Guns Don’t Kill People, Immigrants Do and Other Congressional Words of Wisdom
July 31, 2015
Guns Don’t Kill People, Immigrants Do and Other Congressional Words of Wisdom
by Christopher Brauchli
It depends on two things-who is the actor and who is the victim. Those two things determine how people respond. The one thing it does not depend on is what the actor used to create the victim. It all came to mind during the month of July. July 26th was the 207th day of the year 2015 and that was the day that we celebrated the 206th mass shooting of the year. That does not mean that there had only been 206 occasions when guns were in the news.
Quite the contrary. According to the Gun Violence Archive as of July 29, 2015 there had been 7,360 deaths in the United States in which the gun was the important actor. The individual activities of the gun, however, do not, normally, inspire a lot of response except from the usual people who use frequent gun related incidents to suggest there should be some sort of gun control in this country. Mass shootings, on the other hand, get a great deal of attention. Not all mass shootings are the same and responses to them vary.
In the case of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in 2013 there was a suggestion from the NRA that there should be armed guards in every school in the country but that suggestion was never acted on in part, perhaps because that would have required as many as one million newly armed guards. Following the July 26, 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana, presidential candidate Rick Perry was asked whether the proper response to movie shootings should be to permit all attendees to bring weapons with them. The former governor responded that the proposal made “a lot of sense”. There is little question but that the possibility of a movie shooter being suddenly confronted in the dimly lit space with a theater full of armed patrons who begin shooting at whomever the patron believed fired first would introduce a sense of calm and security to moviegoers that is presently lacking.
Churchgoers would also be better off if fellow worshippers were armed. Churches are typically well lit so that the possibility of a firefight erupting in the church and the wrong people being shot seems less likely. Attendees could, therefore, worship in a peaceful place, secure in the knowledge that an armed intruder would be swiftly dispatched to his maker.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/31/guns-dont-kill-people-immigrants-do-and-other-congressional-words-of-wisdom/