Firearms Regulations/Prohibitions Won’t Solve the Problem of School Massacres (Part 1)
United States –-(Ammoland.com)- After the tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School we have seen a fervent push from our elected officials and the liberal media for new regulations and prohibitions to be placed on firearms.
Specifically, calling for bans on semiautomatic rifles and limitations on magazine capacity. At best these efforts are misguided… to a greater extent what we are seeing here is an attempt to manipulate public sentiment about a horrific tragedy in order to further a political agenda.
The problem with pursuing “gun control” in the wake of such a terrible event is that it wont solve the problem. Simply put, it will do nothing to keep another tragedy like the slaughter that occurred at Sandy Hook from ever happening again. The simple fact is that firearms regulations/prohibitions have never stopped an event like this from occurring in the first place. A little know fact that the media is refusing to cover during all of this is that the state of Connecticut already had an “assault weapons ban” in place, and the school of Sandy Hook was already designated as a “gun free zone“. Neither of these end-goals of gun control did anything to stop a killer from slaughtering little children.
Likewise, the tragedy that happened at Columbine High School took place during the time period of the nationwide Clinton era “assault weapons ban“… it too did absolutely nothing to save lives on that day. There are also plenty of nations around the world with much stricter gun laws than we have that have also experienced the same horrible tragedies. Laws on the books never, ever stop a criminal who is determined to carry out such a heinous act.
Yet, these are the things that our politicians and the liberal media are telling us could have prevented this tragedy. These are the things that they are saying we must do to prevent these tragedies from occurring in the future… but it wont fix the problem because it doesn’t effectively address the problem.
If you want to actually solve this problem and take the effective steps necessary to make sure that a tragedy like this doesn’t happen again then you must first correctly diagnose the problem. Not doing so will only compound the problem and result in nothing more than a witch hunt. Passing new firearms regulations/prohibitions to solve this problem will do nothing more than give people a false sense of security going forward and continue to put our children’s lives in danger.
The problem that we must solve is not defined by the inanimate objects that this murder used to carry out this horrible act… its not about the guns the killer used to murder these children anymore than it is about the car that he used to facilitate getting himself all the way across town to carry out his plan. Attempting to put legislative restrictions on the tools used will not stop this type of incident from happening again in the future. If that is what we choose to do in the aftermath of such a rampage then we will not solve the problem… Future murderers will merely choose different tools to commit the same horrific deeds, and the carnage will not end.
Guns are not the problem. Quite frankly, you could have taken every semiautomatic rifle in the world and thrown them into the deepest and darkest depths of the ocean and it would not have stopped what happened at Sandy Hook. The level of carnage that we saw could just have very well been carried out without the use of a semiautomatic rifle.
What we saw at Sandy Hook was a case of an armed adult vs unarmed first graders. When situations like that occur the end result will always be the exact same thing that we saw at Sandy Hook. That monster could just have easily delivered the same level of carnage with a handgun, a revolver, or even a butcher’s knife. The tool did not matter. When you have helpless children in a confined space going up against an armed adult, the body count is always going to be catastrophic. The tool used to carry out this horrendous act doesn’t matter, and if we are going to solve this problem then we mustn’t allow ourselves to get into a situation where we can’t see the forest for the trees. We must not get so hung up on placing regulations on a tool that we cant find real solutions that might actually solve this problem.
The proper analysis of the problem is this… there was a mad-man who wanted to get into an elementary school and murder little children. Period. It isn’t something that is nuanced or something that falls along any political lines. That is the problem, plain and simple that we must address.
We must deny access to our children to those who wish to do them harm. That is what we must prevent if we are going to keep our children safe. The solve here is that we must take the steps necessary to prevent someone who is willing and able to carry out such an atrocity from ever having access to our children.
You can stop school massacres one of two ways. You can either round up every single mad-man on planet earth and lock them up and throw away the key or you can keep them from getting to our children. You’re never going to be able to screen out all of the evil people out there and isolate them from society. If you can, then by all means go ahead and do it and we can end this national discussion right now. But it cant be done.
Likewise, you are never going to keep the means to kill away from someone who is warped and twisted enough to kill his own mother and then go to a school and slaughter little children. Gun, knife, baseball bat, farm implement, or even their own bare hands… they will always find a way. What happened at Sandy Hook was not because of easy access to guns, it was because of easy access to our schools.
I most certainly do NOT want to turn our schools into prisons, but the way to solve this problem is to put real security measures into place that will keep these lunatics from ever getting inside of a school to carry out these acts in the first place. In addition to that, we must have layers of security inside of the school which will give us the means to stop these lunatics before they reach the classrooms. We also need to improve the level of security at the point of contact with students (the classrooms), as well as increase their ability to escape quickly from harms way.
If we are going to truly protect our children we need to take a long, hard look at the problem and properly diagnose it. The introduction of new firearms regulations and prohibitions will do nothing to solve the problem of school massacres. We don’t need to have a national conversation about “gun control“… We need to have a national conversation about school security. “Gun control” is merely an end goal of politicians… politicians who are either too dogmatic to see the reality of the situation or who are more focused on exploiting a national catastrophe in order to achieve a desired political goal than they are in actually protecting our defenseless children.
*This article is part 1 of a series in which I discuss school massacres and what we can do to stop them from occurring again in the future.
About:
Eric at the Gunmart Blog – Eric is a gun blogger, firearms enthusiast, and sorry excuse for a hunter. He is also an AmmoLand Shoting Sports News Columnist. Leave him some comments on this article before you go. You can also follow Eric on Facebook, Twitter and at his blog, Gunmart. Visit: GunmartBlog.com