As a former police officer I take special note of news items, commentaries and the liberal/conservative oratories concerning gun violence. Most coppers will tell you they've seen the wrong end of a gun a time or two and have also been witness to the death that sometimes comes with firearms in the hands of the wrong people..
Of particular interest is the narrative whose central theme is, 'stricter gun control or outright banning of guns will reduce gun violence'.
Not true. Not even close. You only need look as far as Chicago or New York City for examples of strict control not working. Theirs are among the most stringent in the United States, yet gun-related deaths continue to climb in those cities. No matter how much control you exert over firearms, the criminal element will always have them. Always. After all, they're criminals, right? They are defined by NOT following the laws of the land like most of the populace.
The question becomes, 'how do you keep them out of the wrong hands?' Well, not through gun control, that's for sure. Its just not possible.
Take, for example, drug trafficking. Heroin and cocaine are both illegal, yet their availability on America's streets flourishes. The narc cops take down major players and three more take their places. Dope finds its way into the prisons and jails, and they are the most strictly-controlled portion of our citizenry.
If some deranged person wants to kill, for whatever reason, they'll find a way to do it, firearm or no firearm. Timothy McVeigh? He used a very large homemade bomb and a rental truck and killed 169 people, injuring over six-hundred-eighty more, 22 years ago in Oklahoma City. Every few weeks we hear of a nut case using a vehicle to intentionally run down pedestrians somewhere in the world. Back in 1982 there was a nationwide scare after some crazy started putting potassium cyanide in Tylenol capsules, killing eight people and forever changing the way over-the-counter drugs are packaged and sold in this country.
Deeper background checks prior to gun sales? I don't have an issue with it...unless, somewhere down the line, Congress or whoever the President is gets into the equation of deciding the definition of 'mental fitness'. There are those obvious cases, easy to differentiate, as to whether or not someone should be permitted to own a gun. But what about the guy who never goes outside and always keeps his blinds closed? Is HE unfit just because he prefers to live as a hermit, because his neighbors consider him 'strange'? Or how about the twenty-four-year-old woman who posted on social media ten years earlier that she wanted to 'kill' someone because they did something she didn't like? The issue with social media that folks don't take into consideration is that, once you hit that 'send' button, it's out there forever, no matter if you think you've deleted or erased it. SOMEwhere it's recorded or on file.
After thirty-one years wearing a badge, I can attest to the fact that there are normal, everyday people who walk among us that have no business owning a firearm, individuals who, from the outside, are playing at 33 1/3 along with the rest of us but inside their heads the turn table is doing 78 RPMs.
I can envision all the Millenials pausing to Google that last bit of information.
So what IS the answer? I don't know, but think about this: the year I graduated, 1975, there were TWO school shootings I could find record of; one in New Jersey that killed one man and the other in Brampton, as in Ontario, Canada.
And that, friends, was at a time that it was not uncommon to see rifles or shotguns in gun racks inside pickup trucks in high school parking lots across America, making firearms much more obtainable.
Ask yourself this question, then: what has changed, from then to now?
