Be Prepared: New Gun Laws are Coming

Two mass shootings in 12 hours and three in the span of a week are pushing previously staunch Second Amendment supporting Congressman to agree to vote for new gun control laws.

But rather than suggesting policy designed to effectively deal with such situations, Congress and even the President are engaged in talks to disarm law-abiding gun owners.

One of the more popular gun control laws being debated presently is banning the sale and possession of military-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Banning possession would require a gun buyback program to remove over 2 million of such firearms from lawful citizens. That would be very costly, and would have zero impact on reducing gun violence. The tools might change slightly, but the end result would be the same – lots of unarmed, innocent people gunned down by a lunatic.

In most cases, the shooter bought their weapon legally. Some, though, obtained them due to flaws in the federal and state background check systems. Charleston, S.C., mass-shooter Dylann Roof, for example, should not have been able to obtained the firearm he used to murder black churchgoers because of a previous arrest.

The firearm Roof used was a handgun, and the FBI admitted afterward flaws in the background check system did not reveal a recent arrest for a felony gun charge. The charge should have negated the sale and prevented the massacre. Instead, reliance on a flawed, government-run system enabled the massacre.

More recently, the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter legally bought a long-gun in Nevada, which he illegally transported into California. There he killed three and shot several more. The laws proposed by anti-gun activists and politicians would not have thwarted most recent shootings.

Red flag laws are one of the most likely new laws to be passed by Congress. At least 17 states already have some version of a red flag law on the books, including Florida that passed theirs immediately following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting. Red flag laws are being sold to Congress as allowing law enforcement to strip gun rights from citizens who are mentally ill and would carry out a mass shootings.

In reality we know that these laws are the most abused. They are used by ex-girlfriends, angry neighbors, and family members who tell judges you are mentally unstable and shouldn’t be allowed to have guns. No evidence is needed to back up these claims and you are stripped of your Second Amendment rights with little to no recourse.

Those looking to ban firearms and possession of certain types also fail to grasp a significant fact: There is no evidence suggesting the shooters would not have tried another method to inflict mass casualties.

The greatest examples of mass casualty events in the United States do not involve firearms. One required fuel-laden airliners to ram the World Trade Center. Another required large quantities of fertilizer and a catalyst to blow up a portion of a Federal building in Oklahoma City.

The single largest mass-casualty event at a U.S. school was the Bath Township School bombing. A school official rigged bombs beneath the school and killed 38 children and five other teachers way back in 1927 – when the general public could purchase fully automatic firearms, like the Thompson submachinegun and Browning Automatic Rifle.

Banning ownership of military-style firearms and high-capacity magazines will not stop anyone from inflicting mass casualties. The problem of mass shootings mostly did not exist for the most part prior to the Columbine school shooting in 1999. There were some outlier events, but mass shootings mostly were unheard of when access to firearms was least restricted. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 was the most prominent, and helped to spur the eventual restriction on civilians owning automatic weapons.

So, if we did not have problems with mass shootings, especially in schools, until the past couple decades, access to firearms is not the issue. The issue is how we raise children, and the impact social media has in spreading notoriety.

There was a time when children were taught the world did not care about their feelings. Good and bad things will happen, and we need to deal with matters as they occur. Public shame was a concept many understood, and none wanted to embrace.

During the 21^st Century, though, we are teaching kids that their feelings are most important. That if they find something offensive, the world truly should care. The Gilroy shooter infamously was quoted as saying “I am really angry” when asked why he was shooting up the festival.

Rather than banning access to firearms, it is time to start changing what we teach future generations. The latest one is too self-absorbed to know right from wrong.