Jody Langford
OPINION by JODY LANGFORD
Predictably, after every mass shooting, most recently the tragedy in Florida, the same anti-gun talking heads spew the same talking points. They call for “reasonable” gun laws and blame the NRA and the “gun culture” for the shooting.
I rarely, if ever, hear these talking heads suggest any new law that would actually work to prevent tragedies such as this. There are over 300 million guns in private hands in the United States. If a law was passed banning all guns and requiring all guns to be turned in, how many of these would stay in private hands? My reasonable estimate would be upwards of 100 million.
Criminals for sure would not turn them in and neither would unbalanced creeps such as these school shooters.
Law-abiding citizens would hide theirs, not wanting to give up their Second Amendment rights or the ability to protect themselves and their families. So a complete gun ban and confiscation scheme would only serve to make innocents easier targets.
Prior to 1934, you could walk into a hardware store and buy a machine gun off the shelf and walk out with it. Prior to 1968, you could do the same with all guns other than machine guns. As recently as the late 70’s and early 80’s, there were trucks in the high school parking lots with guns in the racks. Were there all these mass shootings back then? I don’t remember any.
The problem is not the gun, it is society. God, morality, and basic human decency and normalcy are removed from our schools and from every facet of our society, then people wonder where God is when these shootings happen.
The solution, albeit a band-aid, is to arm school personnel. On a volunteer basis, any school teacher, administrator, custodian…any staff member that can pass a background check and undergo basic training in firearms safety…should be allowed to carry concealed in the school. The anti-gunners don’t like this idea because they spew the erroneous idea that the mere existence of the gun will lead to an increase in gun violence. Or that there is a higher probability for innocents to get hurt. Or any other number of baseless claims.
There are two common threads to all of these mass shootings: The bad guy was the only one with a gun, or it took a good guy with a gun to stop the carnage.
Jody Langford is a retired law enforcement officer living in the North County.
History of Australia gun control:
The massacre: On April 28, 1996, a mentally disturbed 28-year-old man named Martin Bryant entered the dining room of the Broad Arrow cafe in Port Arthur, a penal colony turned tourist town on the southeast coast of Tasmania, ate lunch, then took out a semi-automatic rifle and fatally shot 12 people. Armed with a number of high-caliber firearms, Bryant gunned down 22 more as he moved from a gift shop to a parking lot to a gas station. Bryant wasn’t captured until the following morning, after killing a hostage. In the end, 35 people were dead and 18 were seriously wounded.
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Just 12 days later, state and federal leaders proposed, voted on and passed new legislation that would restrict and prohibit the sale and ownership of almost every kind of semi-automatic rifle and rapid-fire gun over the course of a little more than two years. Under one provision of the new NFA, the government used revenue from a small tax hike to pay for a mandatory buyback of over 643,000 firearms. That number would surpass 700,000 after an outpouring of voluntary hand-ins. The program cost $230 million.
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In the 18 years before the Port Arthur attack and passage of the NFA, Australians endured 13 mass shootings, claiming 112 lives. In the years following the bans and buybacks, firearm-related deaths plummeted, and mass shootings became largely a thing of the past.
In 2012, the Guardian published new statistics drawn from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Small Arms Survey showing only “30 homicides by firearm” annually in Australia, or “0.14 per 100,000 population.”
The U.S. statistics are bloated by comparison. Over the same period, Americans suffered “9,146 homicides by firearm,” at a rate of 2.97 for every 100,000 people. Sixty percent of murders in the U.S. are committed with a gun, according to the Guardian, compared to 11.5% in Australia.
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SO gun folks fall in LUV with a reasonable firearm.
William Sidis … the reference to Western B movies is completely appropriate since it is that “fantasy” good guy bad guy that is conceptually unreal in a REAL murder scene. So, turn off the NRA, turn off MSNBC, turn off Fox, listen to your BRAIN … are assault weapons safe in THIS society? Can you or your family REALLY handle a shooter??? REALLLLY? I doubt it.
Lets all just face the fact that America has become a nation that worships violence, fraudulently rationalizes its long history of warmongering as moral purity, accepts unenforced or under-enforced gun regulation, resists national and reasonable gun regulation, and its majority Christian population believes they are individually de facto saved from these political and social sins against their neighbors, both local and global, allowing them to continue their irrational and self-destructive behavior. It’s a formula for insanity, the same insanity that infects someone who arms themselves and shoots up a school or workplace.
Proposing the further militarization of society is a clear sign of this insanity.
Do you have the same criticism of the problematic legal drugs given to almost all mass shooters? News does not like to report on them because they advertise. What about the violence depicted in Hollywood and Video games? I believe this can trigger mentally unstable folks to violence especially combined with the drugs and lack of traditional family values.
People criticize the suggestion to arm teachers as just turning schools into prisons…B.S.! I guess they would rather have the schools be killing fields!
For some reason I can’t log on at CCN, so, I will respond to Francesca Bolognini’s comment here.
First Francesca, number of guns has indeed risen since the 60’s, but so has the population, and the removal of all those things from society that Jody mentioned in her piece.
Then, you rave about countries that have banned “assault weapons” and how good they have it with health care, education, family leave, etc. Sounds like you want socialism…this country isn’t for you.
You also don’t seem to understand the role of LE. How about reading the booklet, “Dial 911 and Die”? You will see that the constitution of the US and the state constitutions do not require the police to protect you. They will get there when they can but it is usually in time to draw a chalk line around your body. There simply are not enough LE officers to post in enough places to protect everybody all the time.
No, YOU are living in the Third World and I am getting tired of people like you trying to drag our country with you.
I am thankful for ladies like Jody who seem to have it figured out.
Oh, they put a picture up. Sorry Jody, thought you were a female. 🙂
He is a Lackey boy for Dan Dow, as i recall he is a X CHP and a mouth piece for the DA
How many school personnel are going to be properly trained? … nooooooobody … so when does the school fight between kids turn into a shooting from a swiped weapon?
Solution: Pay people to turn in their assault weapons like the did in Australia. Melt them down. The seller can then buy a cool classic legal weapon.
“The bad guy was the only one with a gun, or it took a good guy with a gun to stop the carnage.” … put down the episode of Gunsmoke … your value system is TV imaginative.
And the bad guys will be the first in line to turn them in, right?
Can the references to Gunsmoke and address the facts she presented.
Dude why are you using a fake name ?
A gun in the hands of a well trained, mentally stable person is rarely a threat. On the other hand, in the hands of someone intent on doing harm it is a killing instrument. It is not the gun which decides the purpose for which it will be used.