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So much for gun control By RANDY ALCORN — Nov. 10, 2009
There is little to salvage from last week’s mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas, but there are some stark realizations this heartbreaking horror exposes. One is the wishful but mistaken notion that such incidents can be prevented by laws prohibiting or strictly restricting access to firearms. The Second Amendment not with standing, U.S. military bases prohibit unauthorized personnel from carrying firearms on base. Access to military weapons is carefully restricted and weapons are secured in armories.
Never the less, even within the well regulated conditions of a military base, a man was able to acquire and conceal two powerful personal handguns which he used to murder 13 people and wound dozens of others.
The argument that a prohibition against firearms will eliminate the possession of firearms by anyone is clearly refuted by the ample empirical evidence that prohibition simply does not succeed in its intended objective when the subject of the prohibition is something that enough of the population wants. No matter how draconian the restrictions or dire the legal consequences prohibition is defeated by desire.
Prostitution, booze, and drugs are or have been prohibited by law with no appreciable effect on eliminating any of them. In fact, illegal drugs consistently find their way into prisons—the most secured, restrictive institutions in society. Obviously, if prison inmates can gain access to drugs, and military base personnel can gain access to guns, in spite of heavy security and strict prohibitions, how will laws prevent anyone from having either?
While good people are rightly concerned and alarmed by the lethal violence visited on society through the device of firearms, rational people understand that there is no legal magic wand that will abolish such violence simply by prohibiting possession of the device. People who want guns will get them. People who want to harm others will do so, but the amount of harm they can do could be reduced if more people were armed rather than disarmed.
If among the murdered and wounded at Fort Hood any had been armed, the slaughter would have been less. The gunman would have been confronted by people who could defend themselves rather than by helpless victims. Free people should not only be able to arm themselves, they should be able to carry those arms on their person as they do their cell phones. Self defense is among the most basic of human and civil rights.
Those who fear a dangerous wild-west scenario if citizens were freely armed should consider that there is danger now. There are not enough armed police to be everywhere all the time, and anyone can be caught in a situation as occurred at Fort Hood. Most people who drive cars do not drive them recklessly, and most people who own a gun do not go about shooting others without just cause.
Another realization coming out of the Fort Hood incident is that twisted minds often wrap themselves around fixed ideologies. That, however, does not prove a cause and effect relationship between a particular ideology and the detrimental behavior of those with twisted minds.
The murdering major at Fort Hood was a devout Muslim who was heard to shout “God is Great” as he mercilessly and methodically shot his victims. Not unexpectedly, after the shootings there soon followed threats against mosques and condemnations of Muslims.
If murder and savagery can be eliminated by eradicating a religion, then not one but nearly all religions, and many political ideologies, must be eliminated as well. Damaged psyches, weak minds, and evil souls embrace and employ ideologies to justify their heinous actions and to salve their psychological pain. These disordered minds can be found within the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths. There are also practicing paranoids preaching hyper-patriotic versions of political ideologies who can become mass murders for the cause. Recall Timothy McVeigh.
Eliminating entire categories of people based on their religious or political beliefs will be ineffective in riding society of senseless violence. Savagery and mayhem lurk under even the thickest veneer of civilization. Wackos will simply blend in to what ever social milieu is available and pervert any ideology to validate their homicidal violence.
Unless and until science can develop a flawless wacko-meter that detects these aberrant personalities, they will always be moving unidentified among us. Ironically, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre was a psychiatrist, the closest thing we have to a wacko-meter. So, maybe we should round up all the shrinks.
There are no ready remedies to prevent further incidents as occurred at Fort Hood, but there is awareness, for those with open minds, that police state restrictions or targeted pogroms would not only be ineffective, they would undermine the very essence of freedom and justice upon which this nation was founded, and eventually make victims of us all.
