It’s impossible to make any sense of the Newtown, Conn., shootings. To find some reason or logic in such a mass murder would be to find reason or logic in insanity. Insanity, by definition, is illogical and unreasonable.
We, as a society, needn’t follow up the insanity with more illogical and unreasonable reactions. But many around us can’t help themselves. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California already had an assault weapons ban at the ready, waiting for just such an occasion to roll it out. She will do so on the first day of the new Congress session in January. Forget that the shooter didn’t use an assault weapon.
An assault weapon, as defined by the military, is a fully automatic weapon, as opposed to a semi-automatic. The difference is as the names suggest. An automatic weapon fires when one pulls the trigger and continues firing until either the shooter releases the trigger or the magazine runs out of rounds (think machine gun). A semi-automatic fires each time you pull the trigger. Revolvers are not considered semi-automatic although the end result is basically the same. You pull the trigger and the gun fires. So the firearms seen on the old westerns are no less lethal than today’s evilly portrayed “semi-automatics.”
One of the weapons used by the killer in Newtown was a Bushmaster .223 rifle. It is not an automatic weapon. The only reason it would be banned by the so-called assault weapons ban is simply because it looks like an automatic weapon. This is what the assault weapons ban of 1994 did. It banned guns that merely looked like automatic weapons. None of these guns was any more lethal than any other semi-automatic weapon they just had features that, according to the grossly ignorant like Feinstein, made them look menacing. For example, under the assault weapons ban, any gun with a bayonet holder was considered an assault weapon. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather take my chances with a knife at the end of a barrel than a bullet coming out of it. And it wasn’t the bayonet that made it an assault weapon. It was the bayonet holder.
But that’s just part of the irrational response gun-grabbers have when it comes to gun violence. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago—a town which bans so-called assault weapons yet has one of the highest murder rates in the country—held a press conference to urge Congress to reinstate the assault weapons ban. Here’s a guy who can’t even get a handle on the violence in his own city trying to lecture the rest of us on gun violence.
And the self-proclaimed doves on the anti-gun side were calling for anyone who supports the NRA to be killed. One tweet on Twitter read, “Someone should shoot this motherf@%$er NRA President David Keene.” Another tweeted, “Can we now shoot the NRA and everyone who defends them?” These folks sound as unstable as the Newtown killer.
The United States has the highest gun ownership rate in the world yet we don’t even rank in the top 20 for murders. Conversely, Honduras ranks near the bottom in gun ownership and they’re at the top in per capita murders. Switzerland ranks fourth in the world in gun ownership and near the bottom in murders.
It’s not the guns, it’s the crazy people, and until we figure out a way to cure crazy we better figure out a way to stop making our schools a soft target.
“Gun-free zone.” If you really think that works, then put that sign in your front yard.
