Columbine Survivor Addresses Gun Issues

Evan Todd, who was among the 21 students wounded in Colorado during the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre which saw 12 students and a teacher murdered, has written an open letter to President Obama concerning his proposed firearm restrictions.

Don’t expect to see it in the Philadelphia Inquirer or Delaware County Daily Times.


Here it is:

Mr. President,

As a student who was shot and wounded
during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun
debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives:

Universal Background Checks

First, a universal background check
will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite
impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they
can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other
avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will
create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal
activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals,
and people who will do harm to American citizens.

Second, universal background checks
will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax
payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it
now, let alone create another function of government that will have a
huge monthly bill attached to it.

Third, is a universal background check
system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please
define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for
universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would
try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through
the lens of time.

It is not impossible to think that a
tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and
others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten,
twenty, or one hundred years from now — but future generations have the
natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as
much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our
forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants
ever since the Second Amendment was adopted.

Ban on Military-Style Assault Weapons

The evidence is very clear pertaining
to the inadequacies of the assault weapons ban. It had little to no
effect when it was in place from 1994 until 2004. It was during this
time that I personally witnessed two fellow students murder twelve of my
classmates and one teacher. The assault weapons ban did not deter these
two murderers, nor did the other thirty-something laws that they broke.

Gun ownership is at an all time high.
And although tragedies like Columbine and Newtown are exploited by
ideologues and special-interest lobbying groups, crime is at an all time
low. The people have spoken. Gun store shelves have been emptied. Gun
shows are breaking attendance records. Gun manufacturers are sold out
and back ordered. Shortages on ammo and firearms are countrywide. The
American people have spoken and are telling you that our Second
Amendment shall not be infringed.

10-Round Limit for Magazines

Virginia Tech was the site of the
deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Seung-Hui Cho used two of the
smallest caliber hand guns manufactured and a handful of ten round
magazines. There are no substantial facts that prove that limited
magazines would make any difference at all.
Second, this is just another law that endangers law-abiding citizens.
I’ve heard you ask, “why does someone need 30 bullets to kill a deer?”

Let me ask you this: Why would you
prefer criminals to have the ability to out-gun law-abiding citizens?
Under this policy, criminals will still have their 30-round magazines,
but the average American will not. Whose side are you on?

Lastly, when did they government get
into the business of regulating “needs?” This is yet another example of
government overreaching and straying from its intended purpose.

Selling to Criminals

Mr. President, these are your words:
“And finally, Congress needs to help, rather than hinder, law
enforcement as it does its job. We should get tougher on people who buy
guns with the express purpose of turning around and selling them to
criminals. And we should severely punish anybody who helps them do
this.”

Why don’t we start with Eric Holder and thoroughly investigate the Fast and Furious program?

Furthermore, the vast majority of
these mass murderers bought their weapons legally and jumped through all
the hoops —  because they were determined to murder. Adding more hoops
and red tape will not stop these types of people. It doesn’t now — so
what makes you think it will in the future? Criminals who cannot buy
guns legally just resort to the black market.

Criminals and murderers will always find a way.

Critical Examination

Mr. President, in theory, your
initiatives and proposals sound warm and fuzzy — but in reality they are
far from what we need. Your initiatives seem to punish law-abiding
American citizens and enable the murderers, thugs, and other lowlifes
who wish to do harm to others.

Let me be clear: These ideas are the
worst possible initiatives if you seriously care about saving lives and
also upholding your oath of office. There is no dictate, law, or
regulation that will stop bad things from happening — and you know that.
Yet you continue to push the rhetoric. Why?

You said, “If we can save just one person it is worth it.” Well here are a few ideas that will save more that one individual:

First, forget all of your current
initiatives and 23 purposed executive orders. They will do nothing more
than impede law-abiding citizens and breach the intent of the
Constitution. Each initiative steals freedom, grants more power to an
already-overreaching government, and empowers and enables criminals to
run amok.

Second, press Congress to repeal the
“Gun Free Zone Act.” Don’t allow America’s teachers and students to be
endangered one-day more. These parents and teachers have the natural
right to defend themselves and not be looked at as criminals. There is
no reason teachers must disarm themselves to perform their jobs. There
is also no reason a parent or volunteer should be disarmed when they
cross the school line.

This is your chance to correct history
and restore liberty. This simple act of restoring freedom will deter
would-be murderers and for those who try, they will be met with
resistance.

Mr. President, do the right thing,
restore freedom, and save lives. Show the American people that you stand
with them and not with thugs and criminals.

Respectfully,

Severely Concerned Citizen, Evan M. Todd

Columbine Survivor Addresses Gun Issues

Columbine Survivor Addresses Gun Issues

Murder Statistics And Gun Bans

Courtesy Cathy Craddock

From the World Health Organization:

The latest Murder Statistics for the world:

Murders per 100,000 citizens

Honduras 91.6
El Salvador 69.2
Cote d’lvoire 56.9
Jamaica 52.2
Venezuela 45.1
Belize 41.4
US Virgin Islands 39.2
Guatemala 38.5
Saint Kits and Nevis 38.2
Zambia 38.0
Uganda 36.3
Malawi 36.0
Lesotho 35.2
Trinidad and Tobago 35.2
Colombia 33.4
South Africa 31.8
Congo 30.8
Central African Republic 29.3
Bahamas 27.4
Puerto Rico 26.2
Saint Lucia 25.2
Dominican Republic 25.0
Tanzania 24.5
Sudan 24.2
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 22.9
Ethiopia 22.5
Guinea 22.5
Dominica 22.1
Burundi 21.7
Democratic Republic of the Congo 21.7
Panama 21.6
Brazil 21.0
Equatorial Guinea 20.7
Guinea-Bissau 20.2
Kenya 20.1
Kyrgyzstan 20.1
Cameroon 19.7
Montserrat 19.7
Greenland 19.2
Angola 19.0
Guyana 18.6
Burkina Faso 18.0
Eritrea 17.8
Namibia 17.2
Rwanda 17.1
Mexico 16.9
Chad 15.8
Ghana 15.7
Ecuador 15.2
North Korea 15.2
Benin 15.1
Sierra Leone 14.9
Mauritania 14.7
Botswana 14.5
Zimbabwe 14.3
Gabon 13.8
Nicaragua 13.6
French Guiana 13.3
Papua New Guinea 13.0
Swaziland 12.9
Bermuda 12.3
Comoros 12.2
Nigeria 12.2
Cape Verde 11.6
Grenada 11.5
Paraguay 11.5
Barbados 11.3
Togo 10.9
Gambia 10.8
Peru 10.8
Myanmar 10.2
Russia 10.2
Liberia 10.1
Costa Rica 10.0
Nauru 9.8
Bolivia 8.9
Mozambique 8.8
Kazakhstan 8.8
Senegal 8.7
Turks and Caicos Islands 8.7
Mongolia 8.7
British Virgin Islands 8.6
Cayman Islands 8.4
Seychelles 8.3
Madagascar 8.1
Indonesia 8.1
Mali 8.0
Pakistan 7.8
Moldova 7.5
Kiribati 7.3
Guadeloupe 7.0
Haiti 6.9
Timor-Leste 6.9
Anguilla 6.8
Antigua and Barbuda 6.8
Lithuania 6.6
Uruguay 5.9
Philippines 5.4
Ukraine 5.2
Estonia 5.2
Cuba 5.0
Belarus 4.9
Thailand 4.8
Suriname 4.6
Laos 4.6
Georgia 4.3
Martinique 4.2

And

The United States 4.2

ALL the countries above America have 100% gun bans

 

Murder Statistics And Gun Bans

Wellington Oliveira You Didn’t Hear About

Wellington Oliveira killed 12 children and himself on April 7, 2011 at Tasso da Silveira Municipal School which is an elementary school in Rido de Janeiro, Brazil. Twelve other people were seriously wounded.

Oliveira, 23, used a .38-caliber revolver and .32-caliber revolver to do the damage.
Brazil has strict gun laws. All weapons are required to be registered with the state, the minimum age for ownership is 25, and it is almost impossible to legally carry a weapon outside the home. Gun owners are required to pay an BRL $85 fee every three years for each weapon they own.
The laws didn’t save the children, just as the relatively strict gun laws in Connecticut didn’t save the children in Newtown.
Those who want to take advantage of the tragedy and seek not to let a “serious crisis go to waste” should hang their heads in eternal shame.
Wellington Oliveira You Didn't Hear About
Wellington Oliveira You Didn’t Hear About

Thoughts On The Connecticut Massacre

Thoughts On The Connecticut Massacre — As of this writing 27 persons are reported dead after a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. including 18 children, the gunman and the gunman’s mother who was a teacher at the school and whose class the gunman appears to have targeted.

The gunman has been identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza and has reportedly killed himself. A Sig Saur handgun, a Glock 9 handgun and a Bushmaster rifle were found at the scene.

If the reports are correct, this will be the nation’s second worst massacre of school children surpassed only by the Bath, Mich. tragedy of 1927 in which a twisted man named Andrew Kehoe blew up his farm and the school killing 45 including 38  children, himself and his wife who he beat to death at his home. His suicide was performed by driving to the disaster scene at the school and exploding his car amidst a crowd.

Kehoe was the school board treasurer and plotted for months to blow up the Bath Consolidated School sneaking explosives in while pretending to do repairs.

The death toll at Columbine High School in 1999 was 13.

The first mass shooting in the U.S. occurred on April 9, 1891 when 70-year-old James Foster fired a shotgun at a group of children on the playground of St. Mary’s Parochial School in Newburgh, N.Y. causing several minor injuries.

For the next several decades — excepting the incident in Bath — school violence involved specific disputes rather than random attacks. That changed on Jan. 29, 1979 when 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire from her window with a .22 caliber rifle given to her by her father on children at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego  who she “said looked like cows”. Two adults were killed and eight children wounded.

The shooting was the inspiration for the Boomtown Rats hit I Don’t Like Mondays.

Since then there have been at least 12 mass school shootings in which children were targeted just because they were children.

‘Cuz there are no reasons as the song says. Choosing evil does not mix well with choosing reason.

Ed note: The gunman was misidentified as the killer’s brother in initial reports.
Thoughts On The Connecticut Massacre
Thoughts On The Connecticut Massacre

Felons With Guns Would Get Automatic 5 Years

The State House, May 23, passed House Bill 2331 by a vote of 190-7. The bill imposes a five-year minimum sentence without parole for felons caught illegally possessing firearms, says State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129)
The bill would impose additional penalties for a subsequent offense.
It is now before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Justice Breyer Robbed By Machete-Waving Home Intruder

Justice Breyer Robbed By Machete-Waving Home Intruder — Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed Thursdays, Feb. 9, when machete-wielding man broke into his vacation home on the Caribbean island of Nevis and stole $1,000.

Breyer, 73, was with his wife and guests.

In 2004,  Justice David Souter was assaulted by a group of men as he jogged on the street in Washington.

In 1996,  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had her purse snatched while she was out walking with her husband and daughter near their home in Washington.

It seems that some liberals are just to far gone to be turned into conservatives by a mugging.

It also seems that conservative Supreme Court Justices don’t wind up being crime victims. The proper understanding of the Second Amendment appears to have advantages.

 

Justice Breyer Robbed By Machete-Waving Home Intruder

Justice Breyer Robbed By Machete-Waving Home Intruder

Good Guys With Guns Mean Safer Cities

John Lott, respected researcher and a resident of Swarthmore, is noting  that Supreme Court decisions overturning gun-control laws in Washington D.C. and Chicago have brought about significant changes in the safety status of the those cities’ residents. Good Guys With Guns Mean Safer Cities

Namely, they’ve become more so.

Lott notes that in the first six months 2011, there were 14 percent fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year   when having a handgun was illegal.

“It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982,” he writes.


He says that the murder rate in Washington D.C. is down 34 percent since the Heller decision in 2008, which overturned that city’s gun laws.

Thank you, President Bush for the judges you picked.

The same effect, by the way, can be seen closer to home. Harrisburg made “right to carry” applicable to residents of Philadelphia in 1995, a year in which there were 432 homicides. By 1999, homicides there plummeted to 292.

While there were some spikes in the ensuing years (406 in 2006)  it never reached the number of the gun-ban years.

Last year, there were 306 homicides in the city. The city’s population has been stable at a little more than 1.5 million over the last 15 years.

Of course, the ability to effectively protect oneself is not the most important marker for safety. A society that sincerely holds that people are designed and loved by a creator regardless of that person’s convenience to society will be a very safe place in which few will feel need to have a gun.

Believe it or not, Philadelphia once came fairly close to that ideal. In 1958,  the city — which then had population of 2 million — had just 117 murders.

Good Guys With Guns

More Kudos For Pat Meehan

Freshman Congressman Pat Meehan  (R-Pa7) used the skills he honed as the Delaware County District Attorney who convicted John duPont and the U.S. Attorney who took down State Senator Vince Fumo to get a  hapless ATF bureaucrat to fess up that a whole lot of federal agencies were involved in a convoluted scheme to smuggle guns to Mexican drug cartels in the name of law enforcement.

The bureaucrat was William Newell who was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives’ special agent in charge of  Operation Fast and Furious which began in  October 2009 on the watch of Attorney General Eric Holder.

He told Meehan during a congressional hearing, Tuesday, July 26, that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency,  the Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI all knew about it.

At least the Washington bureaucrats who run those agencies.

Fast and Furious was allegedly a ‘sting’ operation in which the feds twisted the arms of gun dealers in Arizona to sell 1,800 firearms — most of which were AK-47 style semi-automatic rifles — to straw buyers for the drug cartels and which were allowed over the border to Mexico without the knowledge of the Mexican government or even U.S. agents in that country.

Newell could not explain how the United States would prosecute those drug cartel bosses in whose hands the weapons wound up.

It would be fodder for a sitcom except that a lot of innocent people were killed by those guns including U.S. law enforcement officers.

The Mexican government is not happy.

Some are saying that the real motivation behind Operation Fast and Furious was to make gun dealers and Second Amendment defenders look bad which would plough the ground for stricter gun control.

You are not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

Quick question: have you read about Meehan’s performance in any of his hometown media?

 

More Kudos For Pat Meehan

Stupidity, Death And Eric Holder

A shameful scandal concerning the death of a Border Patrol agent is starting to creep into the public consciousness.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) began a program in 2005 called Project Gunrunner in which American dealers knowingly sold guns to straw buyers for transfer to criminals in Mexico to set them up for arrest.

By early 2009, it had resulted in charges being filed against 1,400 persons.

In October of that year, the ATF decided to stomp on the accelerator with a Project Gunrunner operation they named “Fast and Furious”.

This plan was objected to by agents on the ground and by the gun dealers as well, but arms were twisted to get them in line and it went into effect. Within 15 months almost 1,800 weapons, most of which were AK-47 semi-automatic rifles, went over the border. The Mexican government was never told. These guns were used in the commission of a host of crimes including the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on Dec. 14, 2010.

Terry’s murder led to ATF agent John Dodson going public with the travesty.

And this has led to congressional hearings.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who oversees the ATF and under whose watch Fast and Furious happened, had this heated exchange Tuesday, May 3, with Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA49) during a hearing before the House’s Judiciary Committee.

Stupidity, Death And Eric Holder

Stupidity, Death And Eric Holder