GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE- PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE!

Weekly Opinion Editorial

Second Amendment under Attack

AGAIN!

by Steve Fair

     If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns!  No one knows who said that for sure, but those words have been printed on billboards, bumper stickers, and t-shirts for decades.  The point the quote makes is that criminals ignore the law anyway and the only person that is harmed by disarming the public is the law abiding citizen who will turn in his gun.  In the old west, when the local sheriff would confiscate weapons, invariably some ne’re do well would ignore the law and refuse to give up his gun.  Violence would break out and because the criminal was the only one with a gun, it was like shooting fish in a barrel- the law abiding citizen had no way to fight back.

     Once again in America the debate over guns is being waged after another depraved lunatic shot up a small college in Oregon.  It was a ‘gun free’ zone, yet somehow there was a gun.  How does that happen? See above.  Immediately the liberals said the only logical answer is to take guns away from every American because guns kill people, but they forget that knives kill people and so do fists and feet and rocks and baseball bats.  Yet no one is calling for outlawing any of those items.  By the way, five times more people are killed with knives than with guns in this country. 

     This week, the White House confirmed that President Obama was preparing a series of ‘executive orders’ on gun control to match his recent outrage after the shooting in Oregon.   “It’s a high priority and will continue to be until we start to see more progress on this issue in this town,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Monday.  Earnest pointedly criticized the “gun show loophole” for allowing criminals and people with mental problems to buy weapons.  He blamed organizations like the National Rifle Association for blocking action in Congress on the issue.

     After the latest mass shooting, the President said,  “We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings.  Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours.  So we know there are ways to prevent it.” What Obama didn’t say was that Australia’s ‘solution’ to stop mass shooting was confiscation of guns.  After an attack in 1996 in a tourist area where 35 people were killed and 23 wounded, the Australian government confiscated 650,000 guns via a ‘mandatory gun buyback’ program.  They forced gun owners to hand their firearms over for destruction.  Unfortunately, the Aussies didn’t have this pesky little item in their constitution known as the right to bear arms.  Did the confiscation of weapons work?  Did Australia’s plan reduce firearm homicides?

     University of Melbourne researchers Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi concluded in a 2008 report on the matter with the statement, “There is little evidence to suggest that [the Australian mandatory gun-buyback program] had any significant effects on firearm homicides.”
     Throughout American’s history, there have been enemies of the second amendment.  The very first gun laws were enacted in Virginia in 1640.  The laws were specifically targeted toward blacks.  It provided that blacks, even freemen, could not own guns. Everyone has heard of Dred Scott vs. Sandford, the landmark decision by the SCOTUS back in 1857 that ruled that blacks could not be citizens of the U.S.  What most don’t know is that gun ownership was a part of the debate.  Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that blacks could not be citizens because if they were citizens, they would have the right to own guns: "Giving them citizenship would give them the full liberty," he said, "to keep and carry arms wherever they went,"  Taney wrote.   

     What happened in Oregon (and other places) is tragic, but banning guns would not prevent such tragedies.  It will only prevent law abiding citizens from owning a weapon to defend themselves.  As another famous quote goes, “Guns don’t kill people- people kill people.”  Sin is in the heart before it’s in the hand.