The brouhaha about assault weapons and the need to control them continues unabated, and with little, if any, connection to reality. The shootings at a Connecticut grade school are the latest flashpoint in the gun control crowd’s crusade to weaken the second amendment and leave law abiding gun owners less safe, not more so. It has been widely reported that Adam Lanza, the murderous lunatic who walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed more than two dozen people last month; did so with an assault weapon.
That information has led to a firestorm of demand that such weapons be banned, and that high capacity magazines be banned as well. President Obama was beating the political drum before the first victim was laid to rest. He appointed Joe Biden to head a group charged with coming up with suggestions to address the problem.
The media all flocked around to add their voices of indignation and horror that such a thing could happen in America. The liberal media chanted their usual gun control chants, and even the more conservative media seemed swayed by the number of deaths and the ages of the victims. The momentum to limit access to such weapons seemed to be gaining steam.
There is one fly in the anti-gun ointment, however. As Today show correspondent Pete Williams reported on December 15, no assault weapon was used by Lanza, at least not at the school. Instead, Lanza apparently had four pistols in his possession instead of two, as originally reported; and he left the AR-15 style weapon in the car he drove. He may have killed his mother with it, but he definitely did not use it to kill any victims at the school.
This link will take you to William’s report. http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/50208495#50208495
The question then becomes why no significant effort was made by the mainstream media, or the anti-gun crowd to realign the debate, and to base it on facts and not fantasy. Why didn’t every media source that mistakenly reported the assault weapon story make an equivalent effort to correct their errors? Why didn’t President Obama or Vice President Biden make that same effort ?
In my opinion, the reason is clear. School safety is not the issue – gun control and a weakening of Second Amendment rights is the issue. The information used by the anti-gun side of this alleged debate has been erroneous in almost every way from the very start – in fact for the last twenty years.
When Bill Clinton passed an assault weapon ban in the 90s, the characteristics of the guns banned were all linked to appearance, and not function. The guns banned at that time met no generally accepted definition of a military assault weapon, from the caliber of the round fired to the rate at which the rounds could be fired. The guns Obama is threatening to ban today also fail to meet any formal definition of an assault weapon.
A law also passed during the Clinton administration, and one which had a much greater impact on school shootings, was the law that made possession of a firearm on school property a federal crime. The law made schools ‘gun free zones’, or in effect, killing fields for the deranged and dangerous among us. Those who are capable of such acts could commit them with almost complete certainty that they would be the only ones on the scene who were armed, at least for the first few crucial minutes. No teacher was going to run to their car and get a gun to confront them – there would be no janitor with a shotgun locked away in a closet somewhere. No, just innocent, unarmed victims to kill until the law arrived; at which point the cowardly bastards generally blow their own heads off.
So the media and the unthinking liberal left who fail to understand 1) that there is no evil in an inanimate object; and 2) that criminals, by definition, do not obey laws continue to call for senseless and feel good responses to a problem that didn’t even exist at Sandy Hook.
In my opinion, this is the latest in a series of major miscalculations by this president. If he really believes that he has the momentum to achieve significant gun control, he is badly mistaken. A friend and I went to a public shooting range in the mountains this weekend. She recently purchased a handgun and wanted some instructions in its safe use. So happens I worked at a gun shop for several years, including regular stints as a range safety officer.
This range is in the boonies. The dirt road we used to reach it was a couple miles long, once we got to that point. It is a very rudimentary range of 100 yards – long enough to sight in high powered rifles, but also usable for handgun and shotgun use.
While we were there, approximately 30 people – white, black, young, old, couples, groups – came and went. They fired their weapons and checked their targets and they gave me a very strong sense of just how off base Obama is on this issue. I truly believe – and fervently hope – that if the government continues to push its gun control agenda, especially on such a fraudulent basis, those actions will arouse Americans from every political persuasion and every economic class to step forward and tell this administration – ENOUGH!
That same message should be delivered to the dishonest mainstream media immediately and as strongly as possible.
