By Budd Schroeder  

As expected, the action of one evil person in South Carolina has the anti-gun advocates calling for more gun control on all Americans. They want more restrictions to limit Second Amendment rights. The words of the Constitution are “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” All the restrictions are infringements on this vital right.

Looking at the media one would think there is a huge percentage of gun owners who are not fit to own firearms, but using simple math disputes that. For the sake of convenience let’s use the figures of gun owner numbers as one hundred million. Most experts estimate that there are more than that. Then let’s use the figure of 100,000 gun violence events. The actual crime rate is lower, but simple division shows that .001 percent of gun owners are violent.

We could hope that figure would describe the percentage of corrupt politicians in government, but we, unfortunately know that is much higher. Yet, it is the corrupt politicians who grandstand and call for more gun control.

The fact is that no gun control laws stop evil criminals from committing their horrible crimes. South Carolina law forbids carrying a gun in a church without the permission of a church official. That gave Mr. Roof a perfect killing field because there would be nobody there capable of stopping him. Reportedly he reloaded five or six times to kill nine people. Not having a high capacity magazine didn’t hinder him in his mass murder either.

The S.A.F.E. Act in New York is another example of gun law failures. It requires the registration of so called “assault weapons.” If estimates of the number of guns that meet the state’s definition is correct, divided by the number of guns actually registered, the result is a meager five percent.

That would highly suggest that there is a lot of civil disobedience in the state. This brings up the concept of Prohibition. That was a law that was obviously unpopular and created even more problems. The public didn’t look at it as a good law and they didn’t obey it.

It had to be repealed as the SAFE Act should be repealed because it has no effect on reducing gun crime. In fact homicides increased, including two policemen being shot to death while sitting in their car. Politicians don’t seem to grasp the obvious. Criminals don’t obey laws and good people don’t need restrictive laws.

E. J. Dionne talked about guns and suicides, blaming the ownership of guns as a factor. Japan has virtually no private ownership of guns and their suicide rate is more than double that of the United States. Go figure. There must be something else that causes suicides.

Gun bans won’t work to keep them out of the hands of criminals any more than drug bans prevent the use of illegal drugs by addicts. If there is a demand for something, there will always be a provider using illegal means.

The only thing that makes a gun dangerous, is the person holding it! Cars and alcohol are not the cause of drunk drivers. They are the products being misused by the drunken driver. The laws should focus on people and not the potential means for evil or tragic events. Gun control is actually an attempt at people control, and politicians like to control people. “Gun control” is a good press release for politicians who prefer slogans to solutions.