Politics
It’s been nearly 5 years since the shootings at Virginia Tech on 4/16/07. I had planned on writing a post on this topic for a simple reason.

There was a shooting at a California medical university today; I can’t help but remember 4/16, how it unfolded and what came afterward. Let me first state that my heart goes out to everyone in that community right now. Parents dreading a phone call from the police, friends frantically calling around to see who picks up. It’s a nightmare.

But something bothers me, the fact that some will politicize this incident to get their agenda out. They sure as hell did it in ’07. Now that the Trayvon story has run away from the media and the racial narrative has started to fall apart, I had wondered if they were going to shift the debate to “Gun control”. Today’s high profile shooting makes it much more likely. Those who want more of it claim they want a “debate”, but what they want is to lecture others. Consider this a rebuttal.

First:  I would like to inform people: This shooting could not have happened! Why?
1) Murder is strictly regulated by the state and federal government! “Murder/death/killing” is illegal. 
2) The state of California has some of, if not the most- draconian gun laws in the country. This includes an “assault weapons” ban, standard capacity “high capacity” magazine ban, and in many counties of California one cannot legally carry a gun for self defense.
3) It is illegal to bring a gun on a school campus, it’s a gun free zone! Someone should have told the shooter they were not allowed to bring their gun on the grounds!
4) We live in a society of laws, and there’s no place for vigilante-ism, we have police forces. The victims should have simply called the police, 7 people are dead, apparently they did not call the police. Or the response time must have been delayed by budgetary cutbacks in police pensions.
5) This incident is proof that more laws are not only necessary, but will be more effective, and that you’re a knuckle dragging caveman if you disagree.

For those who laughed with the above, realize that these are the “alternatives often presented by those who purport themselves to be our intellectual superiors in this debate. (Point worthy of mention: If anything this shooting in California should be a referendum on those laws that were passed in this “progressive” state that did not prevent this incident, and not a referendum on law abiding citizens!)

Say, want to meet one of the people who you will likely be seeing a lot of very soon? New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, proponent of most anything gun ban related. Here she is being challenged by a TV host as to purely cosmetic feature that she wishes to ban on legally sold guns. He asks her a real barn burner question- not what it’s made out of, not what it weighs, or what its purpose on the gun is… he asks her, what it is. Piece of cake for an expert like her right? After all she wants to ban them! Let’s go to the video tape:

Her “shoulder thing that goes up” answer was the source of great mockery on the web.

This woman is the primary proponent of gun legislation on the national scene and she does not even know what she’s asking for. She and her cohorts later did their best to ram their feet completely down their own throats when they claimed people were buying .50caliber heat seeking bullets (No, that doesn’t exist, nor can you find it in a gunshop) and that she wanted to ban the sale of .50 caliber rifles because of this. A friend of mine in the armed forces joked, “Wait, the M82 shoots HEAT SEEKING rounds? I better tell my buddies! Why bother lugging these scopes around if the bullets aim themselves! Why carry stinger missiles if these heat seeking babies can shoot down helicopters and planes? I better thank McCarthy for alerting me to the existence of these bullets, as I’m just a lowly combat arms soldier that doesn’t know what he’s using!” This woman not only has no idea what she’s talking about, she has no problem lying outright to others either.

To clarify further on “Assault weapons”: These guns are not the ones criminals often choose to commit crimes. Off the top of my head, RIFLES in total, all of them, accounted for close to 1% of the weapons used after being illegally obtained (not in a gun store) by criminals in the commission of crimes. Of that 1% number, assault weapons were a smaller fraction. When writing the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994  They more or less held up pictures of guns at the time, and picked what looked scary for their ban list. I’m not kidding. Several states have such bans, they did not impact crime, however it has turned otherwise law abiding citizens into possible felons for possession of guns that have certain cosmetic features.

I love the hoopla about high capacity MAGAZINE (do not call it a “clip) bans. So, let me get this straight… There’s no discussion about how to stop “active shooters”, or how people can defend themselves, the discussion is instead* about, “how can this person who is already breaking several laws kill less people.” (I’m shocked they haven’t brought up violent music and video games already!) Really, this discussion when boiled down is one about “how can this shooter kill less people, or the same amount of people in a slightly slower fashion.” The magazine capacity ban is so disgusting and illogical that I almost didn’t want to dignify it with a rebuttal. My opinion is that the problem here is not what people are being shot with, how many people should die in what time frame, what those guns look like (a l’a the cosmetic bans in the AWB legislation), but the fact that innocent people get shot. Clearly, I must be an “NRA lobbyist” to think such independent thoughts.

The labels they like to throw around have the duality of being both preposterous and inane. “Gun control”, as if it’s guns that are the problem, is their word of choice- when millions of them in the hands of the law abiding killed no one yesterday. Shockingly, millions of knives managed to stab no one either. “Common sense measures” is more of the left and gun ban proponents using big words as currency in debate. See it implies that these things they’re asking for are sensical, and that those who oppose them are not. It’s rubbish, and yet again, more of the rhetorical masturbation exercise that’s the calling card of their ideology.

This is part 1 of this series, I have quite a lot to say, and I’m just getting warmed up.