“Congress is going to do what it does so well. They are attempting to make a symbolic gesture that will further constrict our rights while producing no meaningful results.”
Do you want your family to be safe? I know that I do. How about your neighbors? Do you feel that they should be kept safe? In general, I believe that we all want every American man, woman, and child to be kept safe. So, the question is, how do we go about doing this? Well, lucky for us, the Congress of the United States has the answer.
Their answer is the Keep America Safe Act. After the horrible incident in Las Vegas, Congress is going to do what it does so well. They are attempting to make a symbolic gesture that will further constrict our rights while producing no meaningful results.
This bill is designed to restrict the sales of high-capacity magazines. Therefore, no magazine could be purchased that holds more than ten rounds. This act, should it be passed, would have made no impact on the Vegas killer. More importantly, it will exert no control over future shooters. Moreover, I personally don’t believe that any law or regulation will have any lasting or meaningful effect on events such as this.
Gun control and gun violence are two completely separate items, even though gun control supporters try to tie them together.
Although my statement is pretty gutsy, I believe my logic is very sound. Let us start with the high capacity ban part two. Part two? Absolutely—see, in 1994, the United States enacted an assault weapons ban in this country. This ban stopped the sale of specific weapons that were classified as assault rifles and the standard 30 round magazine. It was in effect for ten years. What was the result? Negligible, and we see a repeat of those same outcomes this time around as well.
Here are the problems with the ban. First off, and most importantly, during the ten years that the ban was in place, there were still 15 mass shooting events. Even with the ban in place, mass shooting events still took place.
There are an estimated three to four million assault rifles legally owned in the United States today.
Let’s assume that approximately half of those owners have four or more 30 round magazines. That means that there are eight to ten million high-capacity magazines for these weapons alone. Unless the government plans on going door to door to confiscate these magazines, there is no realistic way we are going to take them out of society.
Rifles are only used in approximately one quarter of all mass shootings.
This means that the weapon is not as important to the sociopath as the destruction caused. However, it is easy to show these weapons on television and then make up false statistics to scare people into demanding that the government intercedes.
A great example of this would be when the anti-gun California State Sen. Kevin de Leon stated that a gun the police had confiscated “has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.” For those who are not gun-centric, look this news conference up online; there are plenty of people out there who made very humorous videos mocking his mistakes.
California is a current living example of an even broader ban than what is being proposed.
California regulates and tracks virtually every facet of firearms within the state, to include ammunition. They already have magazine capacity limits and virtually ban any weapon they deem to be an assault rifle. Additionally, California is a May Issue state when it comes to conceal carry permits, and the person seeking a permit needs to prove that “good cause exists for the issuance of a license.” In other words, the state can determine for any reason that you have not met the burden of proof that you need to be able to carry a firearm.
With all of these laws in place, clearly the state should have an almost non-existent gun crime rate. Yet the Sacramento Bee reported just last week that homicide rates by firearms have been increasing. In fact, “much of the increase in homicides came in large cities where gun sales per capita are low. Most gun-related crimes are committed by criminals using stolen or borrowed guns, according to several independent and government research studies.”
It takes less than a second to reload a magazine-fed weapon.
Yes, having ten round magazines will mean that the shooter will have to pause more often, but when that pause is less than a second, the effect is virtually non-existent. Look at it logically; how much of an impact does having to reload every 30 shots make? Is 30 rounds a magical number that maximizes the kill ratio?
From my perspective, this was clearly an act of terrorism.
This animal had one objective in mind—to cause as much damage and instill as much fear as possible in a short amount of time. For someone like this, who was willing to surrender his own worthless life for his twisted views, would limiting his guns matter?
People are the issue—people and their own twisted values. You cannot legislate the mental state of a person.
During the 9-11 attacks, they used planes. Ted Kaczynski’s weapon was explosive packages. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols packed explosives into a truck and blew up the federal building in Oklahoma. Even in Europe, jihadists will get in a vehicle and run down a hundred people before they are stopped, and they are still found with illegal assault weapons in their possession.
Do not get me wrong. I am not against having a discussion about gun crime in America. What I am against is having a discussion about gun control. Gun control and gun violence are two completely separate items, even though gun control supporters try to tie them together. Might gun control regulation be part of a discussion about homicide? Absolutely. This conversation, however, must come from a place of fact and logic, not political bantering.
Even more important is to allow those who lost loved ones or were personally injured a chance to grieve and mentally recover.
At the end of the day, I believe, guns are not the issue. People are the issue—people and their own twisted values. You cannot legislate the mental state of a person. This is where we need discussion to begin at. We need to place the blame on the individual and not on the tools they choose for their twisted purposes. Police cannot stop bad people from killing. The average police response time is 11 minutes. In this case, the murderer shot into the crowd for approximately ten minutes. He was dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound long before the police entered his room.
However, if we are trying to actually do something to prevent another mass shooting event like the one that just occurred, then none of this makes any sense at all. The investigation is far from over. We still do not have a clue as to what the motivation of the shooter was. Worse yet, the timeline is so pliable right now that conspiracy theorists are going wild with theories from government mind control to Elvis. Until we know the absolute facts, all of this is simply background noise, which is pathetic and disgusting.
There will be a time to have these discussions, after the investigation is completed. Even more important is to allow those who lost loved ones or were personally injured a chance to grieve and mentally recover. For politicians to use this event to push their own agenda shows their own callous and self-serving view toward those they supposedly represent.
