Reducing Gun Violence

Okay, look, I get it. “Guns” is a very emotional subject for some. Especially for those who don’t like them – who view guns as horribly repugnant or just plain “icky” or who wish not only that they’d never been invented or that we could somehow eliminate them from society.

Newsflash: We can’t. Guns are here to stay. Sorry.

The twenty-something son of a friend of mine recently posted something on his Facebook page (the family lives up in Washinton D.C. by the way). He said that nobody needs to own an “assault weapon” and anyway that it only takes one bullet to kill most things. Needless to say he was for stricter gun regulations.

This is so typical of the liberal mindset: Nobody needs this or that sort of gun; they should be banned! Nobody needs a 30-round magazine; they should be banned! Liberals must feel that these steps would necessarily “reduce gun violence.” In reality, all they do is hinder the RIGHT of law-abiding citizens to own guns, something I need not point out which is protected in a little document called the Bill of Rights. You wanna change the Second Amendment? There is a procedure for doing so. Go ahead and try. Let us all know how far you get.

I posted a rebuttal on the boy’s page. First, I asked him to define what an “assault weapon” is. Then I asked the kid what gave him the right to choose what kind of gun I should or should not own and how I should use it? I bet that the kid had never fired a weapon in his life and suggested as nicely as I could that he is extremely naïve if he thinks that it only takes “one bullet” to kill most things. I added that I would suggest that he shut the fuck up – but that I could not force him to as his right to free speech is protected under the First Amendment, something I seriously doubt he’d ever want to change or even alter. He took all this as a “personal attack.” Bam, unfriended! Boo-friggin-hoo.

I believe “the media” is misrepresenting how the majority of Americans feel about guns. I often hear them projecting their own biases and opinions into their stories and comments – as if the Connecticut school shooting has galvanized the nation to believe that “more gun laws” are necessary.

I’ve got news for you: That’s incorrect. None of my gun-owning friends (and I have lots of them) have changed their opinion on “gun-control.” We pretty much all feel that there are enough gun laws as it is, thank you very much, and we’d like to see them enforced more diligently. We also don’t feel that ANY of the proposed new gun restrictions would have prevented the Newtown shooting or will prevent a similar event from happening in the future.

We gun owners don’t look at the NRA as some big corporation that only represents gun manufacturers. We know that the NRA represents *us*, its members. When Wayne LaPierre speaks, he speaks for me and the millions like me.

Look, I realize that we need to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people. But even under the new, restrictive laws like those in New York State, Adam Lanza’s mother still would have been able to purchase her guns! And so what if the kid only had seven rounds in his magazines? He would have simply carried more of them. Or used the two pistols he was carrying.

So what’s the point? Where does the “reducing gun violence” come in?