Contributors

Friday, June 16, 2017

Is It Time Now?

Every time there's a horrific mass shooting, the NRA says it's not time to talk about gun violence. However, in the aftermath of the shooting on the baseball field in Virginia, it is time to discuss the the ridiculousness of the idea that "guns are protection."

People playing baseball can't carry guns. You can't swing a bat or run bases or field the ball with an AK-47 slung over your shoulder. And even if you could, it wouldn't help.

See, the bad guys don't play fair. They shoot you in the back, at a distance, from cover, when you're least expecting it. A shooter who knows what he's doing can fire off 40-60 rounds in less than 30 seconds, easily hitting five, ten, even 20 victims if the targets are closely grouped. By the time anyone realizes what's happening a dozen people are shot.

Ironically, the morning of the shooting the House was scheduled to hear a bill on making it easier to buy silencers. As always, they came up with a phony reason for the bill: hearing protection.

But what it really does is protect assassins, allowing them to kill more people by making it harder for their victims to tell where the shots are coming from. Silencers don't completely suppress the report of a rifle (and they can degrade accuracy), but they make it harder to hear the shots, and a lot harder to identify the shooter's location.

People at Wednesday's incident knew there was a shooting because they could hear the shooting

With a silencer the shooter would have even more time to take pot shots at people on the field: victims would start falling, one by one, with no obvious reason why. He might have shot 10 people instead of just five.

But back to the silliness of the idea of guns providing "protection." Having a gun will not stop you from getting shot. Two cops were on duty protecting Congressman Scalise: they (or the Alexandria police, who responded within minutes) eventually got the shooter, but they were also wounded. Having a gun makes you a high-priority target.

What does provide protection is body armor. Reports aren't clear on this, but the shooter doesn't appear to have been wearing any. However, the Aurora theater shooter was, according to CNN: "Holmes spent 903.67 on body armor: a bulletproof torso and neck protector, bulletproof arm protection and two different bulletproof groin protectors." It's nuts that that nut was able to buy body armor.

If the Virginia shooter had been fully decked out the way the NRA and Republicans apparently wanted him to be, with an assault rifle, high capacity magazines, body armor and a silencer, he could have fired hundreds of rounds for an hour or more before they finally put the animal down.

Conservatives always want to put a political, partisan or racist spin on every incident, to "prove" they're right. But the problem is not right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal, Christian vs. Muslim.

It's really a conflict between those who use chaos and violence against those who advocate for law and peace.

Those who think that assault rifles, silencers and body armor belong in the hands of any random, unbalanced, incompetent civilian are on the side of chaos and violence.

It's true that guns aren't the only way to kill people: terrorists have used bombs, trucks, cars, machetes, and knives to kill. But soldiers don't drive semis and carry machetes into battle: they use guns because they inflict maximum carnage.

Angry, child-beating civilians like the Virginia shooter should not be carrying weapons of war on the streets of America.

Yeah, we can't save everyone. But if we could cut our murder and suicide rates by two, or five or ten, by keeping guns out of the hands of people who have demonstrated they are prone to violence or depression, wouldn't that be worth it to save 15,000 or 25,000 lives?

We put child pornographers who've never even touched a kid on sex offender registries for their entire lives, restricting their constitutional rights to freedom of association and movement forever, banning them from getting any number of jobs and drastically affecting their everyday lives.

Yet we allow wife-beaters and bar-brawlers who have actually hurt real people to own guns when the evidence is clear that such people are much more likely to commit gun violence. Not having a gun would not affect these people's everyday lives. Yes, they could still hunt: there are these things called bows.

Steve Scalise, the Lousiana congressman who was shot in the pelvis on Wednesday, is one of those Republicans who blew a bowel every time someone suggested we do something about the epidemic of gun violence in this country.

Well, this time the shooter blew Scalise's bowel for him. And Scalise may need to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.

No comments: