The Robb Elementary School mass shooting should not be used to chip away at the Second Amendment
by Scott S. Powell
It goes without saying that mass shootings,
like the recent one in Uvalde, Texas, are always accompanied by emotional
appeals for gun control, as though we don’t already have extensive gun control
laws and as though guns are the problem and not the criminals and deranged
people who go on killing sprees.
Before
tragedies such as the loss of 20-some lives at the Robb Elementary School in
Uvalde, Texas become politicized we are called to grieve and pray for the
families and community affected. Then we are called to ask whether existing gun
control laws already on the books are being enforced. It is important to
enforce existing laws before we pass new laws. We do not ban automobiles or
driving because we have accidents and pileups that take many more lives every
year than gun violence.
A free society
does not control crime by forcing citizens, to adapt to new laws because of
criminal behavior. In fact, it is the exact opposite—we force criminals and
deranged people to accommodate themselves to the behavior of decency and
respect for life, or they pay severe consequences.
Switzerland--a country in which every
household is armed--understands this and has significantly less gun violence
because their citizens have a higher standard of civility and more respect for
the value of life than what we find in America today. Incidentally, abortion is
legal Switzerland up until the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, but it
has one of the lowest rates of abortions and unwanted pregnancies among the developed nations.
America’s problem is not guns, it is the decline in morality, high rates of
broken homes, and the loss of respect for life.
To ban guns
because criminals and deviants misuse them, is to tell the law-abiding, that
their rights and liberties depend not on their own behavior, but on the
behavior of criminals, sociopaths, gang members, and the mentally ill.
Up until 1996,
Australia enjoyed a high degree of freedom much like we have in the United
States. But after a series of mass shootings—with the worst in 1996 resulting thirty-five
innocent people being killed by a deranged gunman—the Australian politicians
decided to ban citizens from owning firearms except under certain circumstances.
In the last 6 months, Australians have lost their civil rights freedoms, with police turning on the people enforcing lockdown laws
with all the fervor of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. When Hugo
Chavez banned gun ownership in Venezuela in 2012, he did so on basis of too
much gun violence. Today Venezuela is a communist country that has driven five
million of its citizens to flee the country.
The Second Amendment
is a vital piece of our Constitutional Republic, which provides for a
government of the people, by the people and for the people. It should be noted,
it is the only amendment that further specifies that the people’s right to keep
and bear arms "shall not be Infringed."
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