Psychos and Gun Control

The tragedy in Connecticut is nearly unbearable. In our anger and hurt a lot of us are going to knee jerk into demands for more gun control. Notwithstanding all the other valid arguments about why that is such a bad idea, consider this.  Did you know the crazy bastard in the recent Oregon Mall shooting was stopped by a citizen with a concealed carry pistol? Didn't hear that on the news did you? Nick Meli is his name. Funny how CNN and the New York Times didn't mention him.

When Mr. Meli pulled his piece and aimed it at the bad guy, the fellow was trying to unjam his semi-automatic rifle. Meli did not immediately pull the trigger because there were people behind the bad guy and he was afraid of missing and hitting an innocent bystander. But, the bad guy definitely saw Meli aiming at him and immediately retreated, ran into a stairwell, unjammed the weapon he was carrying and killed himself. My guess is the bad guy was participating in a bizarre suicide and, seeing Meli drawing down on him, he realized that he might be shot but not killed and yet be unable to kill himself as a result of wounds. He was unwilling to face what he had done in the event of that possibility, decided to not risk surviving and so shot himself. 

I have no doubt that if Mr. Meli had not been there with his pistol, the madman would have kept on shooting and killing even more people once he cleared his weapon's jam. Some of those who would have died probably are enthusiastic gun control supporters. Indeed, some of them, and their friends and families, may now be even more resolved than ever to eliminate private citizen gun ownership because of the experience. How ironic, is it not, that they are alive today and able to hold these beliefs rather be among a larger number of dead or injured because a private citizen exercised his right to keep and bear arms.

The guns genie is out of the bottle, whether we like it or not. There is no putting them back in. The Founders saw to that. They had very good reasons for creating the second amendment. But, those reasons are not the point I want to make, as valid and true as they still are. The point is there are so many guns in so many private citizens hands that there is no way to eliminate them. That means that people will always be able to lay hands on a firearm if they really want to do so. Wail and grind your teeth at the thought if you must, it will make it no less true. Psychotic turds bent on killing others are always going to be able to get guns, no matter how many laws and controls and enforcers we create. The only way to stop them is for the rest of us to also be armed so we can defend ourselves.

Another way to look at this is that many people don't want to have to defend themselves. It may sound harsh, but in a way many of these people are cowards thinking only about themselves. To defend yourself is to put yourself in harms way. There is a chance the bad guy will kill you rather than you kill the bad guy. So, one way to limit your risk is to let someone else take on the danger, to brave the bullets. That's the policeman's job. That's what we pay the security guard to do. For many people, telling them they will have to fight for themselves scares the holy crap out of them, and so they grasp at any alternative to avoid it, no matter how absurd or unworkable it might be. If we could just take away everyone's ability to do us harm then we won't have to worry about harm coming to us, right? Pie in the sky.

It works the other way, too. Sometimes the cowards do have the guns. That bastard in CT was a coward, don't think he wasn't. He went to that school with the intention of dying. He simply didn't have the balls to face his demons or whatever was bothering him, but he also couldn't kill himself quietly in his basement all alone either. Instead, he needed to share the pain and suffering with a sort of involuntary and gruesome support group.  Another thought bothers me even more. He was too cowardly to kill himself just for his own reasons. Perhaps he knew them to be trivial or false or something. The solution was to commit such a horrendous sin and pile up the guilt so high that in the end the only justifiable thing, the only way to atone, was to kill himself. Cute little mind trick: I'm too chickenshit to kill myself, so I put myself in a position where not only do I deserve to die but I'm even more scared of living.

The psychos target schools on purpose. It's the easiest place for them to create a big body count, whatever their reasons. Schools are among our most sacrosanct gun free zones, along with court houses and government buildings. All sorts of penalties apply to anyone who would dare to bring a gun onto school property. Those laws work really well, don't they? A variation on an old favorite saying is, keep all the law abiding citizens with guns off the school property and only the psychos there will have guns. Oh, and the difference between our schools and those court houses and government buildings is the latter have security checkpoints and armed guards and metal detectors and on and on; schools don't. Do we really think that if this piece of crap in CT knew that some of the teachers, the principal, other administrators and even the janitors were packing that he would have chosen to go out this way? More to the point, even if he had, it is likely that some of those kids and teachers would be alive now if some of the adults in the school were armed that day. I sincerely believe that to be true. God knows I wish some of them had been carrying in that school in Connecticut.

Before anyone offers up the silly argument that letting school officials and teachers pack a gun puts our children at risk, I offer this: if we can't trust our teachers to carry guns in school then how can we trust them with our children at all? No I don't really expect a Kindergarten teacher to have a Glock in her purse or in her desk. However, I wouldn't prevent her from having it if she demonstrated the same level of proficiency required of other conceal carry licensees.

Remember all the silly righteous outrage spewing from peoples mouths and in the press about the TSA allowing airline pilots to carry arms in the cockpit after 911? We can trust the pilots to take off and fly at 35,000 feet at 500 mph with 150 passengers on board, but not with a revolver in their briefcase while they do it. Asinine.You will hear all the same supercilious arguments against allowing school officials to be armed. Let me pull a Meryl Streep: Think of the children! What are we doing to our children?!

Back to the teachers, there is a photo going around the internet and on Facebook of an Israeli woman with an assault rifle on a sling over her shoulder and a purse or book bag with a bunch of young students around her. By all accounts this is probably not a teacher. A number of reputable sources indicate that Israeli teachers are not armed in their classrooms. However, the picture according to those same sources is probably of a guard whose job is to protect the kids at school and on outings. Islamic terrorists will cause you to have to do that. For my money its six of one or half a dozen of another. Either way, there are responsible people with guns in the Israeli schools to protect the kids.

I will be blunt. Anyone who would rather take away the guns of honest law abiding citizens than allow protecting armed adults in the schools is as morally culpable every time a child is killed as is the monster who killed that child.

Finally, if we must pass some sort of unconstitutional law, then lets choose one that really would be effective at stopping some of this: make it illegal to publicly refer to these crazy monsters by name in the press or anywhere else. At least that way we take away the motivation for many of them.You will notice here that I did not once use the names of the inhuman butchering scum in Connecticut or Oregon. They should be completely shunned by history as non-persons. Perhaps some others who are thinking about going out in a similar way will think differently when they discover that not only will they not go into the history books, no one will ever know who they were or care.