Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   10/13/2015

        Are rights and facts relevant?

It’s been 10 days since the massacre of students and a teacher in Roseburg, Oregon, by a deranged, hater-of-Christians, whose immediate family (father included) should have been paying attention to his accumulation of guns. It’s a pattern we’ve seen since the Columbine atrocity—parents apparently clueless to offspring that have diminished/demented capacity who should have been turned in to authorities. Still, we've no coherent, practical, constitutional plans from Emperor Obama, Democrats in Congress or leftist pundits, columnists and cartoonists.

Some examples: Last Friday’s “Opinion” page featured a Salt Lake Tribune cartoon with caricatures of the progressives’ bogeymen—angry white men labeled Guns Inc, GOP, NRA, a flannel-shirt-and-confederate-flag adorned southern simpleton and an “assault-gun” bearing, bearded hunter/survivalist. The cartoonist’s version of Republican candidate Ben Carson’s advice to “rush the shooter” was twisted into a mob-inciting call for the bogeymen to attack, of course, a woman holding a “Common sense gun laws” placard. The opposite is the actual case, with the usual gun-hating left, including Obama and all of news media, ginning up a nearly hysterical level of vituperation and guilt directed towards gun owners.

On the same page were a piece by Michael Reagan titled, “Time for sensible background checks,” as well as a column by Robert Minch, “Mass shootings accentuate the violence of the gun.” Reagan’s reasoning seems to avoid or ignore the disconnect between existing laws—prohibiting criminals and insane people from buying guns and killing people—and the futility of expanding such laws to private sales. Criminals already know they can’t legally buy or even possess guns and so they use “straw buyers” to acquire them. Requiring mental health professionals and family members to inform authorities of a dangerous person would help.

Minch, for his part, lobbed more of his characteristic cheap shots my way. I’ll not respond in kind with denigration for his apparent anti-gun and anti-God musings. However, I think it is a disingenuous mischaracterization to call me a “gun lobbyist” employing “unfounded nonsense” in saying that “law-abiding citizens might be denied their ‘God given right’ to self defense in any public space” through gun control measures.

Well, Mr. Minch’s sentiments are simpatico with our Governor Brown and Sacramento Democrats, who just passed and signed into law SB707, which “will prohibit people with concealed weapons permits from carrying firearms on school and college campuses.” Perhaps he could explain to readers how that law will impact anyone who is deranged, unstable and hate-filled—but not already a felon or formerly institutionalized; they could still legally purchase guns.  Perhaps he can explain how guns kill without criminals’ hands holding them.

Will such a person, deluded as the Roseburg killer was, still believe in a mission to kill people—on a campus where guns aren’t allowed and the guard is unarmed? Will they stop at a sign saying “Gun free zone” and remind themselves that it’s against the law to kill people?

By what interpretation of our Founders' “Declaration of Independence”—that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life…”—by what reading of those words can those “Rights” not include the God-given right to self defense? You can reject God with no denigration from this writer. But don’t reject the right to self-defense.

Could you, Mr. Minch, simply state how you have come to believe in your right of self-defense? Does it extend beyond the confines of your home and property? The courts have deemed our 2^nd Amendment “right to bear arms” to be a personal, private right. Shall we agree that it is unalienable? Do you, therefore, support or oppose SB707, support or oppose anyone’s right to obtain a concealed-carry permit, and support or oppose a law-abiding citizen’s right to be secure from assault and attack wherever they should travel? Just questions, not attacks, Mr. Minch.

“The NY Times Discovers Self-Defense,” by John Hinderaker, points out that “The New York Times has editorialized hysterically in favor of more gun control measures for years. Operating in an antiseptically-sealed liberal milieu, the Times editorialists seem not to understand why their position keeps losing at the polls.” Some of their reporters might have been trying to clue them in with “Common Response After Killings in Oregon: ‘I Want to Have a Gun’”

I’m not bothered in the least that gun purchases “shoot up” (pun intended) with each “active shooter” incident. Concealed carry permits have likewise risen exponentially as courts and local authorities acknowledge the obvious: legal gun-carrying citizens proportionally commit a tiny fraction of crime, and “shall issue” policies merely reflect that.

Here are some facts that bear on the issue: Those scary, eeeevil, assault weapons were effectively unavailable for purchase for 10 years. “Between 1994 and 2004, Americans were flatly bared from purchasing or transferring 660 arbitrarily selected semi-automatic firearms and from obtaining any magazine that could hold more than ten rounds. This prohibition had no discernible impact whatsoever.

“In fact, rifles are the least popular killing tools in the United States. Per the FBI, this is how Americans killed each other in 2014” (in summary): Handguns and Unknown firearms=64 percent; Shotguns and Rifles=4 percent; Knives and Cutting Instruments, Hands, feet, fists, pushing, and Other weapons=32 percent (Charles C.W. Cooke, quoting the National Institute of Justice). Less than 1 in 20 deaths from long guns; almost 1 out of 3 deaths involve no guns at all.