Weapons aren’t the real threat to our safety
Each time it happens — each time a weapon-wielding barbarian shoots down innocent bystanders, which is now happening so frequently we’ve almost exhausted our capacity to be shocked — our Pavlovian response is to demand the extinction of firearms, as if that alone would be all that’s needed to restore us to safer times.
Please. If only it was that simple.
Those nine black South Carolinians gunned down during a Bible study were as indiscriminately targeted as the 11 Jewish congregants gunned down three years later in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The 59 concertgoers whose lives were snuffed out by a sniper on the Las Vegas Strip were as innocent and unsuspecting as the 49 revelers who succumbed after being fired upon on a dance floor in Orlando.
It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? We saw 20 elementary school students slain in Connecticut, and 12 high school kids slain in Colorado followed by another 17 in Florida, and 32 collegians assassinated at Virginia Tech.
And that’s merely scratch- ing the surface of these evil times.
Now another 12 innocents are slaughtered in a California bar, and once again, having learned nothing, our leaders rush before the cameras to condemn the weaponry, naively insisting if guns and rifles could be banished we’d have no such problems.
That’s outrageous. Don’t they understand that what’s in a killer’s head matters more than what’s in his hands?
It’s the poisoned minds of these killers that imperils us, not the tools they choose to use, and it’s madness to ignore that, which is exactly what we do, time and time again.
To not understand that is to not understand what’s happening to America.
Firearms are not needed to terrorize us.
The Tsarnaev brothers used pressure cookers, remember?
Charlie Manson’s “family” used knives, remember?
Ted Kaczynski? Tim McVeigh? They used bombs, remember?
Ted Bundy? Albert DeSalvo? They used their hands, remember?a
We’ve seen madmen drive pickup trucks into crowds, remember?
None of these monsters needed a machine gun, rifle or pistol.
Neither did the jihadists who slaughtered thousands in New York. They used airplanes, remember?
It’s not the weapon that threatens us.
These weapons existed long before America turned into the killing field it’s fast becoming.
They were readily available back when life made sense, remember?
They haven’t changed, but as a society we sure have.
Someone needs to say so, but that would take courage on the part of our leaders, a quality unfortunately in short supply these days.
So they continue playing to the politically correct crowd, trolling for cheap applause.
Meanwhile, nothing changes.