Gun Politics

Ten days before Christmas last year, 20-year old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother in their home before driving her car to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut where he fatally shot 20 children and six adult staff members. When first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide. The school shootings at Sandy Hook were the second deadliest in US history. Only the 2007 Virginia Tech killings by Seung-Hui Cho, a student in the university, injured more – 32 people killed and 17 wounded before killing himself.

When I heard the news about Sandy Hook, my heart grieved for the parents who lost children and for the families of the staff members. I’m a parent of four, now adult, children and I guarded them like a hawk when they were young. The age of the victims, the time of the year, and the scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible.

Still, when Obama used four children as props for his photo-op last week, spearheading his agenda for more gun restrictions, it bordered on repugnant exploitation. Its purpose was to posture for the anti-gun advocates in this country and show that he was a man of action. In the face of the Sandy Hook tragedy, he essentially said that he would by-pass the Constitutional due process of co-governing with Congress to issue 23 gun-related executive orders – something he didn’t feel compelled to do after the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting or the 2011 Gabby Gifford shooting in Tucson or the government Fast and Furious scandal about which I blogged last year. No, all of these events occurred before the 2012 election, which he wanted desperately to win. The firestorm following his April 2008 remark about bitter Pennsylvanians and mid-westerners who hold on to their guns and religion rather than defer to government-engineered solutions from all-wise Washington politicians taught then-Senator Obama a thing or two about guns and Americans – both Democrat and Republican gun owners.

On balance, Obama’s anti-gun performance on January 16 was all theater. He was introduced by Biden who spoke emotionally about the Sandy Hook shooting. During his comments, Biden recognized the staged presence of Colin Goddard, who was in the audience. Goddard was among the wounded in the Virginia Tech shooting. He was the target for four bullets from Seung-Hui Cho, the Tech shooter who used a handgun, I might add, not an assault rifle which Obama wants banned. After the Biden introduction, Obama took the podium and spoke, which included reading letters he’d received from the four children on stage with him, exhorting him to action. Not bad for kids aged 8 to 11. When I was their ages I didn’t have the insight their letters revealed. I’d be interested in learning how they gained it.

And then, as he stared phlegmatically at the invited audience, he intoned that “their [the letter writers’] voices should compel us to change.” While he recognized the gun-owning rights of citizens in a free society – rights he wants to curtail with his form of governing (or is he ruling?) – he dramatically said, “OK, let’s sign these orders.” I saw him sign his name two, possibly three times, not 23. The transcript of his teleprompter-aided speech says, “(The executive orders are signed)” but where are they? They are nowhere posted on the White House website. Do they even exist?

After high-fiving and hugging each child Obama promptly left the stage and the show was over. Thus far, the 25 executive orders may be MIA because the congressional GOP said they would be challenged in court if attempted. So the child-hugging charade was pure theater.

Two children not present for the White House staged performance were Donnie and Melinda Herman’s 9-year old twins whose mom put five of six .38 caliber bullets into Paul Slater, a recently released con with a bad-guy rap sheet. Slater had rung the doorbell of the Herman’s suburban Atlanta home several times before breaking in, believing the family was gone. Melinda retreated with her twins to a crawl space off of the master bedroom taking her husband’s revolver and a cell phone in order to call her husband for help who in turn called the police. Donnie told Melinda if the intruder opened the crawl space door to shoot – which she did missing once. Slater somehow managed to remain conscious and was able to run to his SUV, crashing it within a block. He will be a guest of the Georgia penal system for a long time if he survives his wounds. Despite past jeers and ridicule from the Left, Executive VP of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, proved prescient in at least the Herman case when he said that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” except Slater had a crowbar instead of a gun.

As Obama exploited the Sandy Hook tragedy for his ends, pushing measures that he says will protect children in the future, I couldn’t help wonder why he wasn’t equally concerned about the $52,345.87 of national debt per child that his policies have incurred and the fact that he is further mortgaging their future at a rate of $3.83 billion per day. That the debt must be repaid by children now in elementary and secondary schools is far more certain than the reoccurrence of another school shooting.

I further wondered why his agenda didn’t include the movie violence created by his Hollywood buddies who contributed so generously to his two political campaigns. Killings and explosions in their films occur almost every minute. Why ignore movie violence? Because, for example, the blood-soaked B-movie "Django Unchained" returned $125 million to its Democrat contributing producers in the first three weeks. And here comes another “Die Hard” movie, as if we needed another, which no doubt is all special effects and no plot if the TV ads are any indication. Films, video games, and extreme experiences like these desensitize their consumers to violence and destruction. Along with his calls for reinstatement of the assault weapon ban, why not ban violent media content? Such a ban probably collides with the First Amendment, but Obama isn’t concerned about violating the Second Amendment with his gun restrictions.

Obama’s anti-gun agenda, entitled “Now is the Time,” would ban assault rifles, limit magazine capacity, require even more rigorous background checks and their compliance costs (including private gun sales), and require interstate and federal information sharing to learn where are all of the 350 million guns in this country and who are their owners. None of these measures would have prevented the Sandy Hook killings, the Aurora killings, the Tucson killings, which injured Gabby Gifford, nor would it have prevented any of the other horrific shootings that have occurred in this country – because those crimes weren’t committed by law-abiding citizens. No matter. That’s not the issue. Obama and his Attorney General Holder are openly opposed to the Second Amendment and have tried relentlessly to disarm America since first taking office.

During his Solomonic White House presentation, Obama said the “assault rifle” used in the Aurora shooting is designed “for the theater of war” which enabled the killer, James Holmes, to shoot so many people. Untrue. Holmes used three weapons in the shooting – a semi-automatic rifle that is unsuited for modern combat, a shotgun not used in war, and a semi-automatic pistol used only for personal security in a combat theater. Before the shooting, Holmes tossed two smoke grenades into the audience to create confusion before he started shooting. The guy was on a mission. I’m not defending Holmes’ act. I’m refuting Obama’s misleading explanation of it.

An automatic weapon is one which will continue to fire, like a machine gun, as long as the trigger is compressed. Their sale and purchase is illegal in this country. A semi-automatic weapon fires each time the trigger is pulled – like the ancient M-1 rifle of World War II vintage. They are legal and are used more for sport shooting than hunting.

But let’s be clear that the term “assault rifle” is intentionally used by the Left to conjure up emotional images of a weapon Rambo might use. There is no functional difference in an assault rifle and a hunting rifle. “Assault” relates to use rather than function and what the Left calls an assault rifle would never be used in military combat. Rifles with certain assault-like cosmetic features – pistol grips, folding stocks, flash suppressors – were once banned for their look rather than their functionality until the ban sensibly expired under its sunset provision in 2004 having had no effect on gun crimes. One percent of shooting crimes is committed with an “assault” rifle. Even while the ban was in effect, it didn’t prevent the Columbine Massacre in 1999, which was carried out with two shotguns, a carbine, a semi-automatic pistol, and improvised explosives.

All of the weapons Holmes used in the Aurora shootings were legally obtained. Holmes legally passed two background checks. Adam Lanza’s Sandy Hook shooting was unpreventable in a free society, including Connecticut, which has assault weapons laws that are among the strictest in the nation. Lanza never had a background check because he stole the guns he used from his mother who bought them legally and she passed a background check. The Virginia shooter also legally passed a background check. Obama’s tougher background checking wouldn’t have prevented these crimes. However, his measures would  include checking the background of the owner of a stolen weapon before returning it to him or her. So long Fourth Amendment.

Obama wants weapon clips limited to ten rounds. Melinda Herman had six rounds in her revolver, and even firing at point blank range, she missed once. What if Melinda Herman had missed five times or all six times?What if a second criminal had been in the house?

Apparently Obama thinks mass murderers commit their crimes only with assault rifles and a single magazine of ammunition. In fact they have carried multiple weapons and multiple ammunition clips with them. The Aurora and Sandy Hook killers had so many guns, they had to leave some in their cars. So we limit magazine clips to ten rounds. What’s to prevent a killer from reloading several such clips? One of the two Columbine shooters had thirteen 10-round magazines to reload the carbine he carried.

As Obama postured for the anti-gun lobby during his stage show, he told reporters, “If there is a step we can take that will save even one child from what happened in Newtown (Sandy Hook), we should take that step.” Okay, let’s train and arm two or three staff members in every school. There are 55 million students in 133,000 K-12 schools in the nation. If killers knew that possibly three people in every school had a gun, they’d likely pick another target. Obama’s solution? One thousand security officers in schools. Now if we can only figure out a way to get killers to go only to those schools … No. The Left is opposed to training and arming school staff as we did with airline pilots after 9/11. The Left wants to disarm people, not arm them.

The American people were behind him (in gun control), Obama claimed in his January 16 pontification. No they aren’t. A Rasmussen survey released last week showed that 57% thought the government should enforce the gun laws we have rather than pass more laws as Obama wants from Congress. Prior to making his recommendations to Obama, Biden interviewed experts in gun control, one of whom told him that 2010 data showed 77,000 identifiable people tried to get through the NICS system to illegally buy a gun. That’s a crime. How many of them have been prosecuted? Seventy. No interest from the government in improving the prosecution rates. Attorney General Holder said he didn’t have the time or people to be going after these violators. But he and his boss have time to restrict the gun rights of law-abiding citizens.

Full disclosure. I do not own a gun and have never owned a gun in my life. Moreover, I have two sons. One is currently a police officer and the other was a police officer before leaving to start a business that takes him into a mean part of our city. I worry about their safety even though they are constantly armed. Unlike Obama my sons and my family aren’t surrounded by armed security. Therefore by all rights I have more interest in seeing gun violence reduced, if not eliminated, than Obama does. But I want to see real solutions, not the penny ante solutions that Obama proposes.

Over the past three decades 543 people have been killed in 70 mass shootings – about 18 per year. Too many, but three times as many people die from lightning strikes annually. FBI statistics report 352 people were killed last year with rifles. In a nation of 311 million people, the chances of being killed with a rifle  therefore are about one in a million. In contrast, 33,000 people died in car crashes and 100,000 died from hospital medical errors – enough to fill four jumbo jets every week of the year. I cite these statistics to put gun deaths in perspective. Every death is significant whether due to guns or autos or tobacco use or medical mistakes. But if gun control was the answer to gun violence, why were more people (including children like Sandy Hook’s) killed in Chicago last year than the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan? Chicago and New York have some of the toughest gun laws in the nation and also have the highest crime and murder rates.

Several years ago, a city in Georgia required all its residents to own a gun. It was a silly unenforceable law, but home invasions and violent crimes decreased. A Harvard study showed that countries with high rates of gun ownership experienced fewer violent crimes than countries with low gun ownership. Norway has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, but that didn’t prevent the 2008 shooting spree by a lunatic who killed 69 children and attendees at a youth camp.

Rational criminals don’t do their mischief where victims may be armed. But most criminals aren’t rational. Look at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech, Columbine, and mass shootings of similar ilk; the common thread is mental illness. Someone who is mentally ill and wants to kill someone will do it with guns, knives, rocks, fists, or a truck full of fertilizer as we’ve seen done by the demon-possessed Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer the cannibal, Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed seven men “who tried to rape her,” and the yet unidentified woman who pushed a stranger in front of a New York subway train last month as she talked to voices in her head.

The mental illnesses of many who kill were previously known or suspected by others. But five decades ago the courts made it almost impossible to institutionalize people and in fact released many who are a danger to themselves and innocent people. Many live on the streets; most are harmless, some aren’t. They should be on medication, which means putting them in a custodial environment. But the courts won’t allow it and our treatment facilitates lack the capacity. The US mental health system is totally dysfunctional. If we really want to solve the violence problem in this country, we’d start by solving that problem. Had society done so, the victims of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Tucson, and Aurora would be alive today. But since the mentally ill have strong advocates in the courts, in Congress, and in public/private organizations that shield them from institutionalization and treatment, the next best way to prevent their demonic behavior from harming us is with a gun.

Obama has repeatedly shown a disregard for the Constitution. But the Second Amendment stands on a sound rationale.

The Founders of this country as well as its 18^th century citizens were a suspicious lot, especially suspicious of power entrusted to a central government. In order to get the Constitution ratified, the Bill of Rights with its ten amendments had to be added. In them, after writing the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law” restricting freedom of speech and religion, our most fundamental freedom, the Founders next ordered that “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” as the Second Constitutional Amendment. Why? Because they were students of governments going back to the ancient Greek democracies and they worried that when government loses its fear of the people, it will trample underfoot their freedom. Thus it was essential that the people be able to bear arms to defend themselves from their political leaders. The Founders were that concerned about the corrupting affect of power.

Look at the rights that they reserved after fretting about free speech, assembly, religion, and the right to bear arms.  The Fourth Amendment gave protection against search and seizure. The Fifth Amendment protects the right of due process and prevents double jeopardy. The Sixth Amendment guarantees trial by jury, and the Eighth prevents cruel and unusual punishment. These were the threats they believed required explicit prohibition to prevent future administrations from exploiting them.

Like the Founders, I believe government is the greatest threat to our liberty. Those in power would never succeed in stealing our liberty in one fell swoop. And that’s not government’s way. Instead it nibbles away at the edges, until one day we wake up to the fact that we aren’t really free anymore. That’s why Ronald Reagan warned,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

As a student of history, I don’t have to look far to find examples of what happens when citizens are stripped of the ability to defend themselves against their own government. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy happened in my lifetime. Millions are buried in unmarked graves around the world who believed their government would reliably act in their interests. Always.

Do I trust our government, especially the federal government, and most particularly the Obama government, to reliably confine itself to a benign mender of roads, keeper of domestic peace, dispenser of welfare, and protector of our borders?

Not for a heartbeat.