I ran across this op/ed this morning...
No one will rise up to defend a man who walks into an Amish school, lines young girls up against a blackboard, ties up their feet, and then kills them before killing himself. But a surprising number of people will inevitably rise up to defend his guns, to call the man guilty but his weapons innocent.
When Charles Roberts snapped, the tools lay ready to hand. It is not clear what led him to seek out a quiet country school in Lancaster County, Pa., but it is possible he chose it because he knew that it belonged to a trusting, insular community, where there would be no one to stop him from entering with a shotgun, a rifle and an automatic pistol.
This is the third school shooting in a week. What will stick in almost everyone's minds is the gross disparity between Mr. Roberts's murderous intentions and the bucolic peacefulness of an Amish school in early October. But this killing is no different from the ones that took place in Wisconsin and Colorado recently.
The weapons were the same, and so was the conflict between the hideous assault of a damaged mind and the atmosphere of openness and trust that makes education possible. There are no simple solutions to this conflict. It is neither possible nor tolerable to secure every school or guard every child. Nor is it possible or politically tolerable to keep tabs on every gun. But in these killings we see an open society threatened by the ubiquity of its weapons, in which one kind of freedom is allowed to trump all others. Most gun owners are respectable, law-abiding citizens. But that is no reason to acquit the guns.
Three school shootings in the same week is horrible but it's not the fault of guns, nor even the fault of the availability of guns, any more than Mark Foley's dirty e-mails can be blamed on the ubiquity of computers. Each and every time it's the fault of the shooter and nothing else. Predictably, sniveling liberals will use these recent shootings to once again call for gun control legislation. I wonder if the victims had their throats cut would liberals call for a ban on steak knives? If the victims had been garotted with cord would liberals call for a ban on clothes-lines?
"But Ed", you naively point out, "knives and cord have other uses that are not violent, guns are for only one thing...killing."
Silly reader...try protecting a school full of children from an armed maniac with some clothes line or a steak knife. In the hands of the law abiding citizen, guns are no more dangerous than knives or rope, but much more useful in an emergency.
Let me ask this question: what if a teacher in each school were allowed to carry a concealed weapon? Or even all teachers? I wonder how far these killers would get before they were dropped "dead" in their tracks. Extend that logic to communities. What if there were conceal/carry laws in every community? How many violent crimes would not even commence because the criminals would not know who had a weapon and who didn't?
Don't let sympathy and knee-jerk emotion cause you to allow the liberals to use this tragedy to push through legislation that further restricts your access to fire-arms for the protection of you and your family.
5 comments:
Using the same logic, let me ask you this question: How come murders are being commited in states with the death penalty?
PS: The shark photo has been around for many, many years. Just to wonder if it's real is pretty far out.
First let me reject your premise that state executions equal murder. That's like saying that corporal punishment equals child beating. In a strictly technical sense, in both cases a life is being taken, that is true, but the similarities end there.
That being said: Why should society house endlessly one of it's members who has deprived an individual(s) of his right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness? Am I condoning State sanctioned murder...unequivocally, yes!
As long as the constitutional conditions of a speedy trial by jury of peers, competent defense council, defendants sound mind, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, etc were met, State sanctioned killing is fine with me.
Certainly, if evidentiary technology evolves such that a guilty verdict is cast in doubt, that verdict should be reduced to "life" until the evidence can be evaluated.
I freely admit that the price of warehousing criminals at excessive taxpayer expense is a problem for me. I realize that incarceration is a necessary expenditure of a society's taxes and that indentured servitude is unconstitutional, so convicts cannot be made to work for the profit of others, but it seems to me that if the death penalty were fast-tracked so that all the appeals took no more than one year, and the executions were publicized, it would become the deterrent that we want it to be.
Obviously, as a liberal who probably takes pleasure in the government's monthly seizure of your money in taxes, you probably don't mind a big slice of your tax dollars being spent on housing criminals who would be better off dead.
What it comes down to for me is the "eye for an eye" system of justice. Incarceration is fine for all crimes except one, maybe two or three, and that's premeditated murder, violent pedophelia and child abuse. People who hurt children cannot be rehabilitated...kill all the child abusers too.
You didn't get the point, Ed, but that might have been my mistake by not being clear enough. I'll go slow this time, staring with a quote you migt recognize:
"Let me ask this question: what if a teacher in each school were allowed to carry a concealed weapon? Or even all teachers? I wonder how far these killers would get before they were dropped "dead" in their tracks. Extend that logic to communities. What if there were conceal/carry laws in every community? How many violent crimes would not even commence because the criminals would not know who had a weapon and who didn't?"
I say:
Using your logic, murder shouldn't occur in states with death penalty - because potensial murderers would consider the consequences (being senteced to death) and then decide not to go thru with it.
My bad, let me clarify my reasoning...I'll go slow this time.
I didn't say that murders shouldn't occur in states with the death penalty. I said that murders shouldn't occur in states with a fast-tracked death penalty. I mean what's the difference in 20 years on death row and life in prison for these guys...not much. If death sentences were carried out within one year of trial, I believe that would positively affect the murder rate.
I did not equate a fast-track death penalty with a conceal/carry law, although both would function nicely as a deterrent to violent crime.
Uncertainty about a would-be victim's ability to defend himself/herself would focus the mind of the criminal, forcing him to weigh carefully the potential benefits of criminal conduct against the possibility of instant crime prevention from a little old lady with a .357 who is not in the mood to have her purse snatched.
As it stands, criminals know most of the population is unarmed and therefor make perfect victims. With conceal/carry laws in effect, criminals run the risk of, as you say, suffering the "death penalty" from their victim before the crime is even committed.
Ideally, would-be murderers would have to consider both possibilities of getting sentenced to death in effect by their victim, or getting executed quickly by the state. Even the stupidest criminal would hesitate before rolling those particular dice.
Now that's logic.
Good grief.
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