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Boge Quinn
If Just One Capable Adult Had
Access to a Gun ...
by Neal Boortz
By now most of you know about that shooting at a high
school in Germany. Thirteen students and adults, including one police
officer, were killed by one 19-year-old "gunman."
This event has given the hysteria-based anti-gun crowd
a good reason to ratchet up the rhetoric. In fact, even as the shooting
was under way, the German Parliament was considering even stronger gun
control laws.
Europe is seen by some as some sort of a gun-control utopia.
Most of the nations over there have rather strong laws that prevent the
private ownership of handguns ... and strict controls on hunting and sport-shooting
rifles.
A few years ago British myrmidons handed over about 160,000
handguns to their great government protectors after the British Parliament
instituted a virtual ban on private handgun ownership.
So ... just what has happened since Britain instituted
the great gun confiscation program? If you are part of the hysterical
anti-gun ownership left, you probably think that the gun confiscation
made England a safer place in which to live. Well, you would be wrong.
Here are the statistics statistics I'm sure many of
you will just want to totally reject. In the year that followed the great
British gun confiscation, homicides committed with firearms rose by almost
90 percent. Armed street robberies went up by over 50 percent.
You do understand why homicide and robbery went up in
Britain, don't you? It's because the predators with the illegal guns knew
that their victims were less likely to be armed!
I could fill 16 pages here with documentation and information
that would illustrate the eagerness with which armed predators descend
on populations that have been disarmed, and flee populations where access
to guns has become easier.
Take Florida, for instance. When Florida made it easier
for private citizens to carry concealed weapons, violent crime rates went
down & almost immediately. Murder, armed robbery, muggings & all down.
Predators understood that there was an increased chance
that their victims would be armed & so they found another way to obtain
money. Some might even have gone to work!
An interesting side note to the Florida situation: Soon
after the concealed weapons laws were liberalized in Florida the predators
figured out just where they needed to go to find unarmed victims. They
started staking out airports!
They would follow tourists recently arrived at Miami International.
When they left the airport grounds, the predators would bump their cars,
causing them to stop, and then rob them at gunpoint. The predators knew
that people traveling by air probably didn't have guns.
Now & that brings us to schools, and the incident in Germany.
If you want to take a gun and kill a lot of people, common sense would
dictate that you try to pick a place where you will be the only person
with a gun!
If you sit down and try to pick one place where you aren't
likely to find someone with a gun, you would have to work very hard to
come up with a better place than a school! In the U.S. they kick kids
out of schools for key chains!
And so it was in that high school in Germany. The shooter
knew that nobody in that school would have a gun. Nobody would be in a
position to defend themselves. Children and adults were hiding in classrooms,
broom closets and offices & just waiting for this kid to come in and shoot
them. They had no way to defend themselves.
What if just one adult in that school had had access to
a gun? Is it possible that this adult could have taken some action, and
lives would have been saved? Impossible, you say? Are you aware that civilians
with guns have stopped at least three school shootings in the United States
in the past few years? Civilians, not law enforcement officers. How many
times a week do you hear me relate stories about private individuals protecting
themselves with guns? It happens thousands of times a year.
Let me just leave you with this one question. If, God
forbid, you were to hear that an armed student was in your child's school
and was shooting people, which scenario would you wish for?
(a) A scenario in which not one adult school staffer had
a gun that could be used to protect students; or
(b) A scenario in which one or two adults did have guns
and they were using those guns to protect your child's classroom from
the shooter.
That's a no-brainer for me. Let teachers and school administrators
volunteer for special training and then give them the chance to have access
to firearms in schools. To do anything else is to simply invite more tragedy.
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