With the recent school shootings, people are once again hollering about gun control. As a responsible gun-owner this concerns me a great deal. Why? Well, what I see happening has been a slow degradation of the right to bear arms by law abiding citizens, while criminal elements, who certainly don’t obey the law, become ever more armed.
Using children to send a message?
That our current president (Obama) announced his new gun laws surrounded by young children is irony at its greatest. The implication is these that children asked him to do something to protect them from guns, and he was jumping in to save them. But since when do children have the maturity or knowledge to make gun laws? We don’t let children create traffic laws, recommend police procedures, or run the government. (Though some might contend that, unlike our current leaders, at least children know they can’t spend money they don’t have, and that it isn’t moral to steal from other children who have worked hard to earn money.) These children with Obama were obviously parroting information they heard from their parent and teachers, but using the parents and teachers wouldn’t have offered the same great photo op.
We can’t enforce current gun controls
Most reasonable people don’t object to certain gun restrictions. I wouldn’t care, for instance, if owning a machine gun by an individual was prohibited. But the government doesn’t or can’t enforce the gun laws we already have in place, so what’s the point of adding another to the books?
For example, Washington DC (61.4 sq. miles of land) has some of the strictest gun laws in America, and yet a few years ago police ended months of an undercover operation by arresting 70 people and confiscating 161 guns, including automatic rifles and handguns with silencers. Grenades and a rocket launcher were also offered for sale to agents.
There’s no way that element, apparently flourishing in that small area, is going away. I hate to repeat this overused phrase, but the end result is always the same: “If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” The law abiding people give them up, but criminals will not. The fact is that taking guns away from responsible citizens only puts those children in Obama’s photo op more at the mercy of criminals.
Citizens have the right to protect themselves
Without guns how can the average citizen protect his home? Or his family when they are accosted at a bus stop or in a mall? Just do a search on the Internet and you’ll see story after story about people defending their homes and their family. Many of those people would be dead now if they hadn’t legal access to a gun. (More, I suggest, than the casualties at school shootings.) If the average responsible citizen didn’t have the right to bear arms, criminals could do whatever they wanted without fear because the police simply can’t be everywhere. We must do our part. We have the right and duty to protect our families.
Or do we?
Do we uphold the Constitution?
The bottom line is do we uphold the Constitution, including the right to bear arms, or don’t we? Because that’s what is really at stake here is not just gun control, but a slow eroding of all our rights. I say enough is enough!
My heart goes out to the victims in school shootings. I feel for their families and I understand their desire for some good to come of this. But I don’t believe taking guns from good people will help. Some suggest that perhaps instead of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, we should train teachers and others to carry them. I’m not saying that’s the answer, but if I were a teacher, I’d certainly get myself trained and begin carrying a gun. I’d shoot at least a hundred rounds a month to stay in practice, and if a boy came in my school with a weapon, I’d pull out my gun from my holster on my body (not from a locked drawer) and do what I needed to protect those children.
Our choice
You may be appalled. You may say we must prevent that kind of world at all costs. I wish that were possible. It isn’t. And that means each of us has a choice. You can give up your weapon and enact gun control laws to steal your neighbor’s gun from him. You can take away his right to protect his family. But when you’re knifed on the street or your son is shot dead in front of you at a mall, don’t wonder why that criminal still had a gun. Because regardless of any law, criminals won’t be turning in their weapons. They’ll just buy and make and import more, because the potential for victims and profit will be that much higher.
Copyright 2013 Teyla Rachel Branton
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Charlotte
I agree with Teyla. A news reporter that I know was doing a story on gun control and how hard it is to buy a gun. She left the building at 8:30 AM; she went to meet a man about purchasing a gun, she was back by 9:30, had driven to the meeting and purchased a gun without anyone asking any questions as to whether she was a citizen, or had a record or any of the important questions that should be ask. If we don’t have the gun to protect ourselves we might just give everything away and wait for them to come a shoot us. I know this reply is more than a little late but in my opinion the ones wanting the gun laws are the same ones that think the government should keep us, feed us and tell us what we can and can’t do. That’s not freedom folks, that’s dictator ship.
Teyla Rachel Branton
Good points! And many governments who end up outlaw guns do so precisely to control their people (good people). We must retain the ability to protect our families from those who would hurt us, regardless of who those people are. Thanks for posting!
Teyla Rachel Branton
I COMPLETELY agree. Bad guys will always, always have guns. You can outlaw them all you want and they will still kill innocent people with guns. The only way we can protect ourselves is by arming ourselves and becoming trained. Period. There is no way to take guns from people who are intent to kill others, and thinking that a law will do that as Isah suggests is, well, naive.
Saima
“More guns are bad. Less guns are good”Speaking of logic, this is known as a non sequitur…but I’m sure you already knew that. This means you will also acknowledge that building an argument from this fallacious axiom (statement of truth) will inevitably result in a worthless mess.Nobody is suggesting that guns are magical amulets of protection. The absence of them guarantees the absence of certain life saving options. The presence of them, and thereby the presence of such options, may have saved lives. Maybe just one life…maybe many more. Aren’t the anti-gun zealots the first to trot out the “if it saves just one life” line? Kinda reveals the fraud, doesn’t it?”security should have had guns, and they should have had the courage”Yes…they should have. Shame they didn’t. Shame it took a bunch of dead people to figure that out. How many lives do you think you can save with a “should have”?-dk
Isah
Your logic is flawed, and it bnrigs into question your ability to properly use research methods. The absence of a person with a gun to stop the Westroads shooter cannot logically be used as evidence that guns can help stop such violent attacks. Unless you can prove that a person was kept from bringing in a gun to Westroads, your hypothesis is mere speculation. Again, the absence of a fact (a person with a gun could have stopped the shooter)cannot be used to make a leap in logic that had something taken place, i.e., a person with a gun could have stopped the shooter, the shooting would not have taken place. In simpler terms, the fact that guns are banned from Westroads is no evidence whatsoever that if guns were allowed in Westroads, the shooting would have been any less likely whatsoever. Your logic is flawed, presumably because to support your thesis, you need to make such unsupported leaps in logic that are pure nonsense. More guns are bad. Less guns are good. In this case, security should have had guns, and they should have had the courage to stop someone who they saw with a huge bulge in his jacket, which they admit to have seen prior to the shooting. And I also see no reason why it took dispatchers two minutes to call out an officer after getting the 9-11 call for the shooting. That seems like a very very slow dispatch time.
Teyla Rachel Branton
Sorry! I disagree. Bad guys will always, always find guns. You can outlaw them all you want and they will still kill innocent people. The only way we can protect ourselves is by arming ourselves and becoming trained. Period. There are plenty of examples of citizens using personal guns to defend themselves against evil people. You will never be able to take the guns from bad people. Only from citizens who obey the law.