One Doesn't Follow The Other

America has suffered a welter of violence over the past five weeks. From Alabama to Oakland, from North Carolina to Binghamton, New York, lunatics with guns have killed and wounded police and civilians alike, destroying the lives of hundreds of innocent people:

• Saturday, 04 April 2009 - Pittsburgh, PA
  Three police officers killed


• Friday, 03 April 2009 - Binghamton, NY
  Thirteen people killed, four wounded


• March 29: Robert Stewart, 45, shot and killed eight people at Pinelake Health and Rehab in Carthage, N.C., before a police officer shot him and ended the rampage.


• March 29: Devan Kalathat, 42, shot and killed his two children and three other relatives, then killed himself in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara. Kalathat"s wife was critically injured.


• March 21: Lovelle Mixon, 26, shot and killed four Oakland police officers after a traffic stop. Mixon was killed in a shootout with SWAT officers.


• March 10: Michael McLendon, 28, killed 10 people including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff"s deputy across two rural Alabama counties. He then killed himself.

Sometimes the perpetrators have survived to face justice, sometimes they took the coward's way out to avoid that justice (only to usher themselves into the presence of Almighty God to face His justice, and that eternally) but they've always managed to assume ultimate power for a short time and inflict terrific damage, exacting revenge for whatever wrongs they blamed society for doing them and then leaving grief-stricken communities to clean up the mess and figure out how to go on. These maniacs have also provided the rabid ant-gun Left in this country with fresh incentive to ban guns, as if they needed any more. ABC News, for their part, immediately broadcast two stories on the Obama administration's low priority on gun control to try to stir up "righteous anger" over the issue and will broadcast a special tomorrow night featuring Diane Sawyer, who will refute the reasons commonly cited for owning guns. The major line of reasoning they employ is that these mass shootings could be prevented by banning private ownership of firearms altogether, or at least making it so hard that no-one will try. They also paint as irrational the very desire to own a gun, as if no government anywhere at any time in the United States has acted tyrannically, stripping the citizens of their rights, their guns and their lives - we know both arguments to be patently and even laughably false:

• There are approximately 20,000 laws governing firearms in this country at all levels of jurisdiction. Private ownership of firearms is one of the most heavily-regulated activities in our society but contrary to the liberals' thesis, the areas where guns are most tightly controlled usually suffer the highest rates of crime. It is also no coincidence that crime is usually lower in the areas where guns are more available to honest citizens - guns are successfully used to defend lives and property over two million times a year and for every life taken by gun crime, 25-75 lives are saved.

• Washington, DC, where I work, had banned privately-owned handguns since 1976 until the District of Columbia v. Heller decision last summer but suffers from violent crime at three times the national average. In their zeal to ostensibly prevent crime, the liberal city government actually did the criminals a favor by guaranteeing that they would have a permanent and lethal advantage over their intended victims. From Detroit to St. Louis, from Oakland to Baltimore, from Atlanta to Newark, the cities where liberals rule and guns are banned are also ridden by violent crime, and in the event that a felon can't get a gun, he'll simply resort to some other weapon.

• The incident that sparked the Revolution - the Battle of Lexington - was precipitated by a British attempt to seize privately-owned firearms and ammunition stored at Concord, Massachusetts. Since then, our history is littered with examples of oppressive governments and outgunned citizens: the Johnson County War in Wyoming in 1892, the massacres of coal miners and their families from Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 to Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920, and perhaps most infamously, the incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. In this latter episode, Federal agents relentlessly hounded Gary Weaver for seven years before surrounding him at his ranch. After shooting the family dog to try to lure Mr. Weaver out of his house, they killed his son Samuel as he defended himself, shot Mr. Weaver in the back and killed his wife Vicki while she held their infant son in her arms. While Mr. Weaver was largely exonerated of the charges levelled against him, twelve Federal agents were disciplined and FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted to Congress that Ruby Ridge was "synonymous with the exaggerated application of federal law enforcement." (NOTE: It is interesting that no Federal agent involved at Ruby Ridge was ever prosecuted. Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who killed Vicki Weaver as she stood behind a door - he couldn't even see who or what he was shooting at - was protected by a Federal assertion of sovereign immunity.) It is this last incident that so starkly reminds us that governments in our country aren't to be blindly trusted and that stripping the citizens of their most potent safeguard is literally suicidal.

Despite our own history and the clear, explicit and unmistakable intent of the Founding Fathers as expressed in the Second Amendment, liberals want to exploit these recent tragedies to eliminate the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for precisely the reason I cite above. The advancement of a socialist state or any other authoritarian government can be checked by a population that is intelligent, well-informed and well-armed, thus the liberals will stop at nothing to eliminate our capacity to defend ourselves. The nutcases who have perpetrated these murders must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, make no mistake, but to erase a Constitutional right guaranteed every citizen to prevent its abuse is absurd. Last year, when it became apparent that ACORN had facilitated voter fraud in ten states, the Left never proposed eliminating the right to vote. It is ironic in the extreme that the same people who emphatically advocate for rights that appear nowhere in the Constitution - abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, legal rights for terrorists at Gitmo - are just as emphatically trying to kill a right deliberately and specifically included, and they must be resisted with all the strength and determination we can muster.

Source: http://www.nraila.org/GunLaws/Federal/Read.aspx?id=74

Source: http://www.nraila.org/heller/proamicusbriefs/07-290_amicus_aaps.pdf

Source: http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=245

Source:http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_12068204?nclick_check=1

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512560,00.html

Source: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/offenses/violent_crime/index.html

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921299.html