Politicians are supposed to be temps, so calling them leaders is misleading. Whatever they are, temp or career, the longer they remain, the less able they are to follow their oaths of office. And nothing exposes this failure as a mass shooting.
The tragedy in Texas, much like Parkland, is evolving into a failure of government and “the system.” People who we were told were looking out did not. Obvious signs of trouble were ignored, and the result was an angry bully with violent tendencies knowing he could vent his rage on a soft target.
The problem isn’t firearms, and as others have noted, the answer to a few individuals misusing freedom is not to take freedom away from everyone.
If guns are the problem, why not attack a gun show, a shooting range, a police station, or anywhere you know people may be armed and trained to use firearms? Because the only person who ends up dead is you?
Disarming law-abiding citizens or coming up with ways to make it more difficult to exercise your natural right to self-defense has never worked. Just look at Chicago. More people die in the average weekend from violent crime in this gun-control mecca than died in Texas last week. And if it’s a tragedy there, why not every weekend in Chicago, Baltimore, or Los Angeles? Because they have all those gun laws already.
The law-abiding have or are being disarmed.
But Maine, like New Hampshire, is a Constitutional Carry State. It is also, like New Hampshire, one of the safest in the nation. Low violent and property crime. What crime there is gravitates toward liberal-run urban areas – which is true for most of the nation. Remove “common-sense” gun law cities LA, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, and DC from the calculus, and gun-crazy America drops way down the list of countries based on the amount of crime.
But when tragedy strikes, the authoritarian tick compels so-called leaders to do something, and it’s almost always the wrong thing.
Maine, which like Vermont, has been pitching Left for years, wants to use some of the idiocy of action to make the land of the Lobster and Potato people less safe. Things like expanding protective orders and magazine limits. At some point, that will evolve into waiting periods, shall issue laws, location restrictions, and given time, Maine will be more like New York and New Jersey than New Hampshire.
None of those laws will prevent shootings. None of them reduce violent crime. Good guys with guns do that.
If you can’t or don’t want armed officers on campus, armed and trained volunteers in a school can end an active shooter situation in seconds or minutes. That applies to any location, not just a school. Churches, retail outlets, restaurants, and anywhere people gather might look like a good place for some douchebag to vent their rage. A rage that, despite all the chatter about mental health issues, always leaves them with enough clarity to pick targets least likely to present armed resistance.
They are always right enough in their mind to find some fish in a barrel. And that’s both the problem and the solution.
The answer is not to create more soft targets. And it is not to find ways to take freedoms away from more people (or everyone) because a few people abuse it.
We know the Left’s litany of “gun laws” do not stop violent crime. We have decades of proof in the FBI’s crime database. What deters is the risk or threat of armed resistance. The shootings only end when a good guy (or good guys) with guns show up to shoot back – who shoots back. And anywhere an armed presence is likely is less likely to be a target.
The answer is more armed law-abiding citizens, not fewer. More gun safety training, not fewer guns. But progressive politics can’t abide it, so we must suffer fools which, as we can see, continues to cost lives.
