With emotions running high in response to the heart wrenching events that took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary School December 14, many of my liberal friends and family members believe now is the perfect time for gun control legislation.
As heartbreaking as it is that 20 children in Connecticut will not have the chance to open Christmas presents, celebrate birthdays, go on a first date, drive a car, graduate, get married, and have kids, there are millions of kids out there who will. And they are the reason why the rest of us need to fight for the freedoms guaranteed to us in the Constitution which Progressives are so predictably willing to give away.
Before Americans were able to corporately exhale upon hearing the news about the Connecticut shooting, liberals hopped on the gun control bandwagon. One of MSNBC’s many loose cannons, Ed Schultz, went on a rant saying, “Hiding behind the Second Amendment doesn’t cut it anymore,” and described our founders as slave-owning bigots. It’s real hard to wrap your hands around the hypocrisy of those who cry giant crocodile tears over the loss of these 20 precious children (and they should), but care little about millions of children who will never see the light of day due to abortion.
And here we go again; Progressives are manipulating the Sandy Hook massacre as a way to strike down the Second Amendment. Truth is, gun control is like putting a bandage on a gaping wound. Seems to me a better solution is to do something about the culture of violence currently destroying our society from the inside out — and place armed guards in schools in the meantime. Chances are, had one been at Sandy Hook, I wouldn’t be writing about it today.
I may date myself here, but when I was a kid, I didn’t stay inside playing violent computer games or watching violent movies; I played outside with real people who picked flowers in the spring, climbed trees in the summer, jumped in leaf piles in the fall, and ice skated on frozen ponds in the winter. And I grew up to be a responsible citizen and gun owner.
As I’ve written before, if you listen to liberals long enough it’s not too long before you find yourself in Bizarro World. And in the case of the Second Amendment, Progressives like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) pretzel it into something it is not. On “Meet the Press” December 16, Feinstein inferred arming school guards is a crummy idea because “the rights of the few” (i.e. the millions who own guns) would, in her world, somehow “overcome the safety of the majority.” Say, what? Bizarro.
As brokenhearted as we all are over what happened in Connecticut, gun control will not stop those lacking certain emotional filters from doing bad things to children — and others. Policies in China, for example, make it largely illegal for private citizens to own and sell guns. Possession or sale of a gun can lead to anywhere from a 3 year prison term to the death penalty. I digress to mention that because the Chinese government has little regard for human life, gun laws were devised to protect the tyrannical Chinese government from its citizens rather than the other way around.
Nevertheless, people find a way to do bad things, and in the case of the Chinese, crazy people are still hurting children. Oddly, on the same day the Sandy Hook massacre took place, a knife-wielding Chinese man stabbed almost two dozen children at an elementary school in central China. And he found a way to do it although the Chinese government recently enacted strict knife regulation measures after a spate of deadly knife and cleaver attacks on school children in China in 2010, killing 20 and wounding 50.
Before long, the Chinese will be eating steak with teaspoons, and so will we — if we relinquish our Second Amendment rights to those who would rather steal the rights of the masses than address our society’s moral decline. With that in mind, the best gift we can give our kids this Christmas is a future filled with the promise of freedom.
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Susan Stamper Brown is an opinion page columnist, motivational speaker and military advocate who writes about politics, the military, the economy and culture. Email Susan at writestamper@gmail.com or her website at susanstamperbrown.com.
©2012 Susan Stamper Brown. Susan’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc., newspaper syndicate. For info contact Cari Dawson Bartley. E-mail Cari@cagle.com, (800) 696-7561
This column has been edited by the author. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.
Same old NRA crap. You’ve drunk the cool aid too long
Wow. Stamper Brown is one sick person. I would like our childen (and all of us) to have freedom – freedom from being killed by a psychologically deranged person with an assault weapon!
Did you even read her article. Doesn’t look like it. Your the sick person if you think banning assault weapons make us any safer. We as a society lose if we do not have the ability to defend ourselves.
Susan, you are so right on. Facts speak for themselves. An armed society is a polite society. We speak not in fear and emotion, but in facts and with empowerment. The challenge is that “progressives” and leftists want to make this an emotional argument instead of letting the facts speak for themselves. We need to learn from history and remember why our ancestors wrote the Constitution the way that they did, because they left countries who wanted to disarm the peasants in order to control them. Doesn’t anyone else read the articles and hear the comments from Brits and other Europeans telling us not to give up our gun rights? They are living under oppression from tyrannical governments and want us to learn the lesson to keep our rights that they were so quick to give up.
I would think that people care SO much for their children that they would do anything to protect them. Just assume that evil people are going to come to schools on shooting rampages from time to time, because they do and they will as long as they are gun-free zones (if we learn anything from history). So on that assumption alone, and with the basic understanding that you meet force with force, why in the world are people so opposed to guns in schools? Law enforcement officers are not the only ones equipped to handle weapons, so why not private citizens? There are far more of us than there are of law enforcement, and they are never around when the crisis is occurring. It simply astounds me that some people are so quick to blame the inanimate object rather than dealing with the issue at hand: the person with the twisted mind bent on doing evil.
As gun control will not stop the number of these instances in our country, it will reduce them. Banning assault type rifles is a necessity. No one but the military and police need to own these weapons. There is to much sport in using an assault rifle on an elk or deer in hunting. It is a destructive killing machine made to kill humans nothing more. In trying to come to solutions to help stop these random violent crimes we need to do a few things. One we need to look at changing mental health care. The closing down of of government asylums in the 60’s and 70’s have thrown many severely mentally deranged people into our society. Many are homeless veterans of wars past unable to cope with the PTSD and trauma they have witnessed. Many are filling our prisons and should never see the light of day. The amount of mentally ill in prison getting medication is a clear sign of how asylums turned into incarcerational facilities. Most are in solitary confinement not getting any therapeutic support. The amount of energy just cleaning up after these individuals and round the clock observation by staff costs our country and state government billions of dollars. What was considered inhuman and the reason for closure of the institutions, has been accepted practice in the penal system. In order for these people,parents or families of these seriously mentally ill patients to get care, a crime has to be committed. There needs to be reform in this whole debacle of a mental health system.
Mentally ill people need to get quality care forever period. Secondly, instead of focusing on weapons that are used for protection to kill, we need to leave them out and away from our children. Teachers and principals should not think that packing a concealed or non concealed weapon is the answer. The risk of injury to our youth, and accidents that are waiting to happen put our youth at risk. Post 9/11 united airlines trained its crew in the cockpits to in the use of stun guns. Because the discharge of a firearm on board an aircraft is dangerous, they felt stunning and subduing a threat was the safest alternative. I believe it would be the safest alternative in our schools as well. Unless fully trained military or police can guard our schools, the implementation of stun guns at school doors should be mandatory. I would rather have a device that would not kill an person near children than one that would. I think then the intruder could be disarmed and subdued and left to be treated or tried for the crime, with the lowest level of human loss. Our government needs to act as soon as possible to stop the killing of youth everywhere. Chicago’s murdering of children on a daily basis needs to stop. No teen needs to possess weapons to survive in their neighborhood. Yet in the cities is has been as common as a pair of Jordan’s. sweeps of the cities full of gun totaling youth and confiscating weapons is needed. Programs for job training and placement, mentoring, community centers, and continuing education, will help. Everyone needs to pull together now so the twenty little angels and their adult protectors don’t die in vain.
If you read the notes of our founding fathers, you will see that the 2nd amendment does not exist for hunting, fishing, or even home protection. It is there to protect the people from tyrannical governments foreign and domestic. It is the teeth that protects all our constitutional rights. No one hopes for a flood, but the smart people prepare for one. It seems rather foolish to use rocks when the rest of the world uses bow and arrows.
There are an estimated 4 million assault rifles in America. Less 2/100’s of 1% are used in crimes. Heck we lose 40,000 Americans in car wrecks each year. How come your not calling for a ban on those?
Your heart is in the right place, but lets look at the root cause of this evil, not the tool it uses.