What If They Boycotted Something Else?
Aug 21, 2013 Commentary, Second Amendment
Christopher Lane of Australia was attending college in the US and played baseball on his college team. He had just returned from his home country a few days ago and was murdered when three teens who claimed they were bored decided to shoot him. Lane was out jogging when the three wannabe thugs followed him in a car and shot him in the back.
The murder happened in Oklahoma.
This is a tragedy and I can’t even begin to imagine how his family is affected by this. They sent a loved one to the US a few days ago and now he is gone, senselessly murdered by thugs with alleged ties to a gang.
The incident has the anti gun nuts up in arms. Brit twit Piers Morgan says that America’s gun crisis has become the world’s problem.
Former deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer said that Australian tourists should stay away from America to protest a need for stricter gun control.
These fellows come from nations that have taken guns from people and now their citizens are at the mercy of criminals. Gun murders have not stopped in their home nations and no gun law would have prevented Lane’s murder.
You see, none of the people who have been arrested are allowed to own a handgun. How did they get one? The same way people who get the banned substance Heroin do, they obtained it illegally. No law will keep people from getting what they want. One only needs to look at prohibition in the US to see that people who wanted alcohol, an illegal and banned item, got it. Criminals do not obey the law. That is exactly why there are people in the UK and Australia who are shot with guns even though they have extreme gun control.
There is not a gun problem in America; there is a societal and criminal problem. One of the suspects in the Lane murder was on probation and there are indications that all of them had a criminal history.
The crimes committed with guns are almost exclusively done by people who have obtained them illegally. The only thing gun laws do is impose restrictions on those who follow the law in the first place. The liberal system of justice that lets criminals go free is at fault as is the mindset that portrays people as victims who are not responsible for their actions.
Perhaps if we spent as much time going after criminals as we do going after guns we would have some meaningful progress in the murders of people by guns. Keep in mind, more people die in car accidents and from tobacco use than from guns but we concentrate on gun control because it is about controlling people.
In New York a few days ago a cab whose driver was full of road rage jumped a curb and hit a woman amputating her leg. The woman was visiting the US from the UK. Would it make sense for UK officials to advise their citizens not to visit the US until road rage is controlled or until cab drivers are held accountable?
But something deeper needs to be investigated. Two of the three suspects in this case were black and a large number of violent crimes are committed by black people (particularly against other blacks). How would anyone react if the former deputy PM of Australia had advised citizens to avoid the US until it got its black people under control?
This is an important question because we have the gun being blamed for the crime. We hear people calling for all kinds of actions against the gun. A broad generalization is being made and all legal gun owners are being lumped in with the small fraction of people who use illegal guns in an illegal way. If they are free to do this and if it makes logical sense to the gun grabbers then why can’t we simply look at the demographics of 66% of the people involved in this crime and indict an entire class of people for what happened. It works like this:
Gun used in crime means all guns (and gun owners) bad so ban all guns.
Blacks committed murder so all blacks are bad so ban all blacks.
The second statement makes little sense to anyone and is readily rejected but gun grabbers who see the absurdity in it will fail to see the same absurdity in the first sentence.
Guns do not commit crimes. People commit crimes and in this case the gun was the object used to do so. We do not ban knives, baseball bats, cars, sulfuric acid and rope when they are used to commit murder. We recognize that all these items have a purpose and that they can be used to murder. Guns have a purpose and they can be used to murder. We should not ban them just because a small number of people use them illegally (which would not stop even with a complete ban).
The Second Amendment protects a right and that right should not be infringed upon because some people do bad things. Criminals do bad things all the time and yet we don’t condone violating their Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights.
When we rationalize infringing on rights because it makes us safer or keeps bad people from being bad (which never happens) we have given up freedom. Freedom comes with risks and the proper way to mitigate those risks is to hold people accountable.
Bored thug gang banger wannabes do not represent the whole of America and their acts should not dictate gun policy in America.
The Constitution should be the only governing document.
Period.
Boycotting America because a criminal uses a gun to murder an Australian makes as much sense as boycotting Australia because a Great White shark ate an American.
We can no more control a determined criminal than we can a shark…
Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.
Tags: absurdity, australia, baseball, gun control, murder, oklahoma