Monday, January 10, 2011

Loughner & Gun Control

Jared Loughner allegedly shot 20 individuals, including his apparent target Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), at a Tucson meet-and-greet. I will refrain from blaming the rhetoric of Sarah Palin or labelling Loughner a rightwing loon at this point. Loughner's motives are not the subject here, "gun control" is.

As could easily be suspected, liberals are using the shooting as a rallying cry to limit gun ownership. Just look at Huffington Post and how anti-gun sentiment is rampant. Articles such as "Only One Fact in Arizona: Loughner Got a Gun" or "Americans Favor Semi-Automatic Weapons Ban..." are pushing for more limits to gun ownership, especially since Loughner apparently purchased his weapon legally.

After a murderous shooting attack, the media likes to immediately begin defining sanity and defining the assailant as insane. This is an attempt to negate extralegal political action as well as label the act as isolated. If we cannot look at reasons why, we tend to only look to how. How is a gun. Another thing that really annoys me is liberals' constant use of "semi-automatic" as a scare tactic. Do these people even know what a semi-automatic weapon is. It is a firearm which automatically reloads, but will only fire one round per trigger pull. That's all. Nothing scary. Give me a break!

This attack cannot be used to further limit people from having guns. As a matter of fact, I read one pro-gun blog that posed the question of how this Arizona attack might not have been carried out to the extent it was if the people present had been armed. (Of course, if people aren't armed in Arizona, I don't know where they would be.)

We must engage people we hear talking about "gun control" as a solution. It isn't a solution and an unarmed populace is far scarier.

3 comments:

  1. Just found your site on a Voluntaryist Facebook page. Good job. Are you on CalGuns?

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  2. Many people here in Arizona carry firearms regularly. However, the part of Tucson where the Safeway is located is somewhat upscale and liberal, so probably few were carrying THERE. The spurious argument to restrict firearms rights because an undiagnosed probable schizophrenic bought and used it very poorly is as logical as banning Das Capital and Mein Kampf because he read them. Who knows, perhaps from his reading he got an even crazier idea about people of certain ethnic heritage and singled her out for that. The same logic that would chip away at second ammendment rights might lead the country to restricting certain minorities from running for office -- for their own good.... See how fast this false logic gets as crazy as Loughner???

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