If you listen to the news you’ll almost never hear a positive story about someone with a gun. What we are continuously shown gives us the impression that everytime something happens with guns, its negative. This leads people to think we need to get rid of them, or make them harder to get. If more emphasis were put on the positive stories of how people successfully defended themselves however this would begin to give our country a whole different attitude about guns. When we do hear the stories, they’re just kind of watered down …with “oh good for them” lines and ….”this is not something that anyone should try at home” .
Like when the man who caught his neighbor molesting his 6 year daughter. His daughter was saved, she wasn’t kidnapped or murdered and the molester will never molest another child ever, because the man killed the molester. That to me is a victory. Not that the man was killed …that was unfortunate buts its what happens when people are encouraged to “stand their ground”. The only person that wouldn’t protect their daughter in a situation like this is a coward, or someone who felt inadequate, or who was defenseless or not equipped., which believe it or not IS most people
Take the shooting in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012, where 24 year old James Eagan Holmes entered the Century movie theater at the midnight screening of the Dark Knight Rising. This man came in wearing tactical clothing comes in setting off tear gas grenades and shooting into the audience with multiple fire arms ultimately killing 12 people and injuring 58 which they say is the biggest mass murder in U.S. History. Not one person there was equipped at all to take down this lone gunman, not one person. Yet there were hundreds there but not even one security guard was there equipped to help. A job for the police? Well they did show up but by the time the police got there the damage was done and the man who shot them still lives. Everybody there was left defenseless.
I would imagine that most people there never even dreamed of carrying a gun, because guns are made out to look like they are only for bad people, lawbreakers, people with evil hearts who want to kill other people. But what if just one guy in that dark theater had a gun and was lying on the ground, who the gunman never saw, and was trained in how to use it, just one person … a number of lives would be saved and we’d be celebrating a hero who had a gun, instead of a criminal. We’d be proud of him and our sons and daughters would be aspiring to be like him. However instead of a hero’s name going down in history, its the name of another villain , who has made people feel weak and afraid because that villian was empowered and they are not. Our thinking is wrong, we’re thinking about how to weaken the villain by taking away guns instead of empowering ourselves.
What people don’t realize is you can’t stop villains. I don’t care how stringent you make gun laws or how hard you make guns to get, villains don’t care about the law. Thats why they are called villains. The villain will always have guns. I don’t care how many laws are made or how many guns are banned . The only people who are going to obey those laws and give up their guns are law abiding citizens and a law abiding citizen isn’t a person who does senseless killings. Banning guns are not going to stop criminals from doing senseless killings. As a matter of fact, if guns are banned, the villain is the only one who will still have a guns, as they will just be in the black market. When the villain comes from to black market to shoot, bang bang we’re dead, because we’re all law abiding citizens and call 911 when trouble comes and we only call them because we are not encouraged trained or equipped to handle trouble ourselves. Why is that?
There is something really wrong with that picture. We’re a country gearing up to ban law abiding citizens from carrying guns knowing that the only ones who will have them is the criminal and police who always show up after everybody is already dead like they they did in Aurora. Why aren’t we a nation thats been reared to protect ourselves and taught so much to depend on others to defend us?
I never thought about this prior to the Aurora shooting. Up until that day I was a firm believer in “gun bans”. Never again.
Just the thoughts of a new libertarian.
bayardssoul 