In response to my good friend Brian Fleming
We all have sympathy for the families of Newtown victims. These tragic murders make everyone want to do something - anything - to prevent such a thing from happening again. We place ourselves vicariously into the families lives and feel the need to act.
Long before guns were invented, humans were very efficient at killing one another. In fact the conquerors of the Dark and Middle ages did a pretty good job of slaughtering people en masse without a single gun. Bad people have always been, and bad people will always be. The difference between now and then is that guns equalize the weak with the strong. That is the reason why the concept of personal liberty coincided with the availability of guns.
You say that as a retired police officer you are qualified to speak on the subject, but I would argue that you are among the least qualified. You don’t know how it feels to be defenseless because you are always armed. You are trained to defend yourself and control a dangerous situation with or without a weapon. A woman who would be overpowered by a rapist or an intruder does not have the advantage of being armed, highly trained, or at equal strength.
What about the shop owner in the Bronx, or Middletown or Newburgh?
What about the gas station owners or the pizzeria owners who are at the mercy of whoever walks through the door? They may not even carry a lot of cash, but are a mark because of the perceived notion that they have a cash business and they must bring home tons of cash.
They don’t have the right to defend themselves?
You re so ready to take the gun out of George Zimmerman’s hands to save Trayvon Martins life, but what if Martin continued to beat Zimmerman to death as he promised? That’s OK because he didn’t use a gun?
In your example from the 1992 robbery, you say “if you did not have a gun no one would have been shot that night.” Amazingly in your own situation you fail to realize that bad people had a loaded gun that night, in a city where handguns have been illegal for almost a century. So if they got away with the robbery that night, are you confident that they would never use the gun that shot at you again? Did you ever consider that you, as the armed good guy, probably saved innocent lives?
Thousands of people defend themselves every year with a firearm. The national media doesn’t spotlight these stories because it does not support their political agenda. Are those hundreds or thousands of lives that are saved any less precious than those in Newtown? What of the principle in Mississippi who stopped a lunatic with a gun by confronting him with his own gun before he could hurt anyone at an elementary school? Why isn’t that on the 5 o’clock news?
Our police are great, but the fact is most of the time the police arrive after the crime or murder was committed and they are tasked with investigating the scene to bring the perpetrator to justice. They just can’t be there before every crime happens to make us safe. Criminals know this.
I empathize with your angst over the Newtown murders, but blaming inanimate objects or disarming the vast majority of people who are law abiding gun owners is not the solution to this particular problem. It will accomplish nothing but to empower those who have no regard for the law. Lanza, like many of these mass killers, had a neurological disorder. Energy would be much better spent trying to find out why these disorders are occurring, and how to identify when a person suffering from one of these disorders is becoming dangerous. Trying to anticipate and regulate the tool they will use is futile.
Bobby Cattani
Warwick