By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author,
Speaker,
Instructor,
Radio Host
I have to give Trump a few props, when this morning at the White House he explained the importance of getting rid of "gun free zones." He suggested what I have been suggesting . . . arming some of the personnel on school campuses. The reality is, good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns. As President Trump said, the average time it takes the police to arrive is eight minutes, and these shootings take about three minutes. He said, "I want schools protected like banks."
I was glad to hear that, because I was getting very nervous during his
discussion that included his approval for age restriction laws to be passed at the federal level for gun ownership. If that's the case, they better propose an amendment for such a change, because federal legislation regarding our right to keep and bear arms is unconstitutional from an original intent point of view.
During the White House discussion, this morning, even though he talked tough on protecting the right to keep and bear arms, Trump also suggested raising the age of gun ownership to 21 (
which, in many ways, is a change from his 2nd Amendment language prior to the shooting).
In all honesty, a new law restricting gun sales to those who are 21 or older would not do anything to stop school shootings, or any other kind of mass shootings, and would have not stopped Nikolas Cruz in Florida last week. In fact, raising the age to buy a firearm to 21 would not have stopped any of the previous school shootings we have experienced. With a cursory glance at the
list of the most recent school shootings, here's what we can determine - Every single person initiating these shootings were either 21 or older, or under 18, which means that 19 year old Nikolas Cruz would have been the only person an age restriction might have theoretically stopped. But, that wouldn't have stopped him, anyways, because killers always find a way. . . just as the under-18 kids in the shootings on the list did. They found a way to get a gun, because killers always find a way to kill.
Increasing the age to buy a firearm also creates a whole new host of inconsistencies. If you push gun ownership to 21, how do you reconcile having kids under 21 in the military using those kinds of firearms to protect out country? If you push gun ownership to 21, then the logical conclusion would be to push driver's licenses to 21, to push voting back to 21 (as it was originally), and pushing enlisting in the military to 21. If you do one, you have to eventually do the others.
Pam Bondi, Florida's Attorney General, seated next to President Trump this morning, began to talk about The Florida Mental Health Act of 1971 (Florida Statute 394.451-394.47891 (2009 rev.)), commonly known as the "Baker Act," which allows the involuntary institutionalization and examination of an individual. She called the new version the Gun Violence Restraining Order.
That, my friends, is very dangerous. When you make government the definers of mental illness, or the guard over protecting the public by allowing them to arrest those they believe could be disruptive to the common good, you are opening up the opportunity for abuse, and ultimately, tyranny. At what point does a governmental leader decide that conservatives are dangerous to the community and must be arrested and put away. When does such a law get turned against Christians. Jews. Dissidents. You.
The problem with shootings is not that we don't have enough government intrusion, the problem is societal. Our culture has lost sight of God, virtue, and has gone down a path of hypersensitivity that demands government imposed utopia where nobody is sad, nobody is offended, and nobody can even have access to a variety of offensive things (guns, profit, possessions, money) because all of those things offends somebody, somewhere.
In short, the Democrats have created the ultimate weapon. Together, with their socialist overlords, the younger generation has become strong in their hypersensitivity.
Aside from a few bumps in the road, such as the rise of the presidency of Donald Trump, who they are working to twist and mold in their leftist image little by little and crisis by crisis, everything is proceeding as they have foreseen.
The rise of Donald Trump as the Republican offering for President of the United States was seen by the liberal left as an attack against an establishment machine that should have been otherwise unstoppable, in their minds. They were too powerful, and the inevitability of the election of Hillary Clinton was too great.
The Democrats thought that they had turned the corner, and that America was finally a one-party state. Unfortunately, for them, the ability to destroy liberty and create a leftist utopia based on equality in misery turned out to be insignificant next to the power of the Trump movement.
They have rioted, screamed, cried, and threatened impeachment, and Trump's support and popularity has simply increased in the face of the attacks (
especially since the tax reform law). Their strategies have been failing. What they needed was an ultimate crisis that allowed them to unleash the younger generation on him, to force Trump's hand, and force the Republicans to nudge in a direction the Democrats can take full advantage of . . . if not today, down the road.
Then, the Democrats got what they wanted. A school shooting, and a major one with a lot of death. The media ran with it, the students activated, and now the liberal left has the GOP right where they want them.
Sheriff David Clarke has gone so far as to suggest that it may have been planned by the left, saying that the shooting "has George Soros' fingerprints all over it."
The liberal left agenda is logically a failure. The liberal agenda is also historically a failure. Leftism, when taken to an extent beyond the reach of liberty, results in violence, starvation, and death. Just look at Venezuela.
When emotions are kicked into high gear, anger, fear, and aggression come into play, and with each crisis the liberal left agenda makes all the sense in the world to the crying, whining, emotionally distraught individual. All they know is they want the hurt to go away. When we are emotionally exhausted from the pain of some kind of event, common sense is set aside and we are willing to agree with just about anything . . . to make the hurt go away.
The next move by the liberal left, where the youth are demanding gun control through the tears of pain they have rolling down their faces, has been in planning for a long time.
There is an old saying that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. We were all taught to be considerate and reasonable to the people around us but at the same time what has happened is we've created a hypersensitive society.
It's an interesting construct because it has created a weird phenomenon of extremities.
For example, while on the road, I've noticed you either get a bunch of people so afraid to insist on the right of way that everyone is waiting for the next guy to go. However, at the very next stop you may have two jerks practically running into each other and flipping each other off.
We have a society where everyone is easily offended by anyone who disagrees with them, or they are quick to offend you and don't give a crap what you think. Disagreement in any discussion is considered rude. We have the safe spaces that are popping up in colleges because of this ridiculousness. Sounds like a whole new video series . . . "Political correctness Gone Wild."
Yeah, I get it. We were taught to be reasonable. If you don't have something nice to say don't say it at all. But, at what point does that very good idea become a damaging part of society because it is taken too far? We have taken human reasoning, and it has been morphed into a situation that is both overly aggressive and overly hypersensitive. How do you combat something that is essentially at it's core good, but it became bad because it was essentially taken too far? Aggression is seen as a bad thing, but those who see aggression as being bad are aggressive. Disagreement is a bad thing, but those who disagree with you, and call you rude for disagreeing with them, consider themselves tolerant.
It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
These people must be ready to curl up in the corner in sheer terror when it comes to sales. How can you expect these people to have a "can-do attitude" and sell in an aggressive manner if everyone is so touchy-feely that nobody's going to be aggressive enough to be the lead salesman?
Talk about a golden opportunity for the alpha male. These people have become so wimpy that the alpha male has no competition whatsoever. Problem is, the alpha males are taking full advantage and are becoming overly aggressive. So, while we have metrosexuals who want to be more like a woman, and women who think they should be more like a man, and nobody is quite sure which bathroom they want to use, anymore, and everyone is so confused that they don't even know what bathroom to use, anymore . . .
Holy crap. You know what our society sounds like? The split in humanity depicted as Morlocks and Eloi from H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine." You know. The Eloi have become so passive that the more aggressive Morlocks have gotten to the point that they simply provide for and feed the Eloi, to fatten them up, so that that Morlocks may eat them later.
To get back to the Florida Shooting, the politicization of the event by media and the Democrats, and what Trump plans to do, it sure doesn't help the Left's cause when we hear things like what Colton Haab, a JROTC enlistee, said regarding CNN, after the shooting. He said he did not take part in a gun safety townhall with CNN at the helm on the grounds that
CNN attempted to plant “scripted” questions for him to ask.
Trump said that the NRA was in his corner regarding the Age 21 legislation he is calling for. I haven't heard the NRA say such a thing. In fact, National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre is warning us to be on our guard. He says socialism (a.k.a. Democrats) are behind the anti-gun movement. “Socialism is a movement that loves a smear. Racists, misogynists, sexists, xenophobe and more. These are the weapons and vitriol these character assassinations permanently hang on their targets because socialism feeds off manipulated victims,”
LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
LaPierre claimed "European socialists” are taking over the Democratic Party. He also named the “Occupy” movement, Black Lives Matter and antifa as examples of social groups that he claimed promote “uncivil discourse” and aim to "eliminate due process."
“The elimination of due process is the very gold standard of the socialist state,” he said.
LaPierre, earlier in his speech at CPAC, called proposals to limit the amount of weapons available to Americans “completely ridiculous,” and said more security would help prevent future school shootings.
A church in Pennsylvania is doing what it can to defend the right to keep and bear arms by announcing they will be hosting a blessing ceremony for couples with an AR-15 assault rifle.
The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, an offshoot of the Unification Church,
is inviting couples to bring their semi-automatic rifles to the church on Feb. 28 to “show their willingness to defend their families, communities and nation.”
According to the church’s website, the ceremony will focus on the “rod of iron” and each couples’ pledge to defend their home and the coming nation of Cheon Il Guk — the biblical kingdom of God referred to in Scripture.
The church describes the “rod of iron” as an “AR-15 semiautomatic rifle or equivalents such as an AK semiautomatic rifle.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the issue, the hate against the NRA, and those who support the 2nd Amendment, is reaching a "witch-burning" level of craziness.
The townhall in Florida had, among its participants,
NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch. Later at CPAC she told her conservative audience that escaping the CNN-hosted forum was an incredible experience. She said she wouldn't have been able to exit the town hall if she didn't have a security detail.
"I want to make this super obvious point," Loesch said. "The government has proven that they cannot keep you safe. And yet, some people want all of us to disarm. You heard that town hall last night. They cheered the confiscation of firearms. And it was over 5,000 people."
"I had to have a security detail to get out,"
she said of the Sunrise, Florida event. "I wouldn't be able to exit that if I didn't have a private security detail. There were people rushing the stage and screaming burn her. And I came there to talk solutions and I still am going to continue that conversation on solutions as the NRA has been doing since before I was alive."
"The government can't keep you safe and some people want us to give up our firearms and rely solely upon the protection of the same government that's already failed us numerous times to keep us safe. And then they also call Trump a tyrant but they say they want the president to also confiscate our firearms? Try to figure that one out,"
Loesch said.
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