Rocketmedic
Member
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-reid-slam-brakes-on-gun-control/article/2516406?utm_campaign=obinsite#.UNZlxm88CSo
It appears that the President is slowing down the knee-jerk reactions to Sandy Hook. Why? Well, the prevailing right-wing theory is a plot to sew together comprehensive legislation and hammer out deals. I personally think that he's trying to do just that. However, this could be a good thing for us- a chance to put together a PR campaign that doesn't suck, a chance to defend ourselves.
On that, I'm going to get on my soap box here about the NRA. Please read it before you flame me.
I'm a young man, about to be 24. I'm a veteran, currently serving in the National Guard. I'm a combat veteran who understands the power and responsibility of firearms first-hand. I've killed a man with my assigned rifle. I'm white, I live in the Midwest, and I tend to be fiscally conservative. I drive a pickup, listen to country music most of the time, and am married. I own two pistols, three rifles and one shotgun. I am a paramedic and see innocent people assaulted pretty frequently, and infrequently deal with victims of gunshot wounds (whether or not they deserved those wounds is not my job, but some of them did, legally or illegally). Most importantly to the NRA and gun-rights organizations, I'm socially and politically intelligent and active and affluent enough to have a small chunk of disposable income. I also have a touch of Asperger's and was raised as a latchkey kid with divorced parents- sound familiar?
Their response to this tragedy, and the response of the gun community as a whole, has both sickened and angered me. No, I'm not a troll or some bleeding-heart liberal Fantasylander, nor am I a plant. I am literally just another white guy in Central Oklahoma. I'm literally the poster child for American gun owners.
The National Rifle Association is calling for limitations on the First Amendment to protect kids from video games and movies and television violence, on the grounds that it programs us. That's really, really insulting to me and my generation. I grew up playing first-person shooters, hack-and-slash video games, and watching gory movies. My father even took me on a few EMS calls, where I saw trauma and death first-hand. I didn't go shooting as a kid until high school, and then it was with a friend who'd grown up in a similar way and was totally unsupervised. (In California, nonetheless!). Literally everything I knew about guns when I picked up my friend's rifle for the first time was taken from a few safety lectures my dad had given me, Rainbow Six, Medal of Honor, the Internet and Band of Brothers.
Even as a soldier, where proper and safe weapons handling is drilled into you, I still learned quite a bit from games. Doubt me? Load up ARMA or Operation Flashpoint, or even a multiplayer FPS with teammates dedicated to realistic play. You'll learn the same tactics, strategies and techniques that soldiers in Stalingrad and Normandy paid for with blood, and you'll get to practice until you're sick, with no real danger. You're effectively one reset button away from immortality, and you can get better with every repetition. It's training in the purest sense of the word. No, it's not perfect, but it is as close as a 10 y/o with an Xbox can get. Aiming at man-sized targets in a simulated 600-meter engagement and calculating shot placement based on reticles, windage and motion is actually pretty similar to doing it "for real" in terms of preparing you to aim at another human being. Even in Iraq, aiming at an insurgent, I was mentally treating it like it was Battlefield or something- a synthesis of years of training and target recognition and practice. I think that the general increase in competence of American and Western soldiers as compared to the Vietnam-era force may be related to the proliferation of relatively exciting, realistic first-person shooters and the lessons learned from them. Doubt it, older readers? Go watch your grandkids play Black Ops 2 or Halo 4 or whatnot. You might not see good teamwork, but you'll see a near-mastery of understanding kill zones, channeling, dead ground, sniping and sniper hides, ammunition management and even teamwork in many cases. Simply put, we're starting kids on infantry team drills when they're old enough to pick up a controller, and this isn't a bad thing. This is our generation's version of sending you out with a rifle to go hunt up some dinner.
I also played a lot of GTA, killed a lot of virtual cops, and a few hookers (it's really easier to simply buy them and then employ them, since you'll end up getting more money in the long run, and younger High Roaders will probably remember the GTA 3 bridge glitch, where you become essentially unreachable as waves of police officers drive into the ocean and drown). GTA also teaches a very important lesson early- gun-free zones are far safer than gun-owning zones. Doubt it? Play through GTA 3 or anything newer, without cheating (at least not too much). Go through an area with a lot of unarmed people and start shooting (say, the rich parts of Liberty City or San Andreas). You're an angel of death until the police get truly overwhelming. Try it in a territory controlled by a rival gang or out in the sticks and you're in for a fight that will generally drive you off. That's quite possibly the only relevant lesson in the entire game- and that's the point! When Wayne "Retarded Old Guy" LaPierre or whatever his name is started calling on some of my favorite antique games as indoctrination for murderers, it showed just how out of touch he and his supporters really are. To quote Tycho Brahe (a popular Internet writer), "It is a strange sort of patriot who would destroy the First Amendment to protect the Second." Grand Theft Auto, Dynasty Warriors, and every other video game exist for recreation. They're no different than three-gun matches, target shooting, or reloading. That we can imagine being a professional athlete, pilot, or commando, experience a rendition of our great-grandparent's once-in-a-lifetime greatest moments, or even blow off steam by shooting up a city is a precious thing indeed, and one that should not be regulated by government or any power other than our own parents. To those who point out that we already regulate the first amendment, I would reply that we should also regulate the second to the same degree. Do we, as gun owners, really want to open that can of worms?
Let me put it in simple terms: Those who would attempt to blame and thus regulate art, speech, and expression, and my right to those things, are no more friends to me than those who would seek to limit my right to self-defense or redress of grievances, regardless of the number of guns they own or who they would have in elected office. When the NRA declares that violent video games influenced Adam Lanza, it only makes their leaders and members appear more senile, less in tune with society, and less deserving of consideration. They are also being dishonest with the core issues, and I do not support dishonest people, regardless of their politics. (That's why I voted for Obama over Romney, incidentally. He was more honest.)
Second, mental health. There really isn't a consistent infrastructure to provide mental health services in the same sense that we have for physical health, but there are resources. They exist in most cities, in many counties, and in all states. They are overloaded, underfunded, and understaffed, but they are there. An effort to expand mental healthcare is appreciated, but doomed as presented. First, proposals to 'improve' mental health-care are all based upon identification of troubled people and their essentially permanent commitment to prison. Do you know why asylums, county mental health homes, and other places of incarceration have basically vanished? It's because they don't work. You argue that these shooters showed signs of snapping, and they did. At least three (AZ, VT and Aurora) were flagged by school psychologists as pending dangers. Would involuntary incarceration months or years prior to those threats have helped? Possibly. But every time someone suggests that we bring back the "county home for the mentally ill", let's take off the rose-colored glasses and remember that those homes were institutions where rape, torture, and maltreatment were regular things. LGBT persons, autistics, Asperger's, and a laundry list of other "disorders" were simply incarcerated, by the tens of thousands, for "treatment" at the benevolence of the state, by "accepted" means like surgeries, drugs, and behavioral modification. Many of those patients were assaulted, battered, and raped, either by staff or by eachother. Most of them are better-treated in society than they could ever be by society. Don't believe me? A family member, a close friend of mine, has suffered from a mental illness. That family member, in the 1950s, would likely have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, held there for months or years, possibly have been raped, and subjected to batteries of experimental "therapies" and drugs dangerous to health. Those who complain about SSRIs should look into what earlier drugs did to people. Today, that family member is a responsible, productive member of society, a loving, caring, participating family member, and even a gun owner. Does there need to be a stronger emphasis on mental health care and provision of service? Yes, undoubtedly. However, there also needs to be a realization that mental health care is no different than physical health care in that it is the ultimate responsibility of the individual to seek treatment, not the State. To argue otherwise is to endorse a police state where life itself is subject to the whims of government. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are too ill to decide for themselves, and who should be committed. They are often the homeless, the indigent, and the elderly. They are not the problem here.
To those who advocate armed guards at every school and their conversions to prisons, I have no truly good reply. It is a sad state of affairs when we are willing, as a society, to accept that mass murder and violence against our children is so pervasive as to require armed guards at elementary schools. Desert Knolls, Rancho Verde, and even poverty-striken Valle Verde Elementary didn't have metal detectors, security guards, or even controlled access. Neither did Live Oak, Pomolita Junior High, Earl Warren or Shadow Hills. My high school didn't either, although it did have a part-time SRO who was ever-present at lunch (especially with the gang problems we had in 2005). That we accept the loss of liberty and the need for armed guards for our children in lieu of real fixes is not an answer I find acceptable. Unlike many of those who will read this, I have been to a country where nearly half of the workforce was employed as "guards", "police" or in a security role. There were no other jobs, no opportunity, endless violence, corruption and graft. Crime was still a problem. If we're going to harden schools, the next shooting will be at a Wal-Mart, a mall, or a park. Maybe at a zoo, or maybe at a concert. Where will we draw the line and accept that armed guards are not the answer? (Liberals, take heed. Armed security guards are not the answer).
We are not going to be able, as a society, to identify every mentally-ill person, simply by the nature of their illness. We are not going to be able to respect anyone's freedom to bear arms, speak, or live their life in pursuit of happiness if we place American life on lockdown. Do we really want to have a nation where daycare requires an AR-15 and a tactical team on perimeter security, or where driving a new car home triggers a neighborhood alert?
What we can do is control legal access to firearms, expand access to mental health resources, rethink the War on Drugs, and expand carry of firearms for defense. No, Adam Lanza could not have been stopped by anything short of biometrics on the gun itself or the absence of firearms period. Holmes, Loughner, and the VT shooter were all legally allowed to buy weapons and did so. The vast majority of the gun crime in this nation is committed by people who cannot legally own or carry weapons in the first place. Firearms, ammunition and accessories are easy to buy, easy to sell and easy to use and misuse. We, as a community of Americans, need to change that.
First, carry is a good thing. Legal carriers do not commit crimes at the same rate as the general population, and are far less likely to be involved in violent crimes. They are generally better-educated, more affluent, and better-trained than your average American, and far more so than the inner-city African-Americans that are the majority of our criminals. Carriers are also the only realistic answer to active shooters that does not involve Fortress America and an Orwellian police state or complete disarmament. I am not naive enough to force mandatory carry of a weapon on all who are able- many people simply do not want that, and it is not our right or the government's to force my ideals on another person. However, I believe and point to the Pearl, MS shooting that was resolved rapidly by an assistant principal and his pistol as evidence that carry works, far more rapidly than a police response, and I believe that many people would choose to carry a pistol, openly or concealed, were it legitimized in society (liberals, this means that Gun-Free Zones and propaganda needs to reflect social realities; conservatives, this means that we should not be forcing guns on people who don't want them). At Sandy Hook, the principal and school psychologist tried to take on an armed man with bare hands, and were gunned down immediately. Teachers tried to confront him and died messy, near-futile deaths as well. Clawing nails against bullets is not a winning strategy. Charging a man with a semi-automatic rifle is not a winning strategy. Keeping teachers and faculty from carrying guns legally will ignore the lessons every mass shooting has taught us.
On the other hand, we as Americans and gun owners specifically need to realize that there are some weapons that are quite intentionally deadlier than others. Yes, any gun can kill, but there is a reason that most American infantrymen carry an M4 into battle instead of a Remington 700, and that just one man armed with a modern assault rifle, even against armed opposition, is still wielding superior firepower as compared to any pistol or manually-operated action available. There is a reason that these weapons are constantly used by active shooters- it is simply easier to kill a lot of people quickly with a semiautomatic AR than it is with a lever-action rifle or a shotgun or bolt-action or revolver, especially if they may be armed and resisting. That's why the military and police use semi-automatic weapons now. Yes, magazine limits and the AWB are essentially worthless, but they are shot full of holes from the start to enable the continued sale and use of those weapons. Perhaps it is time to consider tighter regulations and more restrictive pricing of semi-automatic weapons. (I, for one, would support a tiered addition of semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines onto the NFA registry, in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed carry, ammunition, and acquisition protections for all firearms on a federal level. Said system would essentially place semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines at price points significantly higher than revolvers and manual actions, thus limiting their availability. However, the NFA registry for semi-automatic and perhaps automatic firearms would be opened up as well and kept open. If you're willing to spend three thousand dollars on an AR-15 and ammunition for a few hours of shooting, and you're in compliance with regulations to own an NFA item, you're not a likely criminal). Would those with carry pistols find themselves subject to similar sanction? Perhaps, although I would personally believe no. A pistol is harder to kill a lot of people with than a rifle, and even with frequent magazine changes, it's simply harder to aim, less powerful, and less lethal. (I support carry, if you haven't noticed). Perhaps some sort of lower fee schedule for semi-automatic vs automatic. Broadly, I would like to see us as owners attempt to make guns as pervasive as cars in our culture, with similar responsibilities.
Lastly, old folks, you need to get with the times. At my LGS today, I heard the owner talking about the UN coming to "take our guns". That's simply not going to happen, not with Barack or Mitt "AWB" Romney or even Hillary in office. Yes, Obama is a centrist multiracial Democratic president. He also crushed Romney in a free, open and legal election, mostly by being in touch with reality. He has made mistakes (Eric Holder), but so has every President. He is the lawfully-elected leader of the USA, a father, a husband, and a man. He is forced to deal daily and be faulted for the failures of a Congress with a stated ambition to ruin him, partisan opposition that literally cannot present even a coherent objection to his policies, and a populace that still has a strong minority that places a football game over a national tragedy. He is belittled constantly on account of his skin color, his imagined place of birth, his ancestry, and his centrist policies. He has literally done more for gun rights than Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan have done, and he is even now stalling for time to defuse the worst of his loyalist's knee-jerk reactions. He may not like the Second Amendment, but maybe that's just his personal experience. I probably wouldn't be a Second Amendment fan if I were a poor, law-abiding black man in downtown Oklahoma City either. Obama isn't trying to pull an Australia on us, he's trying to avert perceived financial disaster. Gun control is pretty far down on his priority list.
When publically-vocal gun owners, in speech, print or online, act as if the President of the United States is an n-word worthy only of scorn or a traitor, what do you think that shows most Americans, gun-owning or not? I have a policy of not associating with fools, regardless of their beliefs. It's why I don't smoke pot and didn't in school, it's why I don't drink, and it's why I roll my eyes every time someone claims to be a member of the "militia" ready to fight to defend their guns. (Side note- most of those 'militias' are neighborhood watch associations at best. At worst, they're thinly-veiled armed bigots with grudges against those who graduated high school. They're no match for the US Army). It's fools like those who will do us more harm than Dianne Feinstein or Chuck Schumer ever will.
So, basically, gun owners, we need to tighten up our shot groups, stop accepting bigots and fools into our ranks, and do a lot more to advocate changes in gun law that keep the next shooting as small as possible. And please, please stop acting retarded, misspelling words, and generally showcasing your ignorance. It's really, really hard to defend your right to carry a pistol in public when you use exclamation points to end every sentence or cannot spell "bear" correctly. "Bare" arms would imply that you were wearing a wifebeater or T-shirt.
Give my generation a reason to respect your opinions and you'll have our support. Give us a reason to scorn you and we will break you like we broke Mitt Romney. The first step to that needs to be a change of message from the NRA.
It appears that the President is slowing down the knee-jerk reactions to Sandy Hook. Why? Well, the prevailing right-wing theory is a plot to sew together comprehensive legislation and hammer out deals. I personally think that he's trying to do just that. However, this could be a good thing for us- a chance to put together a PR campaign that doesn't suck, a chance to defend ourselves.
On that, I'm going to get on my soap box here about the NRA. Please read it before you flame me.
I'm a young man, about to be 24. I'm a veteran, currently serving in the National Guard. I'm a combat veteran who understands the power and responsibility of firearms first-hand. I've killed a man with my assigned rifle. I'm white, I live in the Midwest, and I tend to be fiscally conservative. I drive a pickup, listen to country music most of the time, and am married. I own two pistols, three rifles and one shotgun. I am a paramedic and see innocent people assaulted pretty frequently, and infrequently deal with victims of gunshot wounds (whether or not they deserved those wounds is not my job, but some of them did, legally or illegally). Most importantly to the NRA and gun-rights organizations, I'm socially and politically intelligent and active and affluent enough to have a small chunk of disposable income. I also have a touch of Asperger's and was raised as a latchkey kid with divorced parents- sound familiar?
Their response to this tragedy, and the response of the gun community as a whole, has both sickened and angered me. No, I'm not a troll or some bleeding-heart liberal Fantasylander, nor am I a plant. I am literally just another white guy in Central Oklahoma. I'm literally the poster child for American gun owners.
The National Rifle Association is calling for limitations on the First Amendment to protect kids from video games and movies and television violence, on the grounds that it programs us. That's really, really insulting to me and my generation. I grew up playing first-person shooters, hack-and-slash video games, and watching gory movies. My father even took me on a few EMS calls, where I saw trauma and death first-hand. I didn't go shooting as a kid until high school, and then it was with a friend who'd grown up in a similar way and was totally unsupervised. (In California, nonetheless!). Literally everything I knew about guns when I picked up my friend's rifle for the first time was taken from a few safety lectures my dad had given me, Rainbow Six, Medal of Honor, the Internet and Band of Brothers.
Even as a soldier, where proper and safe weapons handling is drilled into you, I still learned quite a bit from games. Doubt me? Load up ARMA or Operation Flashpoint, or even a multiplayer FPS with teammates dedicated to realistic play. You'll learn the same tactics, strategies and techniques that soldiers in Stalingrad and Normandy paid for with blood, and you'll get to practice until you're sick, with no real danger. You're effectively one reset button away from immortality, and you can get better with every repetition. It's training in the purest sense of the word. No, it's not perfect, but it is as close as a 10 y/o with an Xbox can get. Aiming at man-sized targets in a simulated 600-meter engagement and calculating shot placement based on reticles, windage and motion is actually pretty similar to doing it "for real" in terms of preparing you to aim at another human being. Even in Iraq, aiming at an insurgent, I was mentally treating it like it was Battlefield or something- a synthesis of years of training and target recognition and practice. I think that the general increase in competence of American and Western soldiers as compared to the Vietnam-era force may be related to the proliferation of relatively exciting, realistic first-person shooters and the lessons learned from them. Doubt it, older readers? Go watch your grandkids play Black Ops 2 or Halo 4 or whatnot. You might not see good teamwork, but you'll see a near-mastery of understanding kill zones, channeling, dead ground, sniping and sniper hides, ammunition management and even teamwork in many cases. Simply put, we're starting kids on infantry team drills when they're old enough to pick up a controller, and this isn't a bad thing. This is our generation's version of sending you out with a rifle to go hunt up some dinner.
I also played a lot of GTA, killed a lot of virtual cops, and a few hookers (it's really easier to simply buy them and then employ them, since you'll end up getting more money in the long run, and younger High Roaders will probably remember the GTA 3 bridge glitch, where you become essentially unreachable as waves of police officers drive into the ocean and drown). GTA also teaches a very important lesson early- gun-free zones are far safer than gun-owning zones. Doubt it? Play through GTA 3 or anything newer, without cheating (at least not too much). Go through an area with a lot of unarmed people and start shooting (say, the rich parts of Liberty City or San Andreas). You're an angel of death until the police get truly overwhelming. Try it in a territory controlled by a rival gang or out in the sticks and you're in for a fight that will generally drive you off. That's quite possibly the only relevant lesson in the entire game- and that's the point! When Wayne "Retarded Old Guy" LaPierre or whatever his name is started calling on some of my favorite antique games as indoctrination for murderers, it showed just how out of touch he and his supporters really are. To quote Tycho Brahe (a popular Internet writer), "It is a strange sort of patriot who would destroy the First Amendment to protect the Second." Grand Theft Auto, Dynasty Warriors, and every other video game exist for recreation. They're no different than three-gun matches, target shooting, or reloading. That we can imagine being a professional athlete, pilot, or commando, experience a rendition of our great-grandparent's once-in-a-lifetime greatest moments, or even blow off steam by shooting up a city is a precious thing indeed, and one that should not be regulated by government or any power other than our own parents. To those who point out that we already regulate the first amendment, I would reply that we should also regulate the second to the same degree. Do we, as gun owners, really want to open that can of worms?
Let me put it in simple terms: Those who would attempt to blame and thus regulate art, speech, and expression, and my right to those things, are no more friends to me than those who would seek to limit my right to self-defense or redress of grievances, regardless of the number of guns they own or who they would have in elected office. When the NRA declares that violent video games influenced Adam Lanza, it only makes their leaders and members appear more senile, less in tune with society, and less deserving of consideration. They are also being dishonest with the core issues, and I do not support dishonest people, regardless of their politics. (That's why I voted for Obama over Romney, incidentally. He was more honest.)
Second, mental health. There really isn't a consistent infrastructure to provide mental health services in the same sense that we have for physical health, but there are resources. They exist in most cities, in many counties, and in all states. They are overloaded, underfunded, and understaffed, but they are there. An effort to expand mental healthcare is appreciated, but doomed as presented. First, proposals to 'improve' mental health-care are all based upon identification of troubled people and their essentially permanent commitment to prison. Do you know why asylums, county mental health homes, and other places of incarceration have basically vanished? It's because they don't work. You argue that these shooters showed signs of snapping, and they did. At least three (AZ, VT and Aurora) were flagged by school psychologists as pending dangers. Would involuntary incarceration months or years prior to those threats have helped? Possibly. But every time someone suggests that we bring back the "county home for the mentally ill", let's take off the rose-colored glasses and remember that those homes were institutions where rape, torture, and maltreatment were regular things. LGBT persons, autistics, Asperger's, and a laundry list of other "disorders" were simply incarcerated, by the tens of thousands, for "treatment" at the benevolence of the state, by "accepted" means like surgeries, drugs, and behavioral modification. Many of those patients were assaulted, battered, and raped, either by staff or by eachother. Most of them are better-treated in society than they could ever be by society. Don't believe me? A family member, a close friend of mine, has suffered from a mental illness. That family member, in the 1950s, would likely have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, held there for months or years, possibly have been raped, and subjected to batteries of experimental "therapies" and drugs dangerous to health. Those who complain about SSRIs should look into what earlier drugs did to people. Today, that family member is a responsible, productive member of society, a loving, caring, participating family member, and even a gun owner. Does there need to be a stronger emphasis on mental health care and provision of service? Yes, undoubtedly. However, there also needs to be a realization that mental health care is no different than physical health care in that it is the ultimate responsibility of the individual to seek treatment, not the State. To argue otherwise is to endorse a police state where life itself is subject to the whims of government. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are too ill to decide for themselves, and who should be committed. They are often the homeless, the indigent, and the elderly. They are not the problem here.
To those who advocate armed guards at every school and their conversions to prisons, I have no truly good reply. It is a sad state of affairs when we are willing, as a society, to accept that mass murder and violence against our children is so pervasive as to require armed guards at elementary schools. Desert Knolls, Rancho Verde, and even poverty-striken Valle Verde Elementary didn't have metal detectors, security guards, or even controlled access. Neither did Live Oak, Pomolita Junior High, Earl Warren or Shadow Hills. My high school didn't either, although it did have a part-time SRO who was ever-present at lunch (especially with the gang problems we had in 2005). That we accept the loss of liberty and the need for armed guards for our children in lieu of real fixes is not an answer I find acceptable. Unlike many of those who will read this, I have been to a country where nearly half of the workforce was employed as "guards", "police" or in a security role. There were no other jobs, no opportunity, endless violence, corruption and graft. Crime was still a problem. If we're going to harden schools, the next shooting will be at a Wal-Mart, a mall, or a park. Maybe at a zoo, or maybe at a concert. Where will we draw the line and accept that armed guards are not the answer? (Liberals, take heed. Armed security guards are not the answer).
We are not going to be able, as a society, to identify every mentally-ill person, simply by the nature of their illness. We are not going to be able to respect anyone's freedom to bear arms, speak, or live their life in pursuit of happiness if we place American life on lockdown. Do we really want to have a nation where daycare requires an AR-15 and a tactical team on perimeter security, or where driving a new car home triggers a neighborhood alert?
What we can do is control legal access to firearms, expand access to mental health resources, rethink the War on Drugs, and expand carry of firearms for defense. No, Adam Lanza could not have been stopped by anything short of biometrics on the gun itself or the absence of firearms period. Holmes, Loughner, and the VT shooter were all legally allowed to buy weapons and did so. The vast majority of the gun crime in this nation is committed by people who cannot legally own or carry weapons in the first place. Firearms, ammunition and accessories are easy to buy, easy to sell and easy to use and misuse. We, as a community of Americans, need to change that.
First, carry is a good thing. Legal carriers do not commit crimes at the same rate as the general population, and are far less likely to be involved in violent crimes. They are generally better-educated, more affluent, and better-trained than your average American, and far more so than the inner-city African-Americans that are the majority of our criminals. Carriers are also the only realistic answer to active shooters that does not involve Fortress America and an Orwellian police state or complete disarmament. I am not naive enough to force mandatory carry of a weapon on all who are able- many people simply do not want that, and it is not our right or the government's to force my ideals on another person. However, I believe and point to the Pearl, MS shooting that was resolved rapidly by an assistant principal and his pistol as evidence that carry works, far more rapidly than a police response, and I believe that many people would choose to carry a pistol, openly or concealed, were it legitimized in society (liberals, this means that Gun-Free Zones and propaganda needs to reflect social realities; conservatives, this means that we should not be forcing guns on people who don't want them). At Sandy Hook, the principal and school psychologist tried to take on an armed man with bare hands, and were gunned down immediately. Teachers tried to confront him and died messy, near-futile deaths as well. Clawing nails against bullets is not a winning strategy. Charging a man with a semi-automatic rifle is not a winning strategy. Keeping teachers and faculty from carrying guns legally will ignore the lessons every mass shooting has taught us.
On the other hand, we as Americans and gun owners specifically need to realize that there are some weapons that are quite intentionally deadlier than others. Yes, any gun can kill, but there is a reason that most American infantrymen carry an M4 into battle instead of a Remington 700, and that just one man armed with a modern assault rifle, even against armed opposition, is still wielding superior firepower as compared to any pistol or manually-operated action available. There is a reason that these weapons are constantly used by active shooters- it is simply easier to kill a lot of people quickly with a semiautomatic AR than it is with a lever-action rifle or a shotgun or bolt-action or revolver, especially if they may be armed and resisting. That's why the military and police use semi-automatic weapons now. Yes, magazine limits and the AWB are essentially worthless, but they are shot full of holes from the start to enable the continued sale and use of those weapons. Perhaps it is time to consider tighter regulations and more restrictive pricing of semi-automatic weapons. (I, for one, would support a tiered addition of semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines onto the NFA registry, in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed carry, ammunition, and acquisition protections for all firearms on a federal level. Said system would essentially place semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines at price points significantly higher than revolvers and manual actions, thus limiting their availability. However, the NFA registry for semi-automatic and perhaps automatic firearms would be opened up as well and kept open. If you're willing to spend three thousand dollars on an AR-15 and ammunition for a few hours of shooting, and you're in compliance with regulations to own an NFA item, you're not a likely criminal). Would those with carry pistols find themselves subject to similar sanction? Perhaps, although I would personally believe no. A pistol is harder to kill a lot of people with than a rifle, and even with frequent magazine changes, it's simply harder to aim, less powerful, and less lethal. (I support carry, if you haven't noticed). Perhaps some sort of lower fee schedule for semi-automatic vs automatic. Broadly, I would like to see us as owners attempt to make guns as pervasive as cars in our culture, with similar responsibilities.
Lastly, old folks, you need to get with the times. At my LGS today, I heard the owner talking about the UN coming to "take our guns". That's simply not going to happen, not with Barack or Mitt "AWB" Romney or even Hillary in office. Yes, Obama is a centrist multiracial Democratic president. He also crushed Romney in a free, open and legal election, mostly by being in touch with reality. He has made mistakes (Eric Holder), but so has every President. He is the lawfully-elected leader of the USA, a father, a husband, and a man. He is forced to deal daily and be faulted for the failures of a Congress with a stated ambition to ruin him, partisan opposition that literally cannot present even a coherent objection to his policies, and a populace that still has a strong minority that places a football game over a national tragedy. He is belittled constantly on account of his skin color, his imagined place of birth, his ancestry, and his centrist policies. He has literally done more for gun rights than Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan have done, and he is even now stalling for time to defuse the worst of his loyalist's knee-jerk reactions. He may not like the Second Amendment, but maybe that's just his personal experience. I probably wouldn't be a Second Amendment fan if I were a poor, law-abiding black man in downtown Oklahoma City either. Obama isn't trying to pull an Australia on us, he's trying to avert perceived financial disaster. Gun control is pretty far down on his priority list.
When publically-vocal gun owners, in speech, print or online, act as if the President of the United States is an n-word worthy only of scorn or a traitor, what do you think that shows most Americans, gun-owning or not? I have a policy of not associating with fools, regardless of their beliefs. It's why I don't smoke pot and didn't in school, it's why I don't drink, and it's why I roll my eyes every time someone claims to be a member of the "militia" ready to fight to defend their guns. (Side note- most of those 'militias' are neighborhood watch associations at best. At worst, they're thinly-veiled armed bigots with grudges against those who graduated high school. They're no match for the US Army). It's fools like those who will do us more harm than Dianne Feinstein or Chuck Schumer ever will.
So, basically, gun owners, we need to tighten up our shot groups, stop accepting bigots and fools into our ranks, and do a lot more to advocate changes in gun law that keep the next shooting as small as possible. And please, please stop acting retarded, misspelling words, and generally showcasing your ignorance. It's really, really hard to defend your right to carry a pistol in public when you use exclamation points to end every sentence or cannot spell "bear" correctly. "Bare" arms would imply that you were wearing a wifebeater or T-shirt.
Give my generation a reason to respect your opinions and you'll have our support. Give us a reason to scorn you and we will break you like we broke Mitt Romney. The first step to that needs to be a change of message from the NRA.
) to the point of seeming unreasonable or even illogical, but the reason for that is simple... every attempt to compromise, every "we'll give up this, or concede that, if ya'll leave us alone on THIS..." agreement we made was reneged on. The anti's consistently refuse to stop; they always want more controls, more laws, more restrictions. It is simply not possible to reason with unreasonable people... if it was we wouldn't need a military.
