The liberals hadn’t let the blood dry on the classroom floor in Newton, CT before they were using the deaths of all those children to leverage their cause of gun control. Had conservative broadcasters done such a thing they’d be roundly denounced as soulless ghouls and rightly so. When I first read online of the killings, I just shook my head in sadness then immediately steeled myself for what I knew was coming from the hysterical lefties. They did not disappoint although I must confess to a certain despair that Mayor Bloomberg has become such a predictable old scold. Can we not somehow sue this turkey for calling himself a Republican?
Another horrific mass murder and if we could not predict its timing we could predict its site within certain parameters. With predictable regularity, the most lethal of these types of attacks take place in public venues such as shopping malls, restaurants, theaters, with the deadliest frequently being institutions of learning. We are all familiar with the Columbine high school killings in which 12 students and a single teacher died or the Virginia Tech massacre where 32 people died. Fewer remember the 2006 killing of five Amish schoolgirls by a milk truck driver or the Jonesboro, AR school shooting in which five died, gunned down by fellow students. How many remember the memorable name of Kip Kinkel, an Oregon high school student who murdered his parents and two students in 1998? Or what about that Red Lake, MN mass killing where nine died in 2005? Of course all of you remember the recent Aurora, CO theater shooting but what about the 2007 Arvada, CO school shooting that left five dead?
The point I’m attempting to make here is that these tragedies recur with an irregular chronological predictability but with an altogether predictable targeted area, school campuses, be they elementary as with this latest tragedy, or high school as at Columbine, or university as with Virginia Tech. Other than their educational bond, they all share another commonality, the one which most likely leads to their selection by the perpetrators as the scenes for their slaughters: they are all sites where the presence of firearms is strictly prohibited and enforced with zero tolerance. There is no one to shoot back and thus deter the shooter from his maddened mission. Think about it, most of these mass shootings end with the suicide of the killer after he has accomplished his goal. Few are ever killed by authorities or captured.
These killers control the events because they have picked the setting where that is most easily accomplished, where they can inflict the most pain and death in a very brief period of time before an armed response can be mounted. We hear them called cowards for killing the helpless. I believe they are more viciously cunning than cowardly, picking a target so vulnerable as to permit them to accomplish their goal of creating as much mayhem and death as possible in the shortest period of time.
It’s a cliché to say there’s never been one of these mass shootings at a gun show, but it’s a cliché birthed in truth. How about at a shooting range where a madman could walk in fully armed with total impunity, unquestioned, with multiple lethal weapons and begin firing? His entrée would be easy. Problem is, so would his predictably rapid departure. How about gun shops or sporting goods stores where guns and ammunition are sold and in plentiful supply, filled with shoppers who have a much likelier chance of carrying concealed, unlike a mall theater or food court? Ask yourselves, when was the last mass shooting at a rodeo or a NASCAR race?
Ponder that for a while, those of you liberals who equate the presence and availability of guns with criminal shootings. The truth operates in the obverse: it is precisely where there are the most guns and people who know how to use them where the massacres do not occur. And it is precisely where guns are not present where these slaughters do take place. That is no accident; rather it is a demonstration of the awareness of mass killers as to where it will be most expedient for them to attack, where they will have the most time to conduct their slaughter.
Some may try to prove me wrong by pointing out the Fort Hood shooting but that argument is easily refuted. That horrible event, once again, was carefully planned to be carried out in the general midst of a heavily armed military force in a precise location within that force where it was least likely that any armed soldiers would be present to intervene: the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, a medical processing facility. Like all these other shooters, the cowardly physician who forsook his medical oath knew quite well he was targeting one of the least-protected sites on that huge base.
Those who are so angry, frustrated and fed up with the futility of their lives that they have no desire to continue living have multiple ways of dealing with their problems. Fortunately, most finally accept that they must have external help and seek it, continuing to live. Others refuse that option and take their lives themselves. A few, perhaps more angry than most, go out in in flash of angry defiance, what we call death by cop. Tragically, we always have the few whose warped reasoning and boiling anger leads them to believe they must go out of this world on a stream of innocent blood from a place where the very lack of guns guarantees the fulfillment of their horrific madness.
If you liberals want to assign morality to firearms, consider: As any combat infantryman, and I am one, can tell you, guns don’t kill people; good people with good guns do kill bad people. Unfortunately, bad people with bad guns kill good people unless they are stopped by those good people with good guns. When defensive guns are known to be in the target area, such as schools, the massacre-minded madman will have second thoughts about his target selection, perhaps sending him to a gun range or a gun show to perpetrate his madness.
We can only hope…
Edited version crossposted at American Thinker
