Gun-Free Zones- an Invitation to Kill

Gun-Free Zones- an Invitation to Kill

The news from Parkland, Florida, of a crazed shooter entering a high school and killing at least 17, was the latest in a string of mass shootings occurring where people are at their most vulnerable. Whether in schools, like Columbine and Sandy Hook, or in churches like the ones in Charleston and Sutherland Springs, the single common denominator is the fact that these mass killings took place in buildings presumed to be devoid of firearms- in essence, gun-free zones.

All it takes is for some malcontent, armed with weapon(s) and bent on mass murder, to enter a school or a church, where he knows that there is little chance of being shot, and then bodies start piling up.

Predictably, legislators and politicos, will stand up and demand more and more gun control legislation, even though such legislation would fail to prevent these mass killings from taking place. Just as Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals and the intellectual inspiration to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste,” liberals always take these shootings to push for more and more gun control legislation. These political opportunists would have us believe that some lunatic would be dissuaded from perpetrating mass murder, on the basis that said lunatic sees a sign prohibiting guns at any given location.

Horse feathers!

Gun control laws have about as much to do with preventing mass shootings as warning labels on packs of cigarettes have to do with preventing lung disease. Consider Chicago, for instance, which has the strictest gun control laws in the entire nation. That city also has the highest number of shooting deaths in the entire nation, year after year. Despite very strict gun control laws having been put in place, shooting deaths have escalated in Baltimore, as well. The same could be said for many other large cities around the country.

Putting up a sign that an area is a gun-free zone, be it in a school, church, synagogue, or restaurant, is tantamount to saying that the people inside are completely defenseless, and therefore act as an unintended invitation for a would-be mass killer to perpetrate the most carnage possible.

Arming teachers and administrators, in the same way that commercial airline pilots are now permitted to carry firearms, might provide defense capabilities aimed at taking down mass shooters, but there is something else that should be attendant to any effort to prevent gun violence…and that is teaching children right from wrong, beginning in elementary school.

There was a time when schools drilled into students’ heads that taking a human life, or perpetrating any act of violence, or committing any crime, is wrong, period. Then, beginning in the early 1970s, the concept of moral relativism came creeping into the classroom. It started when teachers began assigning essays to their students, asking whether or not it is wrong for a homeless mother or father to steal a loaf of bread from a convenience store. The notion of “justifiable crime,” thus entering the lexicon in school curriculum, took off from there, aided and abetted with the frequent use of mental illness as a defense to exonerate those committing homicide. Nowadays, it seems that the only “right” and “wrong” being taught is that it is always “right” to challenge authority and that it is always “wrong” to question the dogma of man-made global warming. In the absence of the pledge of allegiance and school prayer, political correctness has taken the place of God and country. Criminologists are notorious for rationalizing and excusing any street crime, including rape or homicide, while being the first to condemn white-collar crime on a wholesale basis.

Another idea might be the imposition of mandatory capital punishment in the cases of all mass shootings, perpetrated by anyone 14 years of age, and older. While there are many studies which claim that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent in preventing homicide, such studies are usually proffered by university professors and lawyers opposed to capital punishment in the first place. However draconian or unenlightened it might otherwise seem, bringing back public executions might well deter many a miscreant from even thinking about perpetrating mass murder.

The first thing that should be done, regardless, is to take down all of the signs which say, “Gun-Free Zone.” The only thing that putting up such signs accomplishes, in the end, is to encourage the sick and twisted to commit mass murder like that which took place on Saint Valentine’s Day, in a quiet suburb of Fort Lauderdale, and in far too many other places across America.

-Drew Nickell, 15 February 2018

© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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