Implementing these changes has benefits for mentally ill patients around the country regardless of mass shooters, but that part does play a role. Like I said before, not all shooters are mentally ill (the two Columbine boys weren't) and definitely not all mentally ill grow up to become shooters. But Adam Lanza was. Ted Kaczynski "The Unabomber" was. Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, the largest school shooting in American history, was. I don't know how these policies would have affected these incidents, but I see no down side for anyone by abolishing the IMD Medicaid restriction and implementing AOT in all 50 states.
Mental health care changes are just an idea, though, and I really don't know enough to say if they'd be successful. I don't know what would be successful because I don't really know what the problem is and I don't think anyone else does either, which is more than a little frightening. I can tell you what I think, though. I don't think all of these problems are gun issues and I don't think they're all about mental health care either. I think America as a society and a culture is the problem. For years, we've pushed God and morality to the side in order to be 'politically correct'. We have a president who, in four Thanksgiving Day speeches, has yet to thank God. We worship celebrities who are famous for getting drunk and cheer for athletes who cheat and rape while men like Tim Tebow are mocked nationwide for having good, strong moral and religious beliefs. We let children govern themselves, refusing to spank or punish them because we can't hurt their feelings. Then, in times of crisis, we wonder where God is and we wonder where human decency has gone. We kill it everyday. Maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe the world will end on December 21st; not the physical world, but our humanity.
Unless we change. I'm not talking about our politicians, I'm talking about change of the most intimate, personal kind: of the individual What we need is for every individual to take a look at themselves and ask, "What can I do? Who can I positively influence today? How can I be a good, moral person?" Because there will always be another Adam Lanza, another Ted Kaczynski, another Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and there's nothing we can do about that and that's reality, as painful as it can sometimes be, but we can be sure that we don't become that person and, by being the best we can be, maybe we can ensure that it's not our neighbor or our cousin or our classmate either.
God bless America.
And so it continues! Five days after the Newtown shooting, the talk of gun control has only increased and today President BO declared that VP Joe Biden to tackle gun control. The good news is this means that it's likely that nothing will ever be accomplished, given who it is we're talking about. The bad news is, in addition to Obama having another scapegoat for yet another inevitable policy failure, some sort of action still needs to be taken.
I've already explained why gun control isn't the answer (in case you need a recap: it's our constitutional right to have a way to protect our selves and, oh yeah, it doesn't work). Something that might prove more effective would be reforming how we treat mentally ill patients. Now, I'm not saying that all mass shooters have been mentally ill (they haven't) or that this would solve all of our problems (it won't), but it's definitely something worth looking into.
Let's take a look at the position of the mentally ill in the United States today, ignoring mass shooters for a moment. It's estimated that about 22% of Americans suffer from some sort of mental illness. As of 2005, that's about 44 million people. Some of these 44 million people live under the care of their families. If you haven't read "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" yet, read it now. I'm not saying that's life for all families, but that's true for some of them. Some of these 44 million are homeless, making up between 20-25% of that population. Some of these 44 million are in hospitals, but more of them are in jail. As of 2005, there were 3 times more mentally ill in jails than in hospitals. 16% of inmates have a mental illness (compared to 6.4% in 1983) and 40% of mentally ill persons have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. And that's not surprising considering the state of psychiatric wards in hospitals: in 1955, 1 of every 300 beds was reserved for psychiatric patients; today, it's 1 in every 3,000.
So, just in terms completely unrelated to mass shooters, something needs to be done about the state of psychiatric treatment in America today. The way I see it, there are two main solutions: abolishing the "institutions for mental diseases" (IMD) Medicaid restriction and implementing Assisted outpatient treatment in every state.
The IMD Medicaid restriction, then. Basically under the current laws these institutes are inpatient facilities with more than 16 beds where more than half the patients have mental illnesses. Federal medicaid does not support patients between the ages of 22-64. The main reason for this is because when Medicaid started in 1965, mental hospitals were funded by the public and the government did not want to replace this funding. That's not how it works anymore, though. Now, adult patients either have to remain in the IMD and not have any federal support, or leave, have their Medicaid reinstated while they're treated in a different medical facility, and then return.
Assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), meanwhile, is a court ordered treatment for individuals with severe mental illness who meet certain criteria, like having a history of medical noncompliance. It's also sometimes referred to as the "involuntary outpatient commitment" because it allows for patients to receive treatment with or without their own consent if others believe they need it for their safety or others. Currently, 44 states enact AOT and it has been proven to reduce the risk of hospitalization, homelessness, arrests/incarceration, and violence while increasing the success of treatment and easing the stress of caregivers in those states. (For those interested in actual numbers, like me, here's a source.) Connecticut is not one of those states. A bill was proposed a few months ago that would have enacted it, but far leftist groups defeated the bill due to protests from "civil liberties" groups, saying it would "severely curtail the privacy rights and liberty issues of people with psychiatric disabilities." I'm not saying that the shooting wouldn't have happened in Newtown if this bill had passed. I'm not saying it wouldn't have either.
Implementing these changes has benefits for mentally ill patients around the country regardless of mass shooters, but that part does play a role. Like I said before, not all shooters are mentally ill (the two Columbine boys weren't) and definitely not all mentally ill grow up to become shooters. But Adam Lanza was. Ted Kaczynski "The Unabomber" was. Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech, the largest school shooting in American history, was. I don't know how these policies would have affected these incidents, but I see no down side for anyone by abolishing the IMD Medicaid restriction and implementing AOT in all 50 states.
Mental health care changes are just an idea, though, and I really don't know enough to say if they'd be successful. I don't know what would be successful because I don't really know what the problem is and I don't think anyone else does either, which is more than a little frightening. I can tell you what I think, though. I don't think all of these problems are gun issues and I don't think they're all about mental health care either. I think America as a society and a culture is the problem. For years, we've pushed God and morality to the side in order to be 'politically correct'. We have a president who, in four Thanksgiving Day speeches, has yet to thank God. We worship celebrities who are famous for getting drunk and cheer for athletes who cheat and rape while men like Tim Tebow are mocked nationwide for having good, strong moral and religious beliefs. We let children govern themselves, refusing to spank or punish them because we can't hurt their feelings. Then, in times of crisis, we wonder where God is and we wonder where human decency has gone. We kill it everyday. Maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe the world will end on December 21st; not the physical world, but our humanity.
Unless we change. I'm not talking about our politicians, I'm talking about change of the most intimate, personal kind: of the individual What we need is for every individual to take a look at themselves and ask, "What can I do? Who can I positively influence today? How can I be a good, moral person?" Because there will always be another Adam Lanza, another Ted Kaczynski, another Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and there's nothing we can do about that and that's reality, as painful as it can sometimes be, but we can be sure that we don't become that person and, by being the best we can be, maybe we can ensure that it's not our neighbor or our cousin or our classmate either.
God bless America.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
"...for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms. . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson's "Commonplace Book", quoting from "On Crimes and Punishment" (1764) by criminologist Cesare Beccaria.
On December 14, 2012, 28 human beings lost their lives during a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, because of one sick boy (and at 20 years old, that's what he was). 20 of them were children from a kindergarten class. Before them, he shot his mother. Nobody in that school was unaffected and he made sure of it when he shot the principal and the school psychologist with the PA system on. The police tried to protect the survivors as they led the children from the school by having them walk in straight lines with their eyes closed, lest they see the horrifying scene surrounding them, but everyone in that school will deal with the scars they received yesterday for the rest of their lives.
Last night, 20 sets of parents sat and waited to identify the bodies of the children that they'd hugged and sent off to school just hours before.
Yesterday was a tragedy the likes of which this country hasn't seen in a long time. Unsurprisingly, it took less than 24 hours to be turned into a political platform for anti-gun leftists. After all, as Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist of our esteemed presidents campaigns, said in 2009, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
The articles are already being written. As "American's Finest News Source" The Onion published only hours after the attack titled "Right to Own Handheld Device that Shoots Deadly Metal Pellets at High Speed Worth All of This." Ed Schwartz, from MSNBC, says that the Constitution is outdated, that the people who wrote it owned slaves and didn't believe in women's rights, obviously indicating that if they were wrong on that they must be wrong on more. Not surprisingly, our own esteemed President used his 'heartfelt' speech to the people of Connecticut to tell people that he plans to tackle the Second Amendment of our Constitution when he said, "And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this from occurring." Never let a crisis go to waste indeed.
Yesterday, I didn't want to deal with the political side of this. There'll be plenty of time for that, I said to myself. But I guess we can't afford to think like that anymore; we can't afford to mourn because politicians on the left are ready and willing to use this as part of their anti-gun propaganda and the right needs to be ready to fight back. So that's what I'm going to do.
Let's look at the exact text. "Amendment Two - The Right to Bear Arms: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." What a lot of people don't realize is that this was included in the Constitution originally as protection against the government. The Founding Fathers had just come out of a war; without firearms, they'd never have been able to escape the oppressive rule of the British. They included this amendment so that if the American government should ever become tyrannical, the people would have a way to defend themselves against the government.
Some would argue that the reason behind owning guns nowadays has changed, but it really hasn't. The point of having a gun, according to the Founding Fathers, was self-defense. The point of owning a gun today is self-defense. The quote used by Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of this post sums the whole situation up. Gun control laws do nothing but prevent good people from owning guns. Bad people, the people like Adam Lanza who have no moral qualms with shooting 26 people dead in an elementary school, don't care if it's legal to own a gun or not. Laws don't matter to them. The people who are concerned about laws are the people who don't kill other people. Gun control would take away guns from people who would use them in self-defense, but they wouldn't affect the killers; actually, that's wrong - it would make it easier for the killers because they don't have to worry about being shot back at by all the law-abiding citizens who don't have guns with them.
Gun control advocates don't see the logic in this. "Let's arm everybody," they say sarcastically, "Let's give everybody guns so that when one person shoots, more people can shoot back." YES! That's exactly what we should do. In Israel, teachers have been armed for 39 years. There's been one school shooting in that time. It was done by Palestinian terrorists during peace negotiations. Ten were killed and 35 wounded before someone shot the terrorist. Let's repeat that: the only school shooting in 39 years in Israel ended because someone with a gun shot the shooter. And this isn't unique. Thailand has armed teacher since 1976. There's been one school shooting.
Since Colombine, in 1999, there've been 31 school shootings in America.
"But," scream the leftwing gun control advocates, "if you arm everyone, people will be more willing to use guns." Wrong again. A boy I know made a very poor argument to me yesterday by insinuating that the number of people owning guns in a country corresponds to the number of firearm related deaths. Of the top ten countries for people owning firearms (America led - 88.8 per every 100 people own guns), three of those countries weren't even in the top 50 for number of firearms related deaths. The highest on the list, America, was the fifteenth country on the list for deaths related to firearms (9 per every 1,000 deaths).
A few weeks ago in Appleton, a man was run of the road by a couple with a bad case of road rage. He called the police when they came at him with their keys, prepared to beat him up. He pulled out a gun and held them there until the police arrived. He did not shoot them, but he did not get beaten up. That's the point of the Second Amendment. The crazies who shoot people today would still shoot people if guns were illegal - people who care about the law don't shoot people. Gun control would only control people who follow the law, making them more vulnerable.
It's more than self-defense, though. It's about responsibility, something that Americans today sorely lack. The saying, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is used so much by gun rights advocates today but it's so true. Forbidding guns doesn't solve the problem - it's a symptom of a larger, underlying cause. Yesterday, a Chinese man attacked 22 children and 1 adult outside a school with a knife. Do we ban knives next? What about cars - that would eliminate driving accidents. Or drugs. Let's ban drugs! Oh, wait....
Gun control doesn't work. Since gun control laws have been implemented in Wales and England, firearm crimes have increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year. That's 89%. In 18 police areas crimes doubles. In comparison, four years after the handgun ban in Washington D.C. was repealed, the murder rate fell to "below triples digits" from the first time since 1963. Weird how that works.
One more thing: you can bet that the government knows that the point of the Second Amendment originally was for protection against the government. So while BO can say that he wants to prevent tragedies like Newtown from occurring again, sure doesn't hurt him either if regular citizens can't have guns, does it?
God bless all those affected in Newtown yesterday and God bless America.
On December 14, 2012, 28 human beings lost their lives during a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, because of one sick boy (and at 20 years old, that's what he was). 20 of them were children from a kindergarten class. Before them, he shot his mother. Nobody in that school was unaffected and he made sure of it when he shot the principal and the school psychologist with the PA system on. The police tried to protect the survivors as they led the children from the school by having them walk in straight lines with their eyes closed, lest they see the horrifying scene surrounding them, but everyone in that school will deal with the scars they received yesterday for the rest of their lives.
Last night, 20 sets of parents sat and waited to identify the bodies of the children that they'd hugged and sent off to school just hours before.
Yesterday was a tragedy the likes of which this country hasn't seen in a long time. Unsurprisingly, it took less than 24 hours to be turned into a political platform for anti-gun leftists. After all, as Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist of our esteemed presidents campaigns, said in 2009, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
The articles are already being written. As "American's Finest News Source" The Onion published only hours after the attack titled "Right to Own Handheld Device that Shoots Deadly Metal Pellets at High Speed Worth All of This." Ed Schwartz, from MSNBC, says that the Constitution is outdated, that the people who wrote it owned slaves and didn't believe in women's rights, obviously indicating that if they were wrong on that they must be wrong on more. Not surprisingly, our own esteemed President used his 'heartfelt' speech to the people of Connecticut to tell people that he plans to tackle the Second Amendment of our Constitution when he said, "And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this from occurring." Never let a crisis go to waste indeed.
Yesterday, I didn't want to deal with the political side of this. There'll be plenty of time for that, I said to myself. But I guess we can't afford to think like that anymore; we can't afford to mourn because politicians on the left are ready and willing to use this as part of their anti-gun propaganda and the right needs to be ready to fight back. So that's what I'm going to do.
Let's look at the exact text. "Amendment Two - The Right to Bear Arms: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." What a lot of people don't realize is that this was included in the Constitution originally as protection against the government. The Founding Fathers had just come out of a war; without firearms, they'd never have been able to escape the oppressive rule of the British. They included this amendment so that if the American government should ever become tyrannical, the people would have a way to defend themselves against the government.
Some would argue that the reason behind owning guns nowadays has changed, but it really hasn't. The point of having a gun, according to the Founding Fathers, was self-defense. The point of owning a gun today is self-defense. The quote used by Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of this post sums the whole situation up. Gun control laws do nothing but prevent good people from owning guns. Bad people, the people like Adam Lanza who have no moral qualms with shooting 26 people dead in an elementary school, don't care if it's legal to own a gun or not. Laws don't matter to them. The people who are concerned about laws are the people who don't kill other people. Gun control would take away guns from people who would use them in self-defense, but they wouldn't affect the killers; actually, that's wrong - it would make it easier for the killers because they don't have to worry about being shot back at by all the law-abiding citizens who don't have guns with them.
Gun control advocates don't see the logic in this. "Let's arm everybody," they say sarcastically, "Let's give everybody guns so that when one person shoots, more people can shoot back." YES! That's exactly what we should do. In Israel, teachers have been armed for 39 years. There's been one school shooting in that time. It was done by Palestinian terrorists during peace negotiations. Ten were killed and 35 wounded before someone shot the terrorist. Let's repeat that: the only school shooting in 39 years in Israel ended because someone with a gun shot the shooter. And this isn't unique. Thailand has armed teacher since 1976. There's been one school shooting.
Since Colombine, in 1999, there've been 31 school shootings in America.
"But," scream the leftwing gun control advocates, "if you arm everyone, people will be more willing to use guns." Wrong again. A boy I know made a very poor argument to me yesterday by insinuating that the number of people owning guns in a country corresponds to the number of firearm related deaths. Of the top ten countries for people owning firearms (America led - 88.8 per every 100 people own guns), three of those countries weren't even in the top 50 for number of firearms related deaths. The highest on the list, America, was the fifteenth country on the list for deaths related to firearms (9 per every 1,000 deaths).
A few weeks ago in Appleton, a man was run of the road by a couple with a bad case of road rage. He called the police when they came at him with their keys, prepared to beat him up. He pulled out a gun and held them there until the police arrived. He did not shoot them, but he did not get beaten up. That's the point of the Second Amendment. The crazies who shoot people today would still shoot people if guns were illegal - people who care about the law don't shoot people. Gun control would only control people who follow the law, making them more vulnerable.
It's more than self-defense, though. It's about responsibility, something that Americans today sorely lack. The saying, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is used so much by gun rights advocates today but it's so true. Forbidding guns doesn't solve the problem - it's a symptom of a larger, underlying cause. Yesterday, a Chinese man attacked 22 children and 1 adult outside a school with a knife. Do we ban knives next? What about cars - that would eliminate driving accidents. Or drugs. Let's ban drugs! Oh, wait....
Gun control doesn't work. Since gun control laws have been implemented in Wales and England, firearm crimes have increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year. That's 89%. In 18 police areas crimes doubles. In comparison, four years after the handgun ban in Washington D.C. was repealed, the murder rate fell to "below triples digits" from the first time since 1963. Weird how that works.
One more thing: you can bet that the government knows that the point of the Second Amendment originally was for protection against the government. So while BO can say that he wants to prevent tragedies like Newtown from occurring again, sure doesn't hurt him either if regular citizens can't have guns, does it?
God bless all those affected in Newtown yesterday and God bless America.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)