Posted on 11/17/2015 3:51:04 AM PST by Benny Huang
If only France had sensible gun control laws, the Paris attacks of November 13th would not have happened.
Okay, everyone knows that isn't true. France has gone way beyond “sensible†gun control laws and has, for all practical purposes, banned civilian ownership of firearms. It didn’t stop last week's surreal carnage—and it won't stop the next attack either.
Freelance reporter David Axe explained on the Daily Beast how fully automatic rifles have come to contaminate la République française. He traces them back to the Russian government which he says readily supplied Kalashnikov rifles to its Slavic allies during the Balkan wars of 1992-1999. "When those conflicts ended in the mid- to late-1990s, the weapons remained—as many as six million of them…" writes Axe. Organized crime has since found a profitable market in Western Europe for these illicit arms.
As David Axe explains, it isn't particularly difficult to obtain an AK-47 in France today—provided you have the proper underworld connections. The underworld, by definition, is the domain of the criminal class, so it should come as no surprise that bad guys can get their hands on serious firepower without much difficulty.
The problem is getting worse. In 2012, a young Muslim shot up a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three students. In January, a team of Muslim terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing satire magazine that regularly mocked religion—and didn’t spare Islam. There was also the attempted shooting spree in August of this year by a Muslim terrorist onboard an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thankfully thwarted by an American trio.
And that’s just the terrorism! France also suffers from ordinary violent crime, centered in its immigrant ghettoes, of course. The city of Marseille in the south of France has become something of a war zone in recent years, earning it the ignominious title "the most dangerous city in Europe." Turf wars are fought with the same full-auto Kalashnikovs used in the most recent Paris attacks. "Marseille is sick with its violence," then-Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in 2013.
If the recent Paris attacks prove anything it's that mass shootings are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Some people will surely argue that the US still leads the world in violent rampages and that any comparison between us and them would be a false one. Of course, I don't mean to imply that the US, when compared to Western Europe, has an equal number of spree killings, or even a proportional number of spree killings, but I will posit that the explanation for the disparity has little to do with differences in our laws.
The second amendment to the Constitution has been the law of the land since 1791. For the better part of two hundred years Americans managed to keep and bear arms with very few instances of people "going postal." But then things began to change.
People were shocked when, in 1966, a man named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower at UT-Austin and began sniping at students below. Stuff like that just didn't happen in those more innocent times. In the decades that followed, the situation only worsened. The killing seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s—Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield, Oregon, and Paducah, Kentucky. The levy broke in 1999 when two teenagers in Colorado laid siege to their high school, killing thirteen people before committing suicide. Since then the massacres have all become a blur—Newtown, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Charleston, the Sikh Temple. It never seems to end.
Liberals have indicted guns. They believe that banning them would be a quick fix and it's what they strongly imply we should do—usually before issuing heated denials that anyone wants to trample your second amendment rights. They just want a few "common sense" controls to make sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands, or so they say. But of course they want to ban guns and that’s why they look to European nations like France as their model. Spree killings just don't happen there—except when they do.
Contrary to gun control propaganda, Europe has not escaped the modern scourge of spree killings. Norway's tough gun control laws didn’t stop the monstrous Anders Brevik from killing 77 people, mostly children, in 2011. Germany’s tough gun control laws didn't prevent Robert Steinhäuser from killing sixteen people at an Erfurt high school in 2002, nor did they prevent Tim Kretschmer from killing sixteen people "for fun" at a Winnenden secondary school in 2009. The Czech Republic's gun control laws didn’t stop a gunman from shooting up a popular restaurant in 2015, killing nine. And of course France’s tough gun control laws didn't stop the most recent attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the foiled train shooting, the Toulouse Jewish day school shooting, or even armed street crime.
Banning guns won't get to the root of the problem, it will only disarm the victims. But just what is the problem? I would argue that we have two. The first of these problems is a creeping darkness of the soul. I believe Mike Huckabee summed it up well when he remarked, in the aftermath of the Oregon community college shooting that "We have not so much a gun problem, we have a problem with sin and evil." His remark did not sit well with liberals who were leery of his religious overtones. Also, they don't want to admit that the revolutionary changes that have swept through society since the 1960s have been anything but positive. Instead they talk about guns. They would have us believe that the roots of our problem are as old as our Constitution and the bitter-clinger frontiersmen who built this country. To them it's not evil, it’s "gun culture."
But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach when Chris Harper Mercer, the Oregon shooter, admitted that his actions were motivated by a desire to win the same notoriety as other shooters before him had? To me, that says that we glorify killers, which only creates copycats. If you're still not convinced that we have a sin and evil problem, read Dave Cullen’s meticulously researched book "Columbine" and I think you’ll find that the attacks were carried out by two very different young men—one, Eric Harris, who was completely dead inside, and the other, Dylan Klebold, who wrestled with great psychic pain.
The other problem is even more difficult to talk about. It’s called jihad. This unholy "holy war" is responsible for not only the Paris attacks but also the Fort Hood massacres and the military recruiting station shootings in Chattanooga and Little Rock.
If liberals are loathe to discuss the sin and evil problem, they are even more reluctant to talk about jihad because it feels like racism. Take for example the recent tweet from Moms Demand Action, a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun control group that advocates European-style gun control here in America. You'd think they'd keep quiet at a time when their preferred policies failed so miserably but they just couldn't resist. "We are united in mourning all lives lost to gun violence" they proclaimed. Gun violence? Oh, I suppose that some of the people in Paris were killed with guns—and others with bombs—but none were killed by "gun violence." They were killed by crazy-ass Muslim violence. Why can’t they bring themselves to say it?
This unwillingness to talk about radical Islam in connection with terroristic violence does us all a disservice because it lets the perps off the hook. It would be like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of "airplane violence." Yes, airplanes played a role in what happened that day but no one was killed by a 747. They were killed by Mohammad Atta and eighteen of his buddies, all Muslims.
In my estimation, both Europe and America suffer from both problems—jihad on the one hand, and sin and evil on the other. Only the quantities vary. On this side of the pond it seems that the sin and evil problem is more pronounced; on the other side, it's jihad.
Guns are liberals' favorite patsy, the inanimate objects they like to blame when they can't—or won't—account for what really ails us. A change in laws will do nothing to prevent future mass shootings. If we're ever to wake up from this awful nightmare of spree killings we will need to enact deeper, more substantive changes to our hearts, minds, and yes—immigration policy.
Self defense is a basic human right.
Here here. Well said.
Absolutely. Like everything else libs due,it’s INSANE to disarm legal gun owners. We need MORE!!
As Paul Harvey would say..."the rest of the story" on that incident is that a number of Texans went to their vehicles, got their hunting rifles, and SHOT BACK. This return fire forced sniper to "keep his head down" until and while the police arrived and ended the incident.
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American...[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." Tenche Coxe, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.
The right of the people to keep and bear ... arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country ..." James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789
"The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpation of power by rulers. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally ... enable the people to resist and triumph over them." Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, p. 3:746-7, 1833
Guns don’t kill, people do.
I’ve had this debate with liberals on a musician forum several times, they refuse to accept the fact that an inanimate object is incapable of doing a thing, that a PERSON has to pull the trigger. They refuse to accept the fact that if you take away guns, two things will occur.
1. Criminals will still have them, as we see in every country that has imposed gun control.
2. People will use other weapons. What did they do before guns existed? They used knives, swords, spears, bows, even rocks.
Same will happen if you take guns out of the equation. Destroy every gun in the world and you will see criminals using more primitive weapons.
But the attack on Paris had nothing to do with gun laws. We can see that if we simply acknowledge the fact that the same group of barbarians has already attacked this country more than once. Trump did make an astute observation, if Parisians did have the ability to carry, things probably would look different right now, they would have been able to at least try and defend themselves. But it would not have stopped the attack itself. That had nothing to do with guns.
I’ve been having this discussion on the same musician forum, the liberals are using everything they can to deny it, especially using semantics to blur the issue. they are not really Muslims/Islamic is their mantra. So why is their name Islamic State?
The difference is in their interpretation of the Koran. Very similar to the difference in the Pentecostal and Baptist interpretation of the Bible. Pentecostals ban make up and dancing, Baptists do not. Both are still considered Christians. And both will still be killed by jihadis if they get the chance. The make no distinction between one group and the other.
Guns and gun laws have nothing to do with it. Our 2nd amendment will simply give us the chance to defend ourselves, it will not stop the attacks we know are on the way.
Thanks Obama...
Switzerland seems to be doing pretty well in THEIR version of “gun control”. Every male citizen, from the age of 18, at which they can demonstrate the ability to use, maintain, and apply the proper respect for the sanctity of home and property through the possession of defensive arms, and for the rest of their lives, is REQUIRED to keep and, if called upon by the Swiss government, bear arms against whatever threat may arise, internally or from an exterior source.
The Swiss are very good at marksman competitions and sporting events which involve the use of firearms.
Every adult male citizen of Switzerland is also a member of the Swiss Army reserve. It has been CENTURIES since any external force has attempted to invade Switzerland.
Even Adolf Hitler was severely repelled by the Swiss, who simply asserted that every rock, every mountain pass and ever village would be solidly defended against any intruder that dared to cross their border with armed intent to take territory.
You can live in Switzerland if you like, but so long as you are resident alien, the ownership or possession of arms is strictly regulated for all non-citizens, who must pass an extensive background review.
Swiss citizenship is rather difficult to acquire, unless you can demonstrate descent by paternal bloodline to some male Swiss ancestor.
I remember it well. It happened not that far from where I lived.
(Of course, I was just a young kid at the time. (LOL!)
We need to stop with the “radical Islam” crap. If one is a true Mohammedan, he follows the Koran, absolutely. That means , at some point, he’s going to turn violent and kill.
How can we be sure of violence? Doesn’t the Koran lend itself to peaceful interpretation? To find the true meaning of the words, look at the life of Mohammed. There was nothing of peace in his lifetime; it was constant war and killing. Oh, except for the occasional camel humping or pedophilia.
They made a TV movie of it in 1975 called THE DEADLY TOWER.
The movie had a VERY ANTI-GUN theme.
At the end, a voice over mentioned that Whitman had a brain tumor, but a louder voice over drowned that out telling everyone to watch some other entertainment show being shown that week.
True.
A "moderate" Muslim is an apostate Muslim. Violence to and oppression toward unbelievers is codified in their wicked scriptures. The only way you can deny it is to deny the very words and meanings of Mohammad's rantings and ravings. That puts you under the threat of a death sentence from your fellow 'believers'.
As far as I know, there is no other "religious" belief system on Earth which does that except maybe the North Korean Kim Dynasty Worship Cult.
Has there ever been a TV movie that "doesn't" have an anti-gun theme? Or a network TV show, for that matter.
Latoer
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