I wish the twenty children and six adults in Connecticut had not been murdered last week and I hope the best for the families of the victims. Proceeding from such an incident should arise a discussion about how to keep children safe. But no. The media and politicians spawn a debate about gun control. Isn’t the issue the safety of our children? Does more gun control actually make our children safer? What if gun control in fact made our children less safe? Could we support that?
The sheriff’s department where we live has informed us that there is nothing that it can do to stop our church and school from being robbed and vandalized. We have been vandalized or robbed 15-20 times in the years I have been pastor here. Law enforcement here cannot stop crimes from being committed against us and can only prosecute crimes already perpetrated against us. We were informed that they could not even really prosecute criminals who commit them against us unless we were willing to purchase video surveillance equipment to catch the criminals in the act. And then we have caught at least three different people in the act through the years — one parent voluntarily paid for the damage and the other two did nothing even with the coercion of law enforcement. We sat together with the criminals in a victim reconciliation program, where we talked together about what they did, but we received zero remuneration. This seems to be about par for the course today.
Like you, this incident has got me thinking about the safety of our school. What would happen if a killer came on our campus with a rifle or handgun and began firing at our teachers and students? I can tell you what would happen right now. We would have a massacre on our hands. I wouldn’t allow him to keep killing people without trying to do something about it, so I would likely be dead. Our teachers would be left with doing about the same thing that the teachers in Newtown did: hide, lock, and barricade the children into a bathroom or closet, throw their bodies over children as a human shield, or charge the killer to distract him and hope that he misses.
Let me present to you a different scenario. It’s not happening right now because it is illegal as far as I know. I’m going to be investigating how far we can go here to protect ourselves. As I mentioned, law enforcement has told us that they cannot and will not protect us. Instead of being unarmed, imagine that every one of our teachers carried a concealed handgun. As soon as a man like this started open firing at our people, three or four of us would be firing back at him. What would that do? It could stop him while he had shot only a few, before he shot many. Knowing we are armed could deter him in the first place. If we shot at him, it could make him leave or look for cover, where he was no longer on the offensive, but on the defensive until more law enforcement could arrive. Those all sound like a safer situation for children.
Let me play the devil’s advocate. We ban semi-automatic weapons. Some of these terms are foreign to many people, if not most. Many city folks don’t know much about guns. Most hunting rifles are semi-automatic. Handguns are semi-automatic. Semi-automatic means you can keep successively firing bullets one at a time. None of the recent mass murders occurred with automatic weapons, even though you’ll hear media persons saying semi-automatic and automatic together like they are the same thing. An “assault rifle” is usually nothing different than a semi-automatic rifle that looks like a military weapon. Looks like.
If we ban semi-automatic weapons, we are banning almost all guns. And then criminals, people who commit horrendous crimes, law-breakers, surprisingly don’t mind violating the law. They are going to murder numerous people, which is worse than owning a gun without a permit. If you ask them if they have a gun, they will lie, because people who will murder numerous people don’t mind lying to people. If you would kill a person, then you would easily lie. Does anyone really need to go through this with me? I guess so. This is how simple it all is.
So criminals, who don’t submit to gun laws, go with murderous intent to kill unarmed people, people who don’t have guns because the law says they can’t.
This all reminds me of what happens when a drunk driver hits a van full of children. What do they do? They make new laws for van safety. I can’t say that I understand the thinking. It is the kind of thinking, I believe, however, that goes along with a culture that has become deluded and reprobate. Or we could just call it NOT thinking. People have a feeling and act on that feeling. The feeling says that criminals or insane or murderous thugs shouldn’t have an “assault rifle,” so we should ban semi-automatic weapons. If the man didn’t have the gun, he wouldn’t have murdered the people. It’s true. But it was illegal for him to shoot people, and that law didn’t stop him. Why would a gun law stop him? It wouldn’t. No one wants him to have the gun. Like the sheriff said, we can’t stop them. It’s only a feeling that will do nothing to protect children, actually leave them more vulnerable.
So what would stop him? If we both had a gun, he could be stopped from doing the damage. The data, actual facts, proves this out. The children would be safer if those watching over them could be or were armed with guns. If we wanted to keep children safe, if that was the issue, then we would have the adults in charge carrying guns. In a perfect world, no criminal would murder anyone, but we’re talking about the world we live in.
If someone wants to get to the root of the murdering, it isn’t the guns. It is the culture of death we live in. All abortion and especially late term abortion is murder. A life is snuffed out with no good reason, the life of the most helpless person in our society. Murderers murder and keep murdering without receiving the appropriate punishment. We have a president who, while a state representative in Illinois, fought for murdering babies who survived a botched abortion. It was hard for me to sympathize with his crocodile tears. He supports the murder of the most innocent, so please stop the act, I say.
On top of all this is the possible motive of the government to disarm it’s people. People are more pliable when they can’t fight. They’ll have to go along with whatever right or freedom is taken away and without recourse. The government will never say there’s a motive to disarm people. The War for Independence started when the British marched to Concord, Massachusetts to confiscate a storage of weapons. This was prominent in the minds of the founding fathers when they penned the second amendment.
Let’s say that both sides of the gun debate said that they really cared about the safety of the children. If that was the case, then we wouldn’t care about whether our position was enacted, just that we did what was best to protect our children. More guns, not less would better and more likely keep our children safe.
Absolutely agree. I am interested in hearing from you concerning the response of the authorities there to your ideas.
I heard Bill Bennett talking about the following: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”
The whole article:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335739/facts-about-mass-shootings-john-fund
I preached a message in the Sunday School hour yesterday titled, "Thinking Biblically About The Connecticut Murders." Anyone interested in listening to it can hear it at http://www.midcoastbaptistchurch.com/audio.php It has been clicked on more than 500 times in two days.
Rush Limbaugh pointed out what none of the MSM has: the murderer shot himself when SOMEONE ELSE POINTED A GUN AT HIM.
Same thing at the mall in Oregon last week.
Too bad someone didn't point a gun at him sooner as in one of the teachers being armed.
The principal and psychologist were heroic in their attempts to stop him, but it is a shame they only had their bodies to use against his gun.
Where there's guns around, I would prefer to be able to control them — by having one on my person, and I am not with any law-enforcement. Why is it that crime in Switzerland is practically nill, and only against foreigners who do not carry (everyone in Switzerland is required to own a gun) while in places like Taiwan where it is the death penalty to own a gun the murder rate is double that of the US? The answer is not stricter gun-control laws but allowing teachers and responsible adults to carry with fewer restrictions. While this doesn't keep criminals from getting their hands on weapons, what we are doing now is either; what more relaxed gun-laws will do is make it harder for criminals to act because of having fewer unarmed victims.
Kent, I think you are right about the problem: culture of death; and probably right about the this-world solution for prevention (to the extent possible).
I was thinking about why there seems to be high-level reactions this time when there weren't over the other three incidents that happened on Obama's watch. I think the difference is the number of little children involved and the picture of that beautiful brave teacher who sacrificed herself for her kids. The outrage (rightly so) spurs emotional reactions that don't really address the problem.
John Fund had a good article on this on National Review Online. He points out that a country that has millions of guns (or whatever the number is) already in circulation will not be able to effectively control guns anyway. So gun-control legislation just won't work.
Unfortunately, if the politicians and the media have their way, all you will get is more gun-control legislation.
People up here tend to be very smug, since we have gun control and we are "better" than those USA gun-nut whackos (just reporting the viewpoint, not one I share). However, we have had our own tragedies with mass killings like this. Our gun-control laws have not prevented them.
Not an easy problem to solve.
Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3
The way to solve the problem is actually simple: the consummation of all things.
Until then, have you considered asking the NRA for help with the legalities of it? I hope you succeed in this, as it would set a legal precedent (especially in a leftist state like CA) for schools in other states that went red the past year.