There was another mass shooting last week at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs in which 3 people were killed, and so here we are again, thrust into the gun control debate by the extreme left-wing progressive media and President Obama himself. They make a huge deal out of the one or two “mass” shootings that happen each year, yet on a daily basis all around the country, roughly 1300 people died from tobacco related products and 30 die as a result of drunk drivers (source: CDC). Why don’t events get the same attention?
The progressive left is hell-bent on disarming law abiding citizens because they believe the world would be a safer place if no one was allowed to have one. They argue people don’t need firearms to protect themselves because they can call the police, and guns — not people — kill things. However, their logic is flawed. It’s not the firearm that kills people anymore than a french fry that is being chocked on.
A gun is an inanimate object, incapable of moving itself or harming anyone or anything without human intervention. The same is true of kitchen knives, hammers, vehicles, axes, and rocks.
If the progressive left were truly interested in making the world a safer place for innocent people to go about their daily lives without fear of being killed, they would instead focus on the below issues first, as they are responsible for far more deaths each year than firearms.
- Around 480,000 people die each year from tobacco related products (source: CDC)
- Roughly 88,000 people die each year from alcohol (source: LA Times)
- Roughly 32,000 people die each year in car accidents (source: Wikipedia)
- More than 10,000 people a year are killed by drunk drivers, 1/3 are repeat offenders (source: MADD)
On average, about 9,000 people are killed each year by all types of firearms according to FBI statics. The good news is, the number of people dying is dropping despite more people owning guns (source: FBI). Moreover, when you subtract from that number those who were justifiably killed by said firearms in self-defense, the number of innocent gun related deaths drops even lower. And the number of people killed in mass shootings is a lot lower.
A gun sitting on the ground is no more dangerous than a rock or a parked car. It’s not going to engage in mass shootings by itself. It’s not until someone comes along and throws the rock or gets behind the wheel drunk or distracted, that they become dangerous. Do we see a movement by the government to ban cars? Of course not.
The unintended consequence of banning firearms is, no one would be able to defend themselves against the criminals that still use them. What the media doesn’t report are the hundreds of people who defend themselves with a firearm every year. But the media is so far biased to the left, they never report these stories because it goes against the progressive agenda.
The media and progressive left spin their made up conclusions to show guns are dangerous and need to be controlled, which only deflects the debate away from the real problem. We should be monitoring the people who are mentally unstable rather than allowing them the freedom to roam society unchecked. We need wacko control, not gun control. The issue isn’t mass shootings and guns. It’s people.
Even if the progressive left was successful in banning guns, that’s not to say things would be any better than they are today. Banning firearms only shifts the advantage to the violent criminal who doesn’t care about breaking the law. Just as drug addicts get drugs even though they are illegal, criminals would still get guns even if they were illegal. The only difference is, innocent people will be at a huge disadvantage when it comes to defending themselves. Many of the innocent people that got wrapped up in the Planned Parenthood shooting were unarmed, and so their only defense to was to cower in a corner, wait for over 5 hours and hope to hell they weren’t seen by the gunman. That’s a horrible solution to a crazed person with a deadly weapon, whether it be a gun, knife, machete, hammer or some other object.
As mentioned before, a gun is not dangerous until it is used by a human in a dangerous or menacing manner. However, any object can be dangerous. Roughly 1300 people are killed each year by fists, hammers and other blunt objects. Are we going to ban everything? Are we going to ban alcohol because it kills tens of thousands of people each year? Are we going to ban cars because they too kill tens of thousands of people? Are we going to ban pools and swimming in the ocean because children drown in them each year?
Bad things happen to good people and crazy people do crazy things, despite what the law says. Gun laws don’t cure insane people. They’ll still use guns, or they’ll use other things like fertilzer, pressure cookers, or poison. We as a society are far better off having a way to defend ourselves against the insane than relying on the police, whose response times are on average greater than 12 minutes and rarely stop crime. Mass shootings and guns are not the issue. It’s the person who has no respect for life.
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