Feelings on this topic run wild. We invite you to take a deep, full, slow breath. Engage your rational mind. Then read the following and act on your conscience.
We all want to protect children. We want to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for our families. The question is, what actions are most likely to protect our children, our homes, our freedoms, and our nation? Is it better to have guns around or not? You have probably heard both sides of the issue already. Below are some questions. This is your chance to think clearly, and you will find that in your heart you know the answers.
1) Imagine yourself as a criminal. (Perish the thought!) As such, you don't keep laws. Are you going to obey gun laws and turn in your guns?
2) Imagine yourself as a criminal. (Perish the thought!) As such, you want to steal, rob, or kill. Supposing that two neighboring towns have very different gun laws. In one town, almost everyone has a gun. In the other town, gun laws prevent people from having guns. In which town would you choose to do your dirty business? Would you rather confront armed or unarmed victims? In which town would the children be most safe from your demented plans to kill a bunch of children? (Take another deep breath. That's an emotional question, but it deserves to be asked.)
3) Imagine yourself as a criminal. (Perish the thought!) Would you vote for gun control or not? Why?
4) Imagine yourself as a police officer. You're responsible to keep 10,000 people safe in the area you patrol. Armed with your pistol, nightstick, and taser, you respond to a disturbance down a narrow alley. Somebody opens fire with an illegal machine gun. You duck behind a garbage can and pull out your pistol. You know it will be at least 5 minutes before back up arrives. At this point, what do you hope about citizens in the area and their firearms? Are your hopes more along the lines of "I'm the trained police and I've got the situation covered?" Or more like, "I hope people start shooting this guy from every window in the alley?" Do you feel adequate to keep 10,000 people safe on your own? Do the people bear any responsibility to keep themselves safe?
5) Imagine yourself as a police officer. Someone has opened fire on the local elementary school. You get a call and you're only 3 minutes away. You rush to the scene. How many children could be killed in those three minutes? Do you feel that you have the situation well in hand? Would you hope that many of the teachers, administrators, janitors, and lunch workers are carrying concealed weapons?
6) Imagine yourself as a police officer. Would you vote for gun control or not? Why?
7) Imagine that you are yourself. Easy, right? The power went out in your neighborhood and some people have started looting houses and businesses. Would you feel more reassured and safe with gun laws, knowing that you don't have a gun, and that the looters technically shouldn't have guns, either (assuming that they are law abiding citizens)? Or would you feel more reassured and safe without gun laws, knowing that the looters might have guns, and you also have your guns? Would you feel safer with a sign on your door to deter the looters that says, "Protected by Acme Alarms Inc." or "Protected by Smith and Wesson"? (For those that don't know, Smith and Wesson means guns.)
8) Will school children be safer with gun control or without it?
9) Imagine that you are yourself. Easy, right? Would you vote for gun control or not? Why?
The above questions were chosen because they are examples of things that are easy to imagine in our current day and experience. We are blessed that in recent memory we have not had an invasion on American soil, nor have we had the government try to take away our inalienable rights. However, we have no reason to believe that human nature has evolved so much that war and tyranny are purged from humanity. We hope that these things would never happen in the USA. It's hard to imagine these things. But the 2nd Amendment is like an insurance policy: you hope you don't ever have to use it, but you always want to have it just the same. If our military were ever spread too thin around the world, and a country dared to invade, would they rather invade a country of unarmed people or a country of armed people? If ever we got a faction in the government who wanted to take away our freedoms (perish the thought), would they find it easier to do that if the country were armed or unarmed? How would we fight to get our freedoms back if we didn't have weapons?
Take another deep breath. Keep your rational brain engaged. Then contact your government leaders. Talk to your neighbors and friends. Help people find reason and reality in spite of all the media hype. This insurance policy called the 2nd Amendment is not negotiable. Hold on to it like your life depends on it. It probably does--either yours, your kid's, or your grand kid's. Pass on to the next generation the freedoms that others died to give you.
Thanks for helping protect the USA!
ReplyDeleteI loved the post about debating respectfully. Thank you for starting this forum. I hope this comment is appropriate and offered the spirit of "I disagree and here's why." I think these are great questions that need to be asked. But I also think there's some truth to the saying "the proof is in the pudding" in this instance. Our country has a LOT of guns and ammunition in circulation and a lot of citizens who own or carry guns, and, compared to other civilized countries, we have a lot of mass shootings -to say nothing of all the gun-related deaths. So are these things the price we must pay in order to uphold our 2nd amendment rights? Or is there something that can be done? If so, is it arming more citizens -including teachers and administrators who may have no desire to carry a gun? -In part, they (like me) may feel this way because they know that the likelihood of that gun being used in an accidental shooting is greater than the likelihood that it will be used to stop a crime? I just think that these are also important issues and questions that need to be considered.
ReplyDeleteLaurie, Thanks for your comment. I appreciate you joining the conversation, and especially that you have chosen to have such a respectful tone. You bring up some good things that are worth considering. First of all, I think we can agree that no one should be required to be armed that didn't wish to be. Secondly, we can certainly agree that gun accidents are tragic. I had a close schoolmate who lost a brother to a gun accident in my school years, and it was very sad. Anyone that chooses to own a gun should treat it with great care. I would invite you to consider that the good things that happen are rarely on the news. Sometimes they are completely undetectable. For instance, if the bank is robbed, it makes the news. If there is an armed guard at the door, and a potential robber decides that it's not worth the danger to try that bank, no one knows about that decision but the robber. It doesn't make the news. Many people prevent crimes by simply displaying that they have a gun, and they never have to fire it. This doesn't usually make the news. We don't know what liberties our government might try to take away if we were unarmed, and hopefully we'll never find out. We don't know how much good our guns do. So once again, our guns are like an insurance policy, which we hope never to have to use. As far as the "proof is in the pudding" saying, that's a good point, and everyone that tastes the pudding seems to have a different opinion. The most believable statistical reviews that I read say that gun laws have no significant effect on gun crime. To create your own opinion, compare the following. This site ranks states by the strictness of their gun laws: http://www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/stateleg/scorecard/2011/2011_Brady_Campaign_State_Scorecard_Rankings.pdf And this site shows rates of gun crime by state: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/10/gun-crime-us-state You can see that California has the most strict gun laws and Arizona and Utah are among the most permissive. Yet California and Arizona's rates of gun crime are very similar while Utah's is significantly lower. It is difficult to argue that gun laws make a big difference given this data. The numbers suggest that something else affects gun crime more significantly. I would suggest that it is the amount of love and kindness in the people--something that you can't legislate at all, and that it would be difficult to get a statistic about. This returns the subject to the first post on this blog. If we want less gun crime, we need to create loving people. Creating loving people starts before conception, and goes through pregnancy and birth and particularly up to age 5, although every age matters. I have seen more convincing statistics showing that high unnecessary C-section rates and other separations of babies and moms at birth contribute to higher crime rates. Why? Because natural birth has a carefully orchestrated hormone sequence that helps boost attachment which turns into loving relationships which create loving people. So if we really want to change crime, we need to change the way we treat people and especially the most vulnerable of people. But in the meantime, we should hold on to our insurance policies. At least, that's my opinion. I like hearing your opinion, too. I can tell that we agree on some things, and disagree about others. And that's OK. Thanks for speaking out.
ReplyDeleteInvitation: Someone skilled at statistics, if you would like to run a correlation test on the above information and comment here, your assistance would be much appreciated.
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