A Gun in Your Hand is Still the Best Protection
By Alan Caruba
Here’s an
excerpt from Steven Goddard’s excellent blog, Real Science:
Posted on September
17, 2013
The DC shooter had two gun arrests,
including one where he fired a bullet into his neighbor’s apartment and didn’t
even bother to check on her. He suffered from delusional paranoia, heard
voices, and had a security clearance and a concealed carry license. And the
Navy let him slip through security yesterday carrying a rifle.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. law enforcement
officials are telling The Associated Press that the Navy contractor identified
as the gunman in the mass shootings at the Washington Navy Yard had been
suffering a host of serious mental issues, including paranoia and a sleep
disorder. He also had been hearing voices in his head, the officials said.
Aaron Alexis, 34, had been treated since August by the Veterans
Administration for his mental problems, the officials said. They spoke on
condition of anonymity because the criminal investigation in the case was
continuing. The Navy had not declared him mentally unfit, which would have
rescinded a security clearance.”
A gun in your
hand is still the best protection against such a random killer or against
anyone threatening your life or the lives of others.
On November 11,
2009, in the week following the killings at Fort Hood—still labeled workplace
violence, not a terrorist attack—a Washington Times editorial noted that “Among
President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S.
soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations
military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost
impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for
personal protection.”
It makes you
wonder why we refer to our military as “armed forces.”
Thanks to the
usual delusionary liberal claptrap cited to oppose gun ownership, military
bases, schools, malls, and even movie theatres remain places where few, unless
they live in a state that permits concealed carry, can shoot back when under
attack.
On Tuesday,
September 17, the nation celebrated Constitution Day, the ratification 226
years ago of the Constitution. When sent to state legislatures many demanded
that a Bill of Rights be included and it is significant that the Second
Amendment right to own and bear arms guarantees the rights enumerated in the
First Amendment.
As Thomas
Jefferson noted, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The
strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is,
as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” That
was never more true than today!
Michael Savage,
the radio talk show personality, is fond of saying that liberalism is a mental
disorder, but there is ample proof, given the irrational way they keep
demanding more laws to control guns, limit gun ownership, and create other
obstacles to a populace that clearly demands to retain the rights spelled out
in the Second Amendment.
Before the
bodies of Alexis’s victims had been counted and removed, Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
a California Democrat and longtime gun control advocate was denouncing “the
litany of massacres” over the past few years, asking “When will enough be
enough?” but not answering why Monday’s killings and those at the Newtown,
Connecticut school, earlier at Columbine high school, or the movie house
killings in a Denver suburb last year all involved perpetrators who were found
to have been mentally deranged. Sen. Feinstein ignores this fact.
Millions of
Americans own guns, mostly for personal protection as opposed to hunting. There
are 13.7 million hunters in the United States over age 16 according to the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. As CNS News reported in February, “That means
hunters constitute only 15.9 to 18.1 percent of the estimated 70-80 million gun
owners in the U.S. in 2001—the last year for which statistics are available.”
There are an estimated 300 million firearms in the U.S., about 100 million of
which are handguns.
Liberals and gun
control advocates would have you believe that the nation has been awash in mass
shootings or that our murder rate is soaring. There is no truth in either of
these assertions. Indeed, in states that permit concealed carry of handguns the
murder rate is lower than those that do not. Chicago, famous for its strict gun
laws, has a high rate of murders and is being joined by Newark, NJ and Trenton
in my home state of New Jersey where it is virtually impossible to secure a
concealed carry permit.
While mass
shootings are frightening events, Bloomberg News reported there had been 78
such events over the past thirty years; incidents in which four or more
people were killed at random. There were 547 victims and “over the same three
decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of one percent of the
559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered over
that same time period.” According to the World Health Organization,
statistically America ranks among nations with the very lowest murder rates per
100,000, many of which have total gun bans.
A May 7, 2013
article in the Los Angeles Times, reported that “Gun crime has plunged in the
United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun
killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government
data show. Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half
believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew
Research Center.”
Americans are
constantly being harangued over the issue of gun ownership. That issue was
settled 226 years ago when our Constitution was enacted.
© Alan Caruba,
2013
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