- Adam Lanza, 20, murdered his mother in her sleep with her own gun. Adam had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome but had no previous record of violence, was a good student and his mother had lavished love and attention on him.
- Adam then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where he shot his way into the building, killed six teachers and staff who tried to stop him and then systematically murdered twenty first-grade children before killing himself as police were entering the school. All the weapons and ammunition he used to commit these murders had been stolen from his mother’s house, and based on the multitude of weapons and ammo recovered at the scene, it is very likely that massacring the youngest children was only the first stage of a plan to wipe out the entire student population.
This was an unspeakably brutal crime. Nobody disputes that. Murdering helpless children revolts us, as it should, and we can only imagine the horror those poor children experienced as they were gunned down by a homicidal maniac. Their families and friends are devastated, their lives are ruined, they will probably never recover from this horrible tragedy. It is human nature to want to do something to prevent something like this from ever happening again, but I recall the words of Rahm Emanuel, former Congressman, former Chief of Staff to Priest-King, current Mayor of Chicago and bare-knuckle politician extraordinaire: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid,” and I instinctively put up my guard.
1) Mrs. Lanza bought, registered and used her firearms legally. She taught her son how to handle firearms not only because it was the responsible thing to do but because it involved him in an activity they could do together. If Adam stole her guns and killed people with them, then those are crimes for which laws already exist.
2) Adam was diagnosed with a mental illness and laws also already exist to prevent the mentally-ill from buying or owning guns. Passing more laws will only waste more paper and criminals will ignore those laws as well as the laws already on the books.
3) If all private firearms in the country were gone tomorrow, criminals would just resort to other means to commit mass murder. Building home-made bombs is illegal but that didn’t stop Ramzi Youssef and his co-conspirators from trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and it didn’t stop Timothy McVeigh from blowing up the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. IED’s have been employed in the thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan so if people want to build a bomb themselves and kills dozens of people with it, they can do it pretty easily.
4) Should we outlaw 3D printers? Those devices have already been used to manufacture workable firearms that have no serial number, aren’t registered and are untraceable. How far do we take this?
5) While it was good TV to see Priest-King wiping his eyes during his speech last week, I have to wonder exactly why he was upset. After all, he has vigorously advanced the right to kill fetuses even after they somehow survive a botched abortion, so I guess the question hinges on when an innocent child is killed, not if. (Two hundred babies were aborted on 14 December for every child that Adam Lanza shot, and two hundred more every day since then.)
6) Adam Lanza, like so many of these mass shooters, chose Sandy Hook Elementary School at least in part because it was a soft target. Nobody was going to stop him. He didn’t attack a police station or an Army base or NRA headquarters because doing so would get him killed, and he wanted to kill as many unarmed people as possible. If he had started shooting his way into the school and the Principal had shot him with her own gun, then we’d be talking about something else today.
7) As much as the Left hates the Second Amendment, the Founding Fathers had very good reason for including it in our basic law. They didn't want a large standing army because of their experience under British occupation; instead they wanted a small, well-trained militia to defend against foreign invasion or Indian attack. Since the people would constitute such a militia, it was imperative that each able-bodied citizen have his own firearms and be trained in their use, and thus the people themselves would reduce the threat to liberty posed by a standing army commanded by a tyrant. Alexander Hamilton said as much in Federalist No. 29: "...if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist."
8) Hearing the Left object to armed guards being assigned to every school puts me in a twist. They claim that doing so would be too expensive and that it wouldn’t actually increase security, both complaints of course being total hogwash. (Chris Christie continues to dig himself deeper and deeper as he joins forces with the liberals. If he thinks he’s ingratiating himself with ordinary Republicans, he’s out of his mind.) They’ve got to be kidding – we borrow $108.3 billion every month so we can send welfare checks to illegals but they draw the line at really securing our schools? Second, have they not walked through an airport in the last eleven years? Have they not noticed the armed guards patrolling the terminal with MP-5’s and dogs? There’s a deterrence factor there. True, there was the JFK Airport plot in June 2007 and we’ve had thugs like Richard Reid and the Underwear Bomber on Christmas Day 2009 attempt to blow up airplanes, but overall, airport security has improved, not least because would-be terrorists can see the retribution right there on the scene waiting for them: They might want to die a martyr but being chewed by a dog and then riddled with submachine gun fire ain’t the way they want to go. What about the shooting at the U.S. Capitol in 1998? Unfortunately, two Capitol Police officers were killed but they stopped a wacko from getting inside the building and killing even more people, and then there’s the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2009, where a private security guard was killed but stopped a lunatic from getting inside and doing the same thing. (It so happened that a group of school children were touring the museum when the incident occurred.) Armed guards have indeed prevented massacres like Sandy Hook, so why the opposition?
This all comes down to the Left having a fundamental philosophical objection to privately-owned firearms. Rather than counter a potential threat with real, practical and effective means, they’d rather disarm everyone – everyone, that is, except the criminals. I mourn the children of Sandy Hook Elementary and I’m sorry that Adam Lanza isn’t alive to face our justice, but I’m not handing over my firearms just because Michael Bloomberg says so. A government that fears its own people will seek to disarm them, and if our firearms are gone, with what are we left but tyranny?
Source: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_29.html
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