Have you ever seen the (not so good) movie Maximum Overdrive? Released in 1986 and starring a young Emilio Estevez, the movie was inspired by a Stephen King novella in which machines on earth, including trucks, cars, and even soda vending machines come to life and try to kill us humans. In one scene, an unmanned military jeep with an M-60 machine gun mounted on the back approaches some humans holed up in a restaurant, and the M-60, by itself, begins firing at the people inside.
Sometimes, I think the anti-gun crowd believe that guns can really do that. Oh, you don't believe me? Check out the front-page, above-the-fold headline in today's Sunday Sacramento Bee. In bold white letters against a dark background photo of some confiscated rifles and shotguns, the headline is: Sacramento's KILLER GUNS. No, this is not an ad for an upcoming movie, this is the headline in a major American daily newspaper. That's right folks, guns get up in the morning and decide that they are going to kill someone, then the guns go out and spontaneously fire at passersby... or something like that. That's what came to my mind when I read this insipid headline.
Reading further into the article, the blame (other than on inanimate objects) rests on Nevada. Yes, Nevada is the cause of California's crime problem, because some criminals travel into Nevada to buy their guns at gun shows, especially in Reno. The little hood rat gangbangers who cause most of this chaos seem to only receive a passing acknowledgment of blame as the Bee zeros in on the tool of their malevolence rather than the user of that tool.
California is a textbook case of being full of outlaws with guns, because by and large, only the outlaws have guns; out in public anyway. In most if not all places in California, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon outside your home. Yeah, yeah, some counties issue CCW permits - just try to get one, especially in the urban counties like Sacramento, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Just where people need armed protection most are the places that don't allow people to arm themselves. The rural counties in California - especially up north - have less stringent CCW requirements, but not much crime happens there anyway. In the cities, criminals have free reign, because law-abiding citizens are not allowed to protect themselves.
The funniest part of the article is where a pro-Brady Bill California legislator extols the stringent gun controls in California, then blames all our problems on Nevada because of their less-stringent gun controls. Nah! California's strict gun control couldn't possibly have anything to do with our state's crime problem; it's all Nevada's fault. The one thing the article fails to mention, yet seems like a rather logical question to ask: With their loose gun laws - loose enough apparently to spur California criminals to shop for guns there - what are the rates of crime in Nevada? Nevada criminals obviously don't have to sneak into another state to buy their weapon of choice; how do Nevada's per-capita crime rates compare to California's? This is not a rhetorical question because I honestly don't know. I am going to guess however that even in Nevada's twin Sin Cities of Vegas and Reno, their crime rates pale in comparison to the cities in California. This is a statistic into which I will dig deeper and get back to you.
There used to be a series on (I think) HBO called Tales of the Gun. The fictional show chronicled the bad luck that happened to people into whose hands a certain pistol fell. This was a perfect metaphor for how anti-gunners (usually Leftists) feel about guns. It is not an evil heart that commits violence with a tool called a gun, it is the gun that turns a heart to evil. The Lefties have it bass ackwards. Contrary to their belief, some people in this world are simply evil. Trying to take away their weapon of choice will not make evil or violence go away. Evil people will always find a way around the rules that are imposed on the society at large. Gun laws only disarm law-abiding people. As one of these law-abiding people (who happens to be firearm owner), I can assure you that my 9mm Beretta has not injected evil into my heart. In fact, it serves as an expression of the love that I have for my family, and my intention to defend them against evil, even if it means I have to kill that evil person in order to ensure the safety of my wife and children.
Good Day to You, Sir
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
1 comment:
In Ohio we have carry/conceal gun laws with a permit. Being a retired cop I didn't have to take the training class, I just paid my money. In my 26 years on the job I kept noticing this phenomenon that criminals always found a way to get a gun to commit their crimes. Those darn laws just never seemed to dissuade them from getting the gun. Some people just never have figured that one out. We had so many CCW violations that our department had a detective assigned to file CCWs all day.
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