So the NRA waited a week to announce it’s contribution to the discussion of gun control with the usual “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun” drivel. Their big idea was to have an armed police officer in all the schools to make sure that no one with an assault gun can do what Adam Lanza did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Besides the impractical nature of doing that, besides the costs associated with doing that and beside the message it sends to young kids, it will not work. Anyone who wants to harm others and is willing to die to do it, will not be stopped by a sleepy guard at a school. This reminds me of the proposed action that the Massachusetts Aeronautical Commission wanted after the attacks of 9/11. One was that they want an armed guard at every Massachusetts airport, 24/7. To date that hasn’t been done. And for good reason.
To see a good response to the announcement that the NRA made Friday see Lawrence O’Donnell’s comments. The link is here. Good piece.
The other thing that baffles me is way so many gun owners/enthusiasts are now going out and buying more guns since the Sandy Hook tragedy. How many assault guns do you need? I personally know of an individual who doesn’t like the government and has many, many guns. What is he expecting? How many guns can one person fire at a time? On TV recently there was a piece about gun owners and one person showed his gun collection. He at least had them in a gun safe. He had over a dozen riffles. Again how many do you need?
The issue isn’t with the average gun owner who is sane and law abiding. It’s just that there are so many guns out there that it is very easy for some person who might be sane but have grudge against someone or some group, for what ever reason, to get the guns he wants and do some terrible things.
We have a terrible gun culture in this country and that has to change as well as the laws about owning guns. Just to make the point about the American gun culture, in both the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, over 6,000 service men and women have died. Total in both wars since they started! In just 2011 alone, over 8,000 people have been killed by guns in the U.S. So every year we loose more people to guns than we do in ten years plus of wars. Why don’t we get upset about that? Think about it.