"...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 Ed Schwartz, from MSNBC, says that the Constitution is outdated, that the people who wrote it owned slaves and didn't believe in women's rights, obviously indicating that if they were wrong on that they must be wrong on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.