Red Flag Laws

With gun control still on the front burner, one of the ideas working its way through Congress is a red flag law.  What would that be?  If there were concerns about a gun owner being a danger to themselves or others, the police would confiscate that person's guns.  Sound reasonable?  No.  The law would inflict the punishment before the person was found guilty of any wrongdoing.  This is similar to the hated asset forfeiture, where the police confiscate property without charging the person with a crime.  It is suddenly up to the defendant to prove that they didn't intend to buy drugs with a large sum of cash.  The same would be true for the guns.  Let's see what the 5th Amendment says:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Did you see that part toward the end.  "...nor be deprived of ... property, without due process of law..."  Would taking a person's guns count as depriving of property?  Yes, it would.  We have already seen how the government selectively enforces laws.  The president's son lied on an application for a gun and nothing has happened.  Rioters across the country (BLM and/or Antifa) were mostly slapped on the wrist despite billions of dollars in damages.  Rioters from January 6th, who caused hundreds of dollars in damages, have had the book thrown at them.  What are the odds that red flag laws get used against people of one political leaning only?  Something close to 100% would be my guess.

It is good to keep in mind that the American Revolution began - had that shot heard round the world - when the British Army marched from Boston to confiscate guns from private citizens.  Are any of our representatives or senators familiar with US history?  I often wonder.

Murder Rates

Lately, I have seen this posted repeatedly:

Interesting.  Sounds like an attack on Democrats and gun control supporters.  If true, this is a strong argument against both.  Let's fact-check it.

First step: Does the US really have the 3rd highest murder rate?  A quick search returned this link and it has the United States way down at 76th, not 3rd.  As of 2018, the US had a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 people.  El Salvador had 10 times that number.  However, if we look at just the number of people murdered, the US ranks 6th with 16,214 murders.  Just looking at the piles of corpses, Nigeria is the most deadly with 64,201 people murdered in 2016.  Based on this, it looks like the maker of the above graphic may have been using murder totals rather than murder rates.

Next step: How many murders are there in the listed cities?  The FBI maintains crime statistics by city that are available here.  The most recent data available that includes all of the mentioned cities is for 2018.  Let's go with that:

That does amount to 12.4% of all murders in the US for 2018.  Doesn't seem like that would move the US from 3rd place to 189th place.  In order to test, we need to subtract those murders from the total and see where the US places then.  16,214 - 2,325 = 13,889.  After changing that on the table used in step one, we get... 6th place.  Yes, 7th place was Colombia with 12,586 murders.  The US position is unchanged.

Let's try the murder rate.  Sure, it was at 76th place when we used the murder rate, but maybe we'll move the needle by using that instead.  So, we'll have to take out those murders from the total and, to be fair, we'll need to factor out the populations of the listed cities to calculate a murder rate for the rest of the country.

Look at that.  Our murder rate has been greatly improved.  After plugging in 4.37 and resorting by murder rate, the US moves from 76th all the way to 82nd, putting us between Chile (4.405) and Latvia (4.356).  That is a far cry from 3rd to 189th.

Conclusion: the graphic is propagandistic crap.

Uvalde Shooting

Ten years ago, I posted this:

Guns are not the cause of the problem

Once again there has been a shooting and there are immediate demands to ban guns. By this logic, we should ban cars. Vastly more people are killed in car accidents than by guns each year. Ban the car! Or maybe we should ban alcohol. I believe a majority of fatal car accidents involve alcohol. If we just ban alcohol, we could reduce car deaths. Of course, we tried banning alcohol and decided it was a failure. Even now the ban on marijuana is toppling in the states.

Interestingly, unlike the car, guns have an amendment in the Constitution denying the Federal Government from banning them. States and localities have enacted gun control laws that, oddly, seem to have the reverse of the intended effect. Washington DC and Chicago have some of the strictest gun control laws and also some of the highest murder rates.

Guns have been legal in the United States since its founding and yet these mass shootings did not happen until the 1970s and later. Why? The availability of guns is not the problem, otherwise we'd be able to point to school shootings in 1914, 1927, 1935, and so on. This is a modern phenomenon that can be traced to something that had changed in the last 40 or so years. I don't know what that is but it isn't that guns are legal.

We had less gun control in the 1950s than we have today and yet we didn't have school shootings.  Why?  Gun availability is obviously not the cause.  In those long ago days, a mentally ill person would have been forcibly committed.  We did away with that.  Could that explain the sudden appearance of mass shootings by mentally ill monsters?  Before modern media, a shooting in one state might never be reported in another state or throughout the entire country.  Might the notoriety gained from such reporting be an incentive?

Why are politicians who are protected by armed guards so eager to disarm people who did not misuse their guns?  By this logic, politicians should have demanded that we outlaw SUVs in the wake of Darrell Brooks killing 6 people in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year.  Really, who needs an SUV?  Let's limit everyone to a Smart Car that can't do as much damage as an SUV.  Let's punish law-abiding SUV owners for the crimes of one SUV driver.

Blaming the gun is misdirection.  If the gun explains all, then why are school shootings a modern phenomenon?

Knife Control

In the wake of London somehow eclipsing New York in murders recently, mayor Sadiq Khan is moving to implement knife control.  Gun control is already very strict in the UK so now knives must be controlled.  England has already gone through the gun control debate and the gun owners lost.  Now that all the guns are gone, the knives are next.  Once the knives are gone, will there be fork control?  Cricket bat control?  Whatever the case, those who oppose gun control can point to the case of England where 'weapon-du-jour control' is just the incremental disarmament of the populace.  Once 'assault rifles' are banned, the controllers will move to ban shotguns, then to handguns, and eventually to knives.

 

A disarmed populace may be less violent (London appears to be an exception) but is also much less of a threat to the government, which funds the police and military.  Government always prefers docile and defenseless subjects and will always say it is for your own good.

Who Cares What You Think?

I saw a link headlined "Samuel L. Jackson mocks Trump’s proposal to arm teachers" and immediately wonder why this was news.  Is Sam Jackson a teacher?  Does he have some applicable experience in securing places from attacks?  Does he hold elective office that would allow him to legislate, enforce, or adjudicate laws on this subject?  No on all accounts.  He's an actor!  I think he is a great actor and have loved him in most movies where he has starred, even bad ones.  However, his opinion on this subject is utterly irrelevant.  Moreover, he has never been in a gunfight, so his tweet doesn't hold any water.  This is just virtue signaling that will draw praise from the people with whom he socializes.

It's Not the Guns

The Parkland school shooting in Florida has once again triggered the demands for gun control.  However, the gun is not the problem.  The 2nd Amendment is not the problem.  Semi-automatic weapons have been around for more than a century.  The 2nd Amendment has been around for 230 years.  Where were the school shootings?  When I was in high school in the 80s, there weren't school shootings.  Almost every school shooting has happened in the last 20 years.  The obvious thing is to examine what has changed not blame something that has remained static.

 

Maybe the internet is to blame.  Social media?  The 24/7 news cycle?  Violent and surprisingly realistic video games?  Profanity-laced music?  Changes in parenting?  Kids raised in the last 25 years have had a dramatically different experience than those raised in previous eras.  Some change, maybe a combination of changes, is what has led to these school shootings.  If it was the guns and the 2nd Amendment, there would be school shootings dating back 100 years or more.

Self-Defense Right vs. Property Rights

I am ambivalent on this proposed Florida bill.  On the one hand, if a business owner is going to deny patrons the right to defend themselves should the need arise, then those business owners should be liable should the worst happens.  If Bob left his handgun in his car when he went to dinner at Pasta House only to then be shot by crazed shooter George, Bob has a good reason to be upset with Pasta House.  Should Pasta House guarantee the safety of its clients if it implements a no gun policy?  On the other hand, Bob was perfectly free to go across the way to the Linguini Palace that allows guns.  Pasta House believes that a no gun policy will drum up more business and has every right to limit who or what comes on the premises.

 

I would lean toward the first view.  The likely result would be a no gun insurance policy market arising with an amazingly low premium.  As the policy would only have to pay when a disarmed gun owner - who was licensed for concealed carry - was injured or killed in a manner where being armed may have prevented it.  Such a situation is going to be extremely rare.  By requiring the business to take responsibility for its clients' safety, the government both supports citizen self-defense rights and the private property owner still has the right to restrict guns.

 

At the very least, it would be useful to see how such a policy works in one state.  If it is a catastrophe, Florida can repeal it and other states can learn from the mess.  If it proves to be a great success, other states can learn from that too.  Federalism allows for such experimentation.

 

Of note, do the proponents of the law have a case where a gun owner was injured or killed in an attack at a business that restricted guns?  I would think that is a miniscule number and that this law is more of a virtue signaling effort.

Unilateral Disarmament

Trump will occasionally make a very good point but do it in a clumsy manner, especially when the 2nd Amendment is involved.  Hillary is a big fan of gun control, even commending the gun confiscation of Australia at one point.  Of course, Hillary has, and will for the rest of her life, armed Secret Service agents protecting her.  She doesn't need a gun because she has half a dozen people with guns.  Trump suggested that she have her detail disarm and "see what happens."  The way he says it reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, which is not a good image for a candidate for president to have.  Still, it makes a valid point.  It is easy for the protected elites to demand that the peasants in fly-over country are disarmed because it will not impact the guns that protect them.

 

Those who demanded the 2nd Amendment feared that a powerful government with a standing army - like they had just experienced with Great Britain - would oppress the people.  Against this fear, they provided that the citizens would be armed with the same weaponry wielded by the military, the musket.  If any of them were around today, they would argue that citizens should be armed with the M4 carbine that is the current standard-issue weapon.  The intent is to make a military takeover nigh impossible.

 

If you desire peace, prepare for war.  That is good advice for a country but also true for citizens with regard to their government.

Truck Control

A Tunisian named Mohamed Bouhlel drove a truck for several miles in Nice, France, killing 84 and injuring hundreds.  He was far more deadly than the San Bernardino killers or the Orlando shooter.  Clearly, if we are going to be consistent, we must blame the instrument of death, not the killer himself.  The availability of guns was the cause in those cases so the availability of the truck is clearly the cause in this case.  Yes, we need truck control.  Perhaps trucks need to be made smaller and less dangerous.  Maybe limit the fuel capacity so that they run out of gas sooner.  Perhaps we could limit the top speed to 10 miles per hour.  All of these added safety features on trucks could save lives.  Something must be done about these rolling machines of death.

Kate Steinle Redux

On July 1st of last year, Kate Steinle was out with her parents on Pier 14 in San Francisco when she was shot and killed by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.  Sanchez was illegally in the United States, a chronic 'undocumented worker' who had been deported 5 times.  You know, the border has never been more secure, so the administration has said on multiple occasions.  To make matters worse, San Francisco had declined to transfer Sanchez to ICE in March 2015 because San Francisco is a sanctuary city.  Sanchez only had 7 felony convictions.  No big deal, right?  And one wonders why Trump gets support for his border wall.

The Steinle story got a lot of press but the Woodburn triple homicide is getting a lot less press.  Yes, now it is Bonifacio Oseguera-Gonzalez who killed three and wounded one in Woodburn, Oregon.  Where Sanchez had been deported 5 times since 1994, Gonzalez had been deported 6 times since 2003!  You know, the border has never been more secure.

 

Why has the press been relatively quiet on this 'mass shooting?'  Simple.  It isn't easily converted into a call for gun control.  If it can't fit into the gun control narrative, the press is only too happy to ignore it.  That it plays into Trump's calls for more border security and deporting illegals doesn't help either.

Know Your Place, Peasant!

Why is it that a man who is surrounded by armed men keeps telling us that our access to guns must be curtailed?  This man calling for gun control will have armed guards surrounding him and his family for the rest of his life but the rest of us must wait for the police to arrive.  Why is it a man who has a fence around his mansion (and wants a bigger fence) tells us that a fence along the southern border would be racist and not work anyway?  There is one set of rules for the elites, the noble class, and another for everyone else, the peasants.

Expand Gun Free Zones!

Another Islamic radical has gone on a killing spree and the blame is placed upon... the gun.  Yes, it is the gun's fault, and thus the NRA's fault and Republicans' fault.  Millions upon millions of guns in the United States but the problem guns keep corrupting innocent Muslims.  If only we had gun controls as strict as France, we would be safe.  There was a massacre in Paris that was even worse than Orlando?  But how?

Question 1: If 1 in 20 of the patrons at Pulse had had concealed handguns, would the carnage have been more, less, or about the same?

Question 2: You are a terrorist and have gotten your hands on a gun.  You want to kill as many people as possible before you are taken down.  Do you attack A) a Police Station, B) a Gun Range, or C) a Gun Free Zone?

Question 3: Your city is on high alert for a terrorist attack because of a Craigslist ad.  Where do you think you will be most safe?  A) Police Station, B) Donut Shop, C) Church, D) Gun Free Zone.

When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.  Wouldn't it have been nice if this was the reception that Omar Mateen had received?

Defending the Right to Self-Defense

Here is a proposed law that I could support if the language was sufficiently clear.  If a business is going to ban guns on the premises, that business should be liable if a gun owner is injured or killed while obeying that ban.  The liability would be limited to things where a gun would have provided the opportunity of self-defense.  For instance, a crazed gunman on the premises would be covered, an earthquake would not.  If patrons are required to be disarmed, the business must take the responsibility to defend them should the need arise.

 

Of course, no matter how well-crafted the law, it will fall upon courts to decide.  Does a person who knowingly enters a gun-free zone forfeit a right to self-defense?  That could lead to every business being gun-free and the 2nd Amendment rendered largely moot outside the confines of private homes.  Do you always have a right to defend yourself?  As the law stands now, the answer is no.  Can a business, or even government, abridge the right to self-defense?  Currently, they can.

 

Whenever there is talk of gun rights, I think of this scene from Code of Silence.  Criminals hate it when their would-be victims can fight back.  Ever notice how there are no mass shootings where one of the victims shot back?  That's because those are the shootings that are stopped before the death toll can rise to the level of a mass shooting.

An Inconvenient Shooting

President Obama had a town hall meeting on gun control.  Shortly thereafter, a man shot a police officer in Philadelphia.  Wow, perhaps this adds an exclamation point to his argument.  No, as a matter of fact, it undermined a slate of talking points from the administration.

Problem 1: It turns out that the gun was stolen from the home of a police officer.  Nothing the president suggested could have any impact on that.  In fact, short of disarming the police or perhaps requiring them to leave their guns at the police station when off duty would have had any impact on the shooter getting the gun.

Problem 2: Edward Archer is black and shot a white officer.  The incident is a reversal of the claimed epidemic of cops shooting black men.  What story might we have been told if the shooting hadn't been caught on camera and the officer's return fire had killed rather than wounded the shooter?  Keep in mind that the Ferguson shooting was not on camera and the initial story bore almost no resemblance to the truth.

Problem 3: Archer proclaimed that he shot the officer "in the name of Islam" and also pledged his allegiance to ISIS, again demonstrating that ISIS is not contained nor is the homeland safe.  Of course, the mayor of Philadelphia declared that - despite the shooter's claims - the shooting had nothing to do with Islam or its teachings.  Why is it that every time someone claims to be acting in the name of Islam, a non-Muslim politician becomes an Islamic theologians who can assure us that such incidents have nothing to do with Islam?

 

Everything about this shooting weakens the Democratic Party's favorite narratives.  Luckily, it is already old news now and we'll not hear about it again.

Mass Shootings double Under Obama

I stumbled upon a fascinating spreadsheet compiled by Mother Jones.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data

Obviously, I am not a regular reader of Mother Jones but I must commend it for the logical and complete data that has been compiled.  As most of my co-workers know, there are few things that I like more than an Excel spreadsheet.  Data in a spreadsheet can reveal a great deal if pressed into a pivot table or sorted by one factor rather than another.  There is the opportunity to get subtotals for certain factors and then compare that to subtotals from another factor.

 

Mother Jones counts 73 mass shootings since 1982, slapping down the Washington Post's claim that San Bernardino was the 355th mass shooting just this year.  Of course, one must define the terms.  Mother Jones only included those incidents where 4 or more were killed and it wasn't gang or drug-related (i.e. the victims had no reason to expect they were at risk of being killed).  In those 73 mass shootings, 595 people were killed and 543 were injured.  The state with the most mass shootings is California (12), followed by Florida and Washington (6 each), then Texas (5).  When looking at the shooters, 43 of them showed prior signs of mental illness.  Those 43 shooters accounted for 63% of the fatalities and 71% of the injured.  In fact, the mentally ill had a higher average number killed (8.7 victims per shooting) than those who were not mentally ill (7.1 victims).

Now let's drift into unfair and unreasonable territory.  Yes, let's ask what portion of the carnage has happened since Hope and Change entered the White House.  It turns out that more than a third (26) of the mass shootings have occurred since President Obama was inaugurated.  There were only 15 mass shootings during the George W Bush administration, 18 during Clinton, and 7 each during Reagan and George Bush.  Let's consider fatalities per month.  Reagan saw 0.7 mass shooting fatalities per month during his two terms.  Bush I had 1.3, Clinton 1.2, Bush II 1.3, and Obama 2.7.  Wow!  The number of fatalities per month has more than doubled under Obama.  If there was this sort of rise with a Republican in the White House, it would be front page news and appearing on every newscast.

Now here is where we head into the tinfoil hat stuff.  This increase in frequency of mass shootings during the Obama Administration does - from his repeatedly stated perspective - add weight to the gun control message.  Some speculated that Fast and Furious was meant to get guns into the hands of bad actors, increase gun crime along the border, and provide an impetus for gun control.  The very idea reminds me of The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) in which a US intelligence agency plots an attack on America to increase next year's funding from Congress.  That doesn't really happen, right?

President Broken Record

I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn't happen in other countries,

Barack Obama after San Bernardino Shooting

 

So quickly we forget Paris, Mr. President.  On a per capita basis, there are half a dozen European countries where the odds of getting killed in a mass shooting are higher than in the US.  Of course, a mass shooting in Europe has to be much bigger to get any coverage here in the US.  Four people killed in Serbia is hardly going to play on the evening news but that same thing in Chatanooga, TN, can run for days.  The bias of the news to report US shootings rather than similar shootings in Europe gives verisimilitude to the president's claim.  No, the only European shootings reported here are the big ones, like Paris last month, or the massacre of 77 Norwegians - mostly teenagers - in 2011.

 

As with every such incident, President Obama suggests gun control.  It is irrelevant to him that the guns used in the San Bernardino shooting were illegal in California.  California has been ratcheting up gun control for years, for the safety of its citizens, don't you know.  What gun control does, as I have mentioned time and again, is to disarm the law-abiding while providing a safer environment for the criminals.  Criminals hate when their victims shoot back.

 

Every time Obama broaches the gun control issue, gun sales go through the roof.  EVERY TIME.  He is a gun store's best advertisement.  He can't not know this.  No one has done more for gun proliferation in the past 7 years than Barack Obama.  If he had been a gun advocate instead, he would not have been able to convince so many to buy guns.  When it is counterproductive to even mention a policy, maybe that is a policy best avoided.

Government is the Most Dangerous Mass Murderer

Yet another crazy has gone on a shooting spree in a gun free zone and there are immediately calls for gun control.  Yes, gun control has done wonders for Chicago, New York, and Washington DC.  Let's bring that same gun murder rate to the rest of the country.  The Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to bear arms because the people have a right to defend themselves.  That right was denied to certain groups in the 20th century and it didn't turn out well.

In 1911, the Ottoman Empire banned guns.  A few years later, a million and a half Armenians were murdered.  The Soviet Union banned guns in 1929.  The following decade, millions of Ukrainian Kulaks were murdered through mass starvation.  Dissident Russians found themselves sent to Siberian gulags.  In 1938, Germany banned guns.  Shortly thereafter, millions of Jews were shipped off to death camps.  Where the Jews managed to have weapons, there were uprisings, the most famous of which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.  China had banned guns in the 1930s, just in time for the Japanese invasion.  Oddly, the ban was still in effect after the war and during the rule of Mao Zedong.  Up to 50 million Chinese were killed during Mao's Cultural Revolution.  Cambodia instituted total gun control in 1956.  When Pol Pot seized power two decades later, he exterminated 2 million unarmed Cambodians, a quarter of the country's population.  Cuba, North Korea, and Iran do not allow private citizens to have guns.

 

This is not to say that gun control automatically leads to mass murder by the government.  Both the United Kingdom and Japan have very strict gun control but it is unlikely that a government will arise in either that would murder its citizens.  But if one did, the people would be helpless to resist.  And that is why we have the 2nd Amendment.  Yes, there are costs to such liberal gun laws.  These costs are only made worse by gun free zones.  The way to stop a bad guy with a gun is for a good guy with a gun to arrive on scene.  All those law-abiding citizens are necessarily disarmed while law is no impediment to the shooter.

 

Today's government might want to take your gun for what it views as good and rational reason.  It will do you no harm and in fact only have your best interest at heart.  However, tomorrow's government - perhaps 20 years from now - might look upon you as a nuisance that has no means to resist its will.

What is the Goal?

Former Congressman Gabby Giffords testified before Congress today.  As a victim of gun violence, she looks to be an ideal person to call for gun control, much like Jim Brady in the wake of his injury during an assassination attempt against Reagan.  However, the big push is for a new assault weapon ban while Ms. Gifford was shot with a handgun.  So, she is testifying purely for the emotional optics, not because anything the Congress might do would have prevented what happened to her.

What of the proposed ban?  If it had been in place last year, would Adam Lanza have been prevented from taking his mother's guns and shooting children at the elementary school?  No.  If the law being proposed would not have stopped the crime that prompted its passage, what is the point?

The vast majority - over 90% - of gun-related murders are committed with handguns, not 'assault' rifles.  Imagine that 90% of car accidents were caused by drinking while 3% were caused by smoking and the Congress seeks to outlaw smoking while driving to address the carnage on the roadways.  Would that make sense?  So, wouldn't it make more sense to outlaw handguns?

Are these Senators and Congressmen stupid?  No, they know they can't get handguns at this time but they might be able to pick off 'assault' rifles.  Maybe next time they will press for a limit of 6 bullets in a clip or magazine.  It is a piecemeal approach.  If guns can be restricted bit by bit, eventually all guns will be illegal and the 2nd Amendment will cease to exist.

Lexington and Concord

Though anyone who took American History or watched School House Rock on Saturday morning TV likely knows that the "Shot heard 'round the world" was fired at Lexington, few realize the cause.  An equal number likely recall that Paul Revere warned that the British were coming.  Hadn't the British already been here for many years?  What was happening that caused all the fuss?  General Thomas Gage, Military Governor of Massachusetts, had been given orders to disarm the militias.  Yes, the British were going to rove the countryside and disarm the people.  The plan didn't go over well.  The American Revolution started when the people resisted Gun Control!

Now, with that in mind, let's ponder the Second Amendment:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

The British (i.e. the government) wanted to disarm the people.  Why?  Because it is easier to rule people who don't have the means to resist.  All governments like to have a monopoly on guns.  Our government is no different.  Today it will be 'assault rifles' and tomorrow it will be automatic pistols, and then it will be shotguns and revolvers.  It is a long process and the government is patient.  At the end of the process lies tyranny.  The Framers of the Constitution knew this.  If we interpreted the 2nd Amendment the way they meant it, there would the latest military rifle over every mantle.

 

Now for some interesting facts:

 

All mass shootings have taken place at gun-free zones.

 

More people are bludgeoned to death with hammers or clubs than are killed with rifles.  Hammer control, anyone?

 

The murder rate in the US had fallen by 50% over the last 20 years.  Violent crime has likewise fallen by a similar amount.

 

The Assault Weapons Ban had no statistical impact on crime.

 

Crime rates dropped in Texas and Florida when they passed Concealed Carry laws.

 

Chicago and Washington DC, cities with strict gun control, have high murder rates and violent crime rates.

 

Though the US murder rate is higher than the UK, our violent crime rate is much lower.  Why doesn't that get reported?

 

The Second Amendment provides the people with the means to resist oppressive government; the Founders were familiar with oppressive government and wanted to prevent it in the future.  Not surprisingly, government isn't too keen on that.  By hook or by crook, government wants to disarm the people.  So, the government is telling us that it is disarming us for our own good, to protect us, to keep us safe.  It sells much better that way.  Even if the current government truly and honestly only wants to protect us, a future government will not be so benevolent when it sees a populace unable to resist its will.

Guns are not the cause of the problem

Once again there has been a shooting and there are immediate demands to ban guns.  By this logic, we should ban cars.  Vastly more people are killed in car accidents than by guns each year.  Ban the car!  Or maybe we should ban alcohol.  I believe a majority of fatal car accidents involve alcohol.  If we just ban alcohol, we could reduce car deaths.  Of course, we tried banning alcohol and decided it was a failure.  Even now the ban on marijuana is toppling in the states.

Interestingly, unlike the car, guns have an amendment in the Constitution denying the Federal Government from banning them.  States and localities have enacted gun control laws that, oddly, seem to have the reverse of the intended effect.  Washington DC and Chicago have some of the strictest gun control laws and also some of the highest murder rates.

 

Guns have been legal in the United States since its founding and yet these mass shootings did not happen until the 1970s and later.  Why?  The availability of guns is not the problem, otherwise we'd be able to point to school shootings in 1914, 1927, 1935, and so on.  This is a modern phenomenon that can be traced to something that had changed in the last 40 or so years.  I don't know what that is but it isn't that guns are legal.