The second amendment is also an area of increasing logical failure. And factual failure. The killing of innocents is a crime no matter how much news is generated. When a group of innocents are killed, and the news multiplies, along with public upset, and the killer has used a gun to do the killing, there is no longer room for common sense. All gun owners are blamed… and responsible.

Guns are objects, mechanisms, machines. None does anything until intimately directed by a human. Ahh, but they facilitate the doing, don’t they? Any sane proto-murderer would blithely discard whatever hatred, passion, ill-will or socio-pathology that may have bubbled up prior, when faced with the lack of a firearm. Right?

Well, no, silly, but at least he or she won’t be able to kill as quickly as he or she might with one of those… those… scary-looking GUNS. For Heaven’s sake, use your head!

Maybe that’s right; how silly of me.

On the other hand, Timothy McVeigh managed to quite efficiently eradicate 168 of our fellow citizens and injure nearly 800 more without a single bullet or gun to fire it.

Oh! Be serious! An act like that takes a lot of planning and preparation. Most gun-involved deaths are spur-of-the-moment acts of passion or stupidity. There’s no point to be made bringing up Oklahoma City.

You know, you’re probably right… if your point is how the government can make it harder to be an efficient killer. In fact, that is where the argument is, isn’t it? If we can somehow make murder by amateurs harder to do, we’ll save a few lives. And, as any person who shrinks from the silhouette of a scary assault rifle will quickly tell you, “If it saves only one life of an innocent child, it’s worth it!”

Maybe that is sufficient reason to lop off a chunk of the Constitution, but I’m not so sure. To start with, look at the nature of past and proposed gun bans and their possible positive impacts.
The 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” had a nebulous impact on U. S. so-called “mass murders.” A stricter ban in Australia appears to have had a more significant effect on multiple-murder events, there, but a single statistic does not a story tell. There are so many social-demographic differences between Australia and the United States that a far broader analysis is needed before we should try to set public policy (and Constitutional subversion) based on an apparent impact on a very different population.
Most of the parameters of the “ban” were derived from the appearance of the weapons, and not their functions. The one key exception was the size of the magazines, which could have a limited role in inhibiting a mass-murder. How would that work?

Suppose the situation were like that at Newtown, Connecticut. A sick, twisted, bent-on-mass-murder dope breaks in to a purposely gun-free school. Instead of a 20 or more cartridge clip, he is limited by the availability of no more than 9-shot clips. So, he brings 2 extras, with one in the rifle. As soon as the first few shots are fired, everyone is scrambling to save him or her self or to protect the kiddos. No one is charging at the murderer. When the clip empties there would be a brief quiet period – but very brief: maybe 5 seconds while the clip is popped and a new one inserted and the slide pulled to “cock” the rifle again. The next 9 shots will fully terrorize a grade-school staff that is not only ignorant of firearms, but who fear them, firing or not.

Murderous dope will get his 27 shots off with no problem. If that Newtown numbskull had more clips he could have walked to another classroom and murdered some more people. He shot himself when police arrived, evidently acting out a suicide ritual he had long contemplated.

So the 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” would have made no difference unless the rifle, itself, had not been available at all. In all likelihood, the difference would have been that the murderer would have made more shots with pistols. One can imagine that in lieu of a large-magazine rifle, our knucklehead would have brought maybe 3 or 4 handguns and equally terrorized the school’s population with 20 to 30 bullets fired slightly slower than with a scary-looking Bushmaster. No one there was prepared or equipped to challenge him, either physically or psychologically. Dope’s mom could have prevented the tragedy by keeping her legal firearms away from her known-to-be-disturbed son.

Essentially, all the non-NRA proposals that have spawned from the Newtown tragedy will have one basic effect: children in school buildings will be left defenseless, but, since murderers will eventually be a bit less efficient, a few fewer kids will be murdered than otherwise. Hopefully, mom and dad, your defenseless kiddo will be one of the lucky ones.

Those who are aiming at complete confiscation of all but BB guns, could, if their hare-brained concept ever comes to pass, conceivably save most of the TWO hundred lives lost to non-drug, non-gang, non-criminal gun events each year. They might prevent a few suicides, too, and consider the loss of freedom well worth the cost.

What they won’t prevent are the tens of thousands of criminal gun events, because criminals don’t register their weapons and can hide them fairly easily when the Gestapo comes looking for them. I hope that no one reading this is looking forward to living in a country that can even attempt to confiscate private property (or forcibly buy-back) from tens of millions of owners. It’s the same country that doesn’t enforce the gun laws it has now.

All plans for restricting guns and their law-abiding owners can be seriously considered only by putting on blinders to some serious, serious reality. There are many myths that liberals and those further left, continuously proclaim as truth, and which all the people that matter believe. Here are a few:
• The presence of guns will spur an increase in gun accidents, stupid gun crimes, and random, foolish shootings. The opposite is what reality is, in fact.
• Attackers will take a defender’s gun and use it against him or her. This happens extremely rarely, and can be made even rarer with proper education. Rare means a literal handful of times each year. It is more common that unarmed defenders wrest weapons away from attackers.
• Gun deaths increase, overall, because of the availability of so-called (ie. “scary-looking”) assault rifles. In truth only about 6% of shootings involve such weapons, and not even 6% of deaths. Most deadly shootings are done with handguns, often with small calibers.

Finally, the far more important statistic, the far more life-preserving and crime-preventing statistic is this one: EVERY YEAR IN THE UNITED STATES, PRIVATE FIREARMS ARE USED IN SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 830,000 AND 2 MILLION DEFENSIVE EVENTS. Most of these involve no discharge of the weapon, but not only lead to hundreds of thousands of apprehensions, but prevent many tens of thousands of other violent crimes because perpetrators encountered an armed defender, leading to arrests. The logical argument is that we could not enjoy a civil society without private gun ownership.

The only truly effective change that should come from Newtown, Aurora and other such murders of defenseless innocents, would be to teach gun safety and handling to every child, starting around age 8 or 9, including proper self-defense. Teach it right in public school. It is certainly more productive and worthy than lesson plans based on homosexuality and gender-identity problems. Worse, they teach kids how to have sex “safely” in far too early years. There are thousands more lives ruined with pre-marital sex by kids, than by guns. Taking away the unalienable right of self-defense, and damaging the Constitution in the process is a “solution” that deserves the very highest skepticism and suspicion.

Stupid is as stupid does.