I suspected this would happen:
Gun control advocates sputter at their own impotence. The National Rifle Association is politically ascendant. And Barack Obama’s White House pledges to safeguard the Second Amendment in its first official response to the deaths of at least 12 people in a mass shooting at a new Batman movie screening in suburban Denver…”We don’t want sympathy. We want action,” Dan Gross, president of the Brady campaign said Friday as President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney mourned the dead.
Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, was more emphatic than many in the early hours after the shooting. “Everyone is scared of the NRA,” he said on MSNBC. “Number one, there are some things worth losing for in politics and to be able to prevent carnage like this is worth losing for.”
Yet it’s been more than a decade since gun control advocates had a realistic hope of getting the type of legislation they seek, despite predictions that each shocking outburst of violence would lead to action.
They are only losing ground
And Farmdad sends me this story that gives even more logic:
Elliott said people should take caution when applying cases like the Friday theater shooting in Aurora to gun policy, saying initial police reports indicate Holmes may have spent months working out an elaborate plan.
“It appears this was so carefully planned at this point that laws wouldn’t have been a deterrent,” he said. “I don’t care what kind of gun laws you have, it wouldn’t have stopped it.”
Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner agreed that one incident, while tragic, should not prompt sweeping changes to gun policy.
“I don’t know that policy could have prevented this,” he said. “It appears there was a lot of planning involved.”
As I said before like a few other nationally famous criminals, this guy was a perfect mix of crazy and intelligent. Most smart people could cook up a better plot to kill more people, or cause more mayhem…but there isn’t any real GAIN in any of this, and all these famous spree killers never saw any gain except notoriety at being a monster…which is a tough sell for anybody sane. And most people who are crazy simply don’t have the faculties to plot out such an elaborate and successful plan.
Thankfully monsters like this are VERY rare, but again if he was smart enough to do what he did, getting past a few extra laws that are comparatively minor compared to say mass murder, it doesn’t seem like much of an obstacle.
That’s the truth. There’s nothing that can stop someone determined to kill a lot of people who has the will and the intelligence to do it. Especially if their goal isn’t a specific high value person but any old group.
Humans are fragile enough, and there’s plenty of ways to get enough chemical, kinetic, or thermal power to do the job.
The antis are a part of the “You didn’t build that” thinking. Its all about the collective to them. Individual people and their needs and contributions don’t count. Its only what the State does.
And when they say “You can’t defend yourself” to someone who acutally has well it rankles a person just like it does when the president says “you didn’t build that” to someone with a buisness or hell even a hobby that they’re proud of.
More what I’m seeing is people being less aghast at the weapons than at the person. Which a large part of that is the greater familiarity. These guns aren’t mysterious, and even if they were it’s now very easy to look them up. And to look up the current laws.
Which makes the antis who still blather about “High powered automatic hand guns” seem completely moronic.
It’d be like a Pro-Lifer who blathered about 4th trimester double birth abortions. Or a Pro-Choicer who blathered about how Jesus approved of abortions because he had a mohel among his disciples.
Laws do NOT prevent crime. Laws do provide the means and system whereby a lawbreaker can be punished for commiting a crime.
The common single denominator to all the arguments put forward by the anti rights
folks is that if we had a law restricting things, guns, drugs, etc. we would no longer have guns, drugs, etc.
This fairy tale ignores the reality of the world in which we live. We live in a world of less then perfect people, some good, some not so good, and some evil.
Guns are not good or evil. The use to which people put them is what matters.
We are not going to “Live Happily Ever After” and a realistic man (or woman)
must face the reality that they are responsible for their own safety and the police are reactive, they come to the crime scene after they are called.
Paul in Texas