In the last week three stories hit the news that illustrate the silliness of the notion that more guns are more better:
1) In Chicago, cops killed a 55-year-old woman by accident when responding to a domestic violence call. Some mentally disturbed college engineering student with a baseball bat was also shot to death. They just happened to be black...
Cops are supposed to be trained to respond to these situations. If good guys with guns can't distinguish between dangerous nut cases and grandmothers, how can anyone expect a random dufus with a concealed pistol in his waistband or purse to be able to make snap decisions and avoid "collateral damage?"
2) The grand jury declined to file charges against the cop who killed Tamir Rice. A year ago two Cleveland cops pulled into a park where a 12-year-old black boy was playing with a pellet gun and shot him dead within three seconds.
It's an outrage that cops just whacked this black kid without first figuring out what the hell was going on.
But what should really worry gun nuts is that the cops whacked this kid without first figuring out what the hell was going on. Suppose this kid was carrying a real gun, like so many of those open-carry idiots roaming fast-food joints in Texas. People wouldn't be quite so outraged if the kid actually posed a real danger. This grand jury decision justifies cops just driving up and blowing away anyone who's carrying a gun, if they feel threatened.
And gun lovers shouldn't think that being white is going to save their hides. The vast majority of shooters in murder sprees are disaffected, gun-loving white guys, so few people will shed tears when cops shoot guys who are just one step away from becoming Dylan Klebold or Dylann Roof.
If you have a gun when something bad goes down, the cops are going to target you because you're not wearing a uniform. They can't tell good guys from bad guys who are carrying guns. After the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson an innocent man was very nearly shot because he'd taken the gun away from the shooter, but wasn't because a man carrying a concealed weapon paused to figure out what the hell was going on. Maybe he should hold a training session for the cops in Cleveland and Chicago.
3) When Republican state lawmaker David Ramadan responded to one of Donald Trump's moronic tweets with the disdain it deserved, Trump's followers accused him being a Muslim, demanded his citizenship be revoked, told him to "go back home" to Lebanon and made not-so-subtle threats of violence against him. He responded with typical conservative bravado:
“I think I can protect myself,” he said, chuckling. “Second Amendment guy here.”Ha ha. Good one.
The thing is, neither the Second Amendment nor a handgun will protect you like a flak jacket and a ballistic helmet can. Guns are pretty worthless "protection" because you can't shoot what you don't see coming.
The guys threatening him aren't going to meet him at high noon in front of the saloon on Main Street. They're going to throw a brick through the window of his office, or a Molotov cocktail through the front window of his house, or terrorize his children at the bus stop, or ambush him with a passel of their punk-ass pals, or shoot him from a safe distance with a rifle, the way other political figures such as JFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated.
As long as guns are everywhere, bad guys will always have the upper hand: when a trained shooter picks the time and place for an attack he can unload a full magazine (6, 7, 10, 17, 20, 30 or more rounds) into a person or a crowd long before anyone can possibly react. Even if you've got your weapon in your hand and a round in the chamber, people will be dead on the floor before you can get a single shot off.
The only way to reduce the carnage wrought by guns is to reduce the number of guns in the hands of nitwits who shoot people when they get scared or pissed off.
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