Bet that title caught your attention. I intended it to.
I don’t write the title to belittle the tragedy that happened yesterday at the elementary school in Connecticut where apparently a mentally ill (or autistic, depending on which news account you read) 20-year-old killed his mother at home, then took her guns and went to the school she taught Kindergarten at, where he then shot and killed twenty children and six adults before taking his own life.
That is indeed an unnecessary tragedy, and we need to keep alive the memories of those kids. This on top of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and others. I have a nine-year-old adopted son from my first marriage whom I never get to see, but that doesn’t mean my thoughts don’t turn to him when things like this happen. He’s still my son.
What does bother me about the whole thing is that almost immediately the politicos and activists start shouting about the need for “gun control” (whatever that means) and about the need to take guns away from everybody because they kill people. What also bothers me is the way that news outlets sensationalize the news to their own ends.
Today the publication Salon posts an article about another kid who was arrested for plotting to shoot and blow up a school. The web page sensationalizes the story by headlining it with a huge image of AR-15 assault rifles (click the image to see it full-size from my screen).
The problem is that the photograph has nothing to do with this story. If you read the article, police moved when the kid acquired a Colt .45 pistol. Why the pictures of assault rifles?
So back to gun control, as much as I hate politics.
Knee-jerk-reaction legislation is almost always bad legislation. We need to think through what we’re doing before we take the dramatic step of doing it. The Second Amendment still exists in our Constitution, and our Supreme Court has repeatedly decided that it allows responsible citizens to keep and bear arms as a right.
Where we fail is not the “right to bear arms,” but to do it responsibly. With any right comes responsibility in exercising that right appropriately.
The other necessarily question is how far do we go?
The FBI’s own statistics do confirm that firearms are used nearly three to one over other weapons, combined, when it comes to murders:
| Total murders |
Total firearms |
Knives or cutting instruments |
Other weapons |
Hands, fists, feet, etc. |
|
| Total | 12,664 | 8,583 | 1,694 | 1,659 | 50 |
But when it comes to violent crime overall (here, for example, aggravated assault), Guns are outnumbered nearly two to one by other methods:
| Total aggravated assaults |
Firearms | Knives or cutting instruments |
Other weapons |
Personal weapons |
Agency count |
| 652,169 | 138,336 | 124,380 | 214,060 | 175,393 | 14,060 |
Source for the above numbers: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/index-page
According to one source, that I’m still trying to locate, the number one weapon used for assaults is not a gun, but a baseball bat. Why aren’t baseball bats regulated?
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Steven Buehler