I wholeheartedly believe the president.
Despite seven years of foisting gimmicks on the American people, designed to score cheap political points while leaving substantive issues unaddressed, President Obama has finally unleashed his true passion. Speaking off-script, he fired with both barrels at America’s lack of stringent gun control laws, blaming that, and ultimately the American people, for the mass shooting at an Oregon community college.
For speaking with the courage of his convictions, the President gets an A.
But for failing to understand even the most basic “cause and effect” relationship — a concept mastered by fourth graders — Mr. Obama earns an F, illustrating a disturbing lack of judgment.
It’s one thing if a politician thinks blaming guns for the nation’s violence will be a winning issue in the polls. That kind of naked political calculation, while repugnant, is at least understandable.
But how is it possible the president of the United States actually believes guns themselves are the root cause for so much blood in the streets? It is unfathomable.
Let’s review this situation with our eye on the real target:
1. Enough is enough. It is time, once and for all, to stop ignoring the white elephant in the room: guns are not responsible for these mass killings. And let’s stop the feel-good fairy tale rhetoric that sounds good but accomplishes absolutely nothing: getting bulletproof backpacks for our kids, placing metal detectors in schools, and advocating over-the-top gun control laws all in the name of this “never happening again.”
It’s time to get down to the business of “why,” and identify the real problems, because you can’t provide an answer if you don’t know the question.
And until we truly look in the mirror, this will happen again. You can do everything discussed above, and it will still occur, because they are tactics, not strategy. Big difference.
This didn’t happen in the 1950’s — or even the 1980’s or most of the ‘90’s — when access to guns was considerably easier than now. We didn’t bolt school doors a generation ago. We didn’t have lockdowns. We didn’t whitewash everything. We didn’t coddle our kids all the time, and we didn’t get a trophy even when we lost. Oh, and we didn’t kill people when something didn’t go our way or we had hurt feelings.
It is time to stop kicking the can down the road while patting ourselves on the back for “solutions” that won’t solve anything except to soothe our own egos.
2. Are people — the president included — really that naive to think that a mentally ill person with no intention of seeing tomorrow’s sunrise would not try killing as many as possible, even if he didn’t have guns?
In other words, we are supposed to believe that a would-be murderer wakes up one day and thinks, “If I had guns, I would go shoot everyone I see, including myself, but since I don’t, I’ll just grab a latte, mosey down to the gym, drop off the dry cleaning and get a jumpstart on those reports my boss needs.”
Sorry, but in The Real World, it doesn’t work that way.
Instead, radicals and people with mental illness do whatever it takes to “succeed,” guns notwithstanding. They make crude but lethal bombs out of household items such as pressure cookers (Boston Bombers). Or they grab a knife and start wildly stabbing (Pittsburgh, where 22 were injured by a student, and China, where 29 died and 130 were injured in a knifing spree). Or they drive through a crowd to kill as many as possible with their car. And some, of course, steal guns and murder gun owners in preparation for their mass killings (Sandy Hook).
Taking the call to ban more guns to its “logical” end, we must therefore ban kitchen appliances, cutlery, and yes, even automobiles. And we should punish law-abiding gun owners who were victimized by criminals, making them the “bad guy.”
The lack of common sense in such “reforms” is simply astounding.
3. What should we do about guns? Implement reasonable laws to close loopholes, such as mandating that all people buying firearms at gun shows and via the Internet be subjected to a 60-second background check. Sounds simple enough, but is it opposed by many gun-rights organizations.
Despite claims by conspiracy theorists, background checks are not federal gun registries, nor do they lead to them. Background checks are not a conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat issue. Since they do not impede or infringe upon a law-abiding citizen’s right to own a firearm, it’s not “gun control” at all. It’s criminal control.
And the checks work: there have been 1.8 million denials since 1998. In 2010, half of those denied had felony convictions or indictments, almost 20 percent were fugitives, and 11 percent violated state laws.
To allow convicted felons or the mentally ill to buy a gun with quasi-legal impunity is crazy. Granted, they aren’t legally allowed to possess firearms, but any criminal with half a brain will get his gun via this loophole rather than risk getting caught in an undercover sting.
Background checks are useful, but not a panacea. The FBI database is only as good as the information it receives from states. If criminal and mental health records aren’t routinely sent and/or updated, it won’t be as effective as it could be. It’s not perfect, but that’s not a reason to scrap expanding it.
Nothing can or will ever fully prevent lunatics from engaging in a shooting spree, but a background check system is a solid first line of defense.
4. Address mental health issues. America must better fund mental health services, and make the system considerably more effective. A good start would be passing Texas Sen. John Cornyn’s Mental Health And Safe Communities Act — legislation designed to help mental health patients before they strike.
According to the Washington Post, “the bill would clarify the types of mental health records required to be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and encourage states to send more information to the database by creating a stick-and-carrot compliance system. It would also encourage ‘best practices’ for responding to mental health crises, including the use of specially trained response teams by federal and local law enforcement agencies.”
Prevention, rather than overreaction, is critical to keeping the peace.
5 .Perhaps most important, we need to stop coddling our children. Doing so has left them unable to cope with everyday life, leaving many dysfunctional. But for some, any type of rejection leads to violence against anyone and anything, snapping when something finally doesn’t go their way. Someone doesn’t like them, they get fired, a teacher or boss disciplines them — and they go on a rampage. We are raising generations of extremely risk-averse and thin-skinned individuals who are “offended” by everything — a complex fueled by a woefully misguided sense of entitlement. It has become a dangerous condition, exacerbated by a romanticized outlook of going out in a “blaze of glory.”
Parents need to stop being their children’s friend, and start being parents again. Back to basics.
There is no single cause for these mass shootings, and it will take a comprehensive effort to stop such tragedies. But that can only happen if we stop shooting blanks, and keep the real issues that need addressing squarely in our crosshairs.
