ANTI-GUN ADVOCATES ARE AFTER THE WRONG ENEMY

By: Jim Moore

It is uncanny how many people mistake effect for cause. That’s like saying rain causes clouds, and frostbite causes winter. Many writers, who should know better, confuse action with reaction, thereby ignoring commonsense.

Case in point: Columnist Cynthia Tucker, reporting on several incidents of shooting deaths, recently said: “Yes, there are no doubt thugs among who would do whatever it took to get deadly weapons no matter how stringent the laws regulating firearms. It would be difficult to deter those with no conscience. Easy accessibility of firearms produces the tendency of a gun to make outlaws of previously law-abiding citizens.”

Really? The talking gun, not the devil, made me do it, right? In that case, we should hide all the knives in the house, lock up the hammers, and never visit a friend who has a Skilsaw on the bench, or a screwdriver on the sink.

Furthermore, to hear the media tell it, we are in a killing frenzy of dangerous proportions, but if we remove the guns all be well in Wonderland.

Well, I have two pieces of news for those poor and misguided souls.

First, the evil in man’s heart is the real killer. It has been since Cain whacked Abel. And to blame it on the weapon Cain used is a waste of time. We all have some wickedness in us. (Nobody threw a rock at the prostitute, if you remember.)

The fact is, without good in the heart, restricting the means of preventing evil is attacking the problem at the wrong end.

Second, statistics tell us something quite different than all the cacophonous anti-gun rhetoric.

Dr. Martin Fackler, America’s foremost expert on ballistic injuries, makes these points:

(A) guns prevent 75 crimes for each death caused by doctors carelessness or mistakes.

(B) most killers have enough sense to choose places that have no armed resistance; schools, hospitals, public transportation, churches, and so on.

(C) Anti-gun laws will only worsen the situation because studies show that in states that allow qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons mass shootings essentially disappear.

(D) A recent headline in USA Today reads: “Gun injuries in crimes fall 40% in five years.” This decline has occurred in tandem with a rise in the number of firearms in the hands of a responsible public.

(E) anti-gun laws will force gun owners into a moral box: do they obey what they believe is an irrational law, or will they feel morally obligated to disobey it?

“Faced with this moral dilemma,” says Dr. Fackler, “had most of our founding fathers chosen to obey, we would still be a colony of England.”

The weapons question is a tough one. But until we can eliminate the evil in the heart of man, the smart thing would be to keep the eyes open and the iron hot.

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Jim Moore is a free-lance political writer and is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.