GUNS

January 30, 2013.  Today there were two more shootings, one on a school bus and one in a workplace.

The head of the NRA recently said, “The best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  Sounds reasonable.  Or does it?

Consider this:  The United States Secret Service officers are among the world’s best trained and most disciplined “good guys.”  Yet in my lifetime there were two incidents of a president of the United States being shot while surrounded and protected by these “good guys.”  The bad guys always have the element of secrecy and surprise on their side.

And consider the NRA statement that there should be armed guards in every school to protect the students.   School employees taking occasional pistol range practice?   Not enough.  I suggest that to have countered the Sandy Point Elementary massacre would have required something akin to counter-terrorist training and discipline.  How many such guards would be required in each school?  And how would they be paid for?  Added taxes or reduced spending on learning activities? 

It’s not just the more than 130,000 schools nationwide.  Would it not be logical to apply the same concept of protection to churches, synagogues, public meeting places, theaters, restaurants, shopping malls, workplaces?  See, when one carries the thought further how ludicrous it becomes.  It would be hitting the mother lode for manufacturers and distributors of firearms and the NRA which receives large financial support from these industries.  But an impossible financial burden for the country.

What can and should be done?   After incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre there arises a loud cry of “don’t take our guns away.”  Don’t worry gun owners—your right to bear arms is guaranteed by the constitution and by the voting power of millions of gun owners.  And rightly so—we are all safer in our homes because the would-be attacker never knows whether he will face a loaded weapon.  (Yes I meant “he.”  Although large numbers of women own firearms, the perpetrators of gun crimes historically are predominately males.)

          It’s sad when gun owners and the NRA give more thought to the imagined threat to their right to own guns than to protection of our precious school children by more effective background checks and taking large-magazine weapons off the streets.