Comforting words from A Holy Experience:
When you can hardly even ask where the heart of God is in all this evil and dark...God takes our broken hearts and gives us His own still-beating heart, His pierced right through and made whole heart...so we can still keep breathing... When our believing runs out, God's loving runs on...His inexplicable love somehow beating unstoppable.
To go from such a tragedy to the always hot topic of gun control is a bit tricky, but it is one of the most important issues facing our country today. It has been jolted to the forefront in light of these recent events. I will be as brief as I can:
- Taking away everyone's guns does not suddenly make law breaking crazy people sane.
- When there are laws against owning firearms, the law abiding citizens turn in their weapons. The law breaking citizens do not.
- The law breaking citizens are then able to use their illegal firearms to attack/bring violence upon/murder/etc. innocent civilians, who now have no way to defend themselves against the crazies.
Allowing responsible adults to own guns will not cause additional gun violence. Taking away guns from responsible adults will not decrease gun violence; the EXACT OPPOSITE happens.
LISTEN: If you actually care about LEARNING something about all of this - putting politics aside and learning from someone that knows guns, if you have learned all you know about guns from TV, if you want to EDUCATE yourself on the matter to be able to have an intelligent debate, read THIS.
LISTEN: If you actually care about LEARNING something about all of this - putting politics aside and learning from someone that knows guns, if you have learned all you know about guns from TV, if you want to EDUCATE yourself on the matter to be able to have an intelligent debate, read THIS.
"Those who trade liberty for security have neither." - John Adams
Free men do not ask permission to bear arms.
Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.
Know guns, know safety. No guns, no safety.
Assault is a behavior, not a device.
You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.
You don't shoot to kill, you shoot to stay alive.
64,999,987 firearm owners killed no one yesterday.
The Second Amendment is in place in case the others are ignored.
Gun control is not about guns. It is about control.
The 2nd Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights. RIGHTS. It is not the Bill of Needs. Too many people in this debate are trying to frame it by what they think we NEED, which is in itself contrary to the intent of the Bill of Rights. These words cannot be interpreted any other way, and should not be distorted. As anyone with a proper historical perspective knows, when the founders said, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," they meant gun ownership is a RIGHT and it shall not be infringed upon. Period. The comma between the militia part and the individual part clearly separates them into two distinct statements. Any effort to distort that is an effort to ignore all of the supporting documentation from the founding fathers behind this wording.
Since we all have the right to bear arms, I obtained my concealed handgun license earlier this year and believe it is one of the smartest things I have done in my life. I am fully able to protect myself, my children AND OTHERS if need be.
Did you see this news story about the Georgia mother that shot their home intruder five times after he cornered her and her twins, 9 years old, in their attic? What would have happened if she was not armed and able to defend herself? This is a perfect example of why limiting rounds is a horrible idea. Five bullets to the face/neck region, and he still did not die. What if there would have been more men? We would be reading three obituaries instead.
Did you see this news story about the Georgia mother that shot their home intruder five times after he cornered her and her twins, 9 years old, in their attic? What would have happened if she was not armed and able to defend herself? This is a perfect example of why limiting rounds is a horrible idea. Five bullets to the face/neck region, and he still did not die. What if there would have been more men? We would be reading three obituaries instead.
There are numerous studies done showing that having guns actually prevents more crime. One great example occured in Florida about 10 years ago. (I cannot remember which city...will try to remember /research and update here...) Rape occurrence was off the charts, and within months of arming women in the area, the rapes drastically reduced. The facts do not lie and study after study after study - real life example after real life example after real life example - show the detrimental effects of gun control and gun bans.
A great video can be seen HERE on the gun control in Australia and the horrendous consequences it has had for its citizens. Watch and weep...
Armed Robberies increased by 69%
Assaults with guns jumped 28%
Gun Murders jumped 19%
Home Invasions were up 21%
Why on earth would a bad guy think twice about breaking into a home, knowing the inhabitants are unarmed?
This is a wonderful book on the topic: More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott, Jr. - click here to purchase
Interesting...A great video can be seen HERE on the gun control in Australia and the horrendous consequences it has had for its citizens. Watch and weep...
Armed Robberies increased by 69%
Assaults with guns jumped 28%
Gun Murders jumped 19%
Home Invasions were up 21%
Why on earth would a bad guy think twice about breaking into a home, knowing the inhabitants are unarmed?
This is a wonderful book on the topic: More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott, Jr. - click here to purchase
SCHOOL OBAMA'S DAUGHTERS ATTEND HAS 11 ARMED GUARDS
Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact. The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak.
If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point.
The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC's David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren't used (and weren't even allowed).
Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.
Guns, Mental Illness, and Newtown - The Wall Street Journal
By David Kopel - 12.17.12
(Summary if you do not read the entire article: People who are serious about preventing the next Newtown should embrace much greater funding for mental health, strong laws for civil commitment of the violently mentally ill—and stop kidding themselves that pretend gun-free zones will stop killers).
Has the rate of random mass shootings in the United States increased? Over the past 30 years, the answer is definitely yes. It is also true that the total U.S. homicide rate has fallen by over half since 1980, and the gun homicide rate has fallen along with it. Today, Americans are safer from violent crime, including gun homicide, than they have been at any time since the mid-1960s.
Mass shootings, defined as four or more fatalities, fluctuate from year to year, but over the past 30 years there has been no long-term increase or decrease. But "random" mass shootings, such as the horrific crimes last Friday in Newtown, Conn., have increased.
If you count only such crimes in which five or more victims were killed, there were six in the 1980s and 19 in the 2000s.Alan Lankford of the University of Alabama analyzed data from a recent New York Police Department study of "active shooters"—criminals who attempted to murder people in a confined area, where there are lots of people, and who chose at least some victims randomly. Counting only the incidents with at least two casualties, there were 179 such crimes between 1966 and 2010. In the 1980s, there were 18. In the 1990s, there were 54. In the 2000s, there were 87.
Why the increase? It cannot be because gun-control laws have become more lax. Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, there were almost no federal gun-control laws. The exception was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set up an extremely severe registration and tax system for automatic weapons and has remained in force for 78 years.
Nor are magazines holding more than 10 rounds something new. They were invented decades ago and have long been standard for many handguns. Police officers carry them for the same reason that civilians do: Especially if a person is attacked by multiple assailants, there is no guarantee that a 10-round magazine will end the assault.
The 1980s were much worse than today in terms of overall violent crime, including gun homicide, but they were much better than today in terms of mass random shootings. The difference wasn't that the 1980s had tougher controls on so-called "assault weapons." No assault weapons law existed in the U.S. until California passed a ban in 1989.
Connecticut followed in 1993. None of the guns that the Newtown murderer used was an assault weapon under Connecticut law. This illustrates the uselessness of bans on so-called assault weapons, since those bans concentrate on guns' cosmetics, such as whether the gun has a bayonet lug, rather than their function.
What some people call "assault weapons" function like every other normal firearm—they fire only one bullet each time the trigger is pressed. Unlike automatics (machine guns), they do not fire continuously as long as the trigger is held. They are "semi-automatic" because they eject the empty shell case and load the next round into the firing chamber.
Today in America, most handguns are semi-automatics, as are many long guns, including the best-selling rifle today, the AR-15, the model used in the Newtown shooting. Some of these guns look like machine guns, but they do not function like machine guns.
Back in the mid-1960s, in most states, an adult could walk into a store and buy an AR-15 rifle, no questions asked. Today, firearms are the most heavily regulated consumer product in the United States. If someone wants to purchase an AR-15 or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. Permission is denied if the buyer is in one of nine categories of "prohibited persons," including felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and persons who have been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.
Since gun controls today are far stricter than at the time when "active shooters" were rare, what can account for the increase in these shootings? One plausible answer is the media. Cable TV in the 1990s, and the Internet today, greatly magnify the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve. We know that many would-be mass killers obsessively study their predecessors.
Loren Coleman's 2004 book "The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines" shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 classic "The Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.
A second explanation is the deinstitutionalization of the violently mentally ill. A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill.
In the mid-1960s, many of the killings would have been prevented because the severely mentally ill would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. But today, while government at most every level has bloated over the past half-century, mental-health treatment has been decimated. According to a study released in July by the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of state hospital beds in America per capita has plummeted to 1850 levels, or 14.1 beds per 100,000 people.
Moreover, a 2011 paper by Steven P. Segal at the University of California, Berkeley, "Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S. Homicide Rates," found that a third of the state-to-state variation in homicide rates was attributable to the strength or weakness of involuntary civil-commitment laws.
Finally, it must be acknowledged that many of these attacks today unfortunately take place in pretend "gun-free zones," such as schools, movie theaters and shopping malls. According to Ron Borsch's study for the Force Science Research Center at Minnesota State University-Mankato, active shooters are different from the gangsters and other street toughs whom a police officer might engage in a gunfight. They are predominantly weaklings and cowards who crumble easily as soon as an armed person shows up.
The problem is that by the time the police arrive, lots of people are already dead. So when armed citizens are on the scene, many lives are saved. The media rarely mention the mass murders that were thwarted by armed citizens at the Shoney's Restaurant in Anniston, Ala. (1991), the high school in Pearl, Miss. (1997), the middle-school dance in Edinboro, Penn. (1998), and the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. (2007), among others.
At the Clackamas Mall in Oregon last week, an active shooter murdered two people and then saw that a shopper, who had a handgun carry permit, had drawn a gun and was aiming at him. The murderer's next shot was to kill himself.
Real gun-free zones are a wonderful idea, but they are only real if they are created by metal detectors backed up by armed guards. Pretend gun-free zones, where law-abiding adults (who pass a fingerprint-based background check and a safety training class) are still disarmed, are magnets for evildoers who know they will be able to murder at will with little threat of being fired upon.
People who are serious about preventing the next Newtown should embrace much greater funding for mental health, strong laws for civil commitment of the violently mentally ill—and stop kidding themselves that pretend gun-free zones will stop killers.
A brief history lesson regarding gun control via Doug Giles January 6, 2013
In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th century because of gun control: 56 million.
You won’t see this data on the U.S. evening news or hear politicians disseminating this information. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens.
He also goes on to comment on the "Demand A Plan" video compiled by several celebrities demanding action on guns:
Hollywood has even cobbled together a little tsk-tsk black and white video demanding our government do something about gun violence. That would be the very gun violence they have glamorized on the big screen for the last few decades. Hello.
I believe the total head count of the people slaughtered on film from all the participants from the “Demand a Plan” anti-gun clip comes out to a whopping 100,000 on screen murders.
Yes, Hollywood, please lecture us about gun violence wrecking our culture. Life imitates art, morons, and your films probably spawned half of the killers’ bloody dreams for the last two decades. Lecture us? Please. Physician, heal thyself...If you truly want to stem the tide of violent deaths, you should have made a video about the danger of hammers and clubs, as the FBI reports they kill more people every year than rifles do.
A Novel Idea: Register NON Gun Owners
Vermont State Rep. Fred Maslack has read the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as Vermont's own Constitution very carefully, and his strict interpretation of these documents is popping some eyeballs in New England and elsewhere.
Maslack recently proposed a bill to register "non-gun-owners" and require them to pay a $500 fee to the state. Thus Vermont would become the first state to require a permit for the luxury of going about unarmed and assess a fee of $500 for the privilege of not owning a gun.
Maslack read the "militia" phrase of the Second Amendment as not only affirming the right of the individual citizen to bear arms, but as a clear mandate to do so. He believes that universal gun ownership was advocated by the Framers of the Constitution as an antidote to a "monopoly of force" by the government as well as criminals.
Vermont 's constitution states explicitly that "the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the State" and those persons who are "conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms" shall be required to "pay such equivalent." Clearly, says Maslack, Vermonters have a
constitutional obligation to arm themselves, so that they are capable of responding to "any situation that may arise."
Under the bill, adults who choose not to own a firearm would be required to register their name, address, Social Security Number, and driver's license number with the state. "There is a legitimate government interest in knowing who is not prepared to defend the state should they be asked to do so," Maslack says.
Vermont already boasts a high rate of gun ownership along with the least restrictive laws of any state...it's currently the only state that allows a citizen to carry a concealed firearm without a permit. This combination of plenty of guns and few laws regulating them has resulted in a crime rate that is the third lowest in the nation.
There is no reason why gun owners should have to pay taxes to support police protection for people not wanting to own guns. Let them contribute their fair share and pay their own way.
At least we're covered down here.
Giving advice to Americans, an elderly man at the end of the video on the devastating effect of Australia's gun control states plain and simple: "Never ever EVER give up this freedom."
