Gun violence …

I don’t own a gun. 

Well, actually I do – it’s a BB gun I bought to ding the squirrels that mugged my bird feeder years ago.  Once I discovered a truly squirrel-proof feeder I didn’t need it any more.  But I kept it. 

So I don’t own a firearm. Nor do I feel a pressing need to have one. I don’t hunt. I’m not into target shooting. I’m not too worried about violent criminals or wild animal attacks where I live. 

That said, I have nothing against law-abiding people who own guns. The gun owners I know are respectable citizens who bought their guns legally, maintain them properly, and know how to use them. They learned in the military, in law enforcement, or were taught by a family member how to safely and responsibly handle a gun.   

Not everyone should have a gun, however. Criminals, for example. The mentally unstable shouldn’t, either. Nor should the average person get their hands on weapons designed specifically for the military to kill a lot of other people quickly – like a .50 cal machine gun.  Or a tank. Or an RPG launcher. No good from come from that. 

Some people believe nobody should be allowed to have any kind of firearm, whether that’s a .22 handgun or rifle, a .357 magnum, or an AR-15. They believe if you take away all the guns you’ll eliminate mass murders such as the Newtown, Orlando and San Bernardino massacres.

Every time one of these horrifying incidents happens they push to tighten restrictions on guns. As I write this there’s a sit-in in Congress to protest the lack of new gun laws. The media love this type of stuff – legislators pounding the table over the need to ban “assault weapons” while Mothers Against Gun Violence and other anti-gun groups march in the streets, coupled with tearful clips of families who’ve lost loved ones through gang shootings or accidents.

The problem is that they are all addressing the wrong cause. There are plenty of restrictions on gun purchases and laws about guns on the books already. The problem is not the types of guns or the laws – it’s the simple fact that when someone is a criminal, or mentally deranged, and they decide to kill people they will, with or without a gun.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with a home-made truck bomb of fuel oil and fertilizer. We didn’t ban fuel oil, fertilizer or trucks in the aftermath, because McVeigh was the lunatic monster who killed all those people. Those were his tools. 

When the 911 hijackers killed 3000 people in New York they didn’t use guns, they used planes they commandeered by brandishing box cutters.  We didn’t ban planes as a result, but we tightened restrictions on what objects people could carry on a plane.  Did that make air travel safer? Nobody knows but it hasn’t stopped terrorists from blowing up planes.     

Banning all guns will accomplish nothing. Taking violent criminals and terrorist wannabes off the street will. So will keeping violent mentally unstable people from getting dangerous weapons.

None of which is politically correct. The same people who want to ban guns are usually the same people opposed to lengthy sentences for violent criminals, despise any form of profiling or pro-active law enforcement, and almost always oppose to the death penalty. 

No one in that same group wants to admit it, but the “mainstreaming” into society of the mentally ill in the 1970s and beyond, and the desire to consider all forms of mental illness as “treatable” diseases controllable through medications, opened the floodgates as well. That ignored the fact that this only works if someone voluntarily sticks to their medication regimen; it’s entirely up to the patient, and not everybody will take their meds as prescribed once they’re on the street.    

In the three most recent massacres, many people recognized in advance that the perpetrators were unstable.  But they were afraid to say anything for fear of seeming insensitive. In the Newtown case, the mother of the killer knew he was off his meds, but did nothing.  In Orlando there were warning flags all over the place – the FBI even interviewed the killer twice before that based on tips. And in San Bernardino neighbors hesitated to call police because they didn’t want to seem to be racial profiling. 

The lesson: Bad things happen when good people do nothing. 

I blame political correctness more so than guns for these events. All three of these slaughters could have been prevented if only someone had the courage to simply report what they knew, instead of worrying about hurting someone’s feelings.   

I won’t bother to rehash the usual arguments about the 2^nd Amendment and why it’s really in the Constitution.  The anti-gun extremists keep parsing the words to support a flawed premise that it was never intended to allow individual citizens – rather than “militia” – to own guns.  And that it only applied to muskets, not modern firearms. Their arguments are ridiculous. 

Nor will I take the other extreme’s position that every citizen can have whatever firearm they desire, be that a .22 or a bazooka. That’s equally ridiculous.   

I concede we have a problem with “gun violence.” We always have as long as I can remember. Growing up in Miami it was mainly bad guys killing other bad guys – much as it is in Chicago now – or good guys killing bad guys, so nobody really cared that much.  It’s only when innocent civilians get gunned down that it grabs the public’s attention.  And truthfully, that doesn’t happen all that often outside the bad parts of major U.S. cities.

The majority of deaths attributed to “gun violence” in this country are suicides (61%), which is rarely noted when gun-control advocates throw around how many people are killed by guns every year.  Gun involved murders are a fraction of that.  Mass shootings, however horrific, are extremely rare and an even smaller fraction of gun deaths each year.

That doesn’t mean we should accept mass shootings as a part of life.  We should do everything in our power to prevent them – the key word being “prevent.” And that means removing from society those people who are most likely to commit such acts.  Making it harder or even impossible for them to legally buy a gun won’t prevent them from getting one, if that’s their weapon of choice; it will only delay them or raise their cost. If someone is Hell-bent on killing lots of people for whatever crazy and/or ideological reason, you have to stop the person, not the weapon. 

Gun violence doesn’t come from the gun, but from the person wielding the gun.  Nobody wants to deal with the people behind the guns until they’ve killed people with those guns. 

All the political theater surrounding the issue is just that – political theater. Democrats in particular see this as a big issue heading into November elections; something they can use to bludgeon Republicans and paint them as uncaring, unfeeling pawns of the NRA. Democrats are counting on the ignorance of the public – and their friends in the media – to associate the tragedy in Orlando with the lack of stricter restrictions on access to guns.

I’m afraid they’ll succeed. Even though what happened in Orlando had nothing to do with lax restrictions on access to guns. Or even with the gun used -- which the media instantly tagged, erroneously, as an “assault” weapon, which implies an automatic weapon to most – but was in fact a fairly ordinary AR-15-style .223 caliber hunting rifle. And yes, someone has to pull the trigger each and every time to fire every shot using that rifle.    

If they do succeed that’s too bad because another law, another regulation, another ban on certain types of guns would not have prevented the massacres in Newtown, San Bernardino, or Orlando, nor would those prevent something just as heinous happening again. 

We need to step up and recognize that we need to stop the people intent on doing harm, not the weapons.  That means keeping violent criminals in jail.  Getting terrorist wannabes off our streets. And taking a hard look at how much latitude we give the mentally ill to manage themselves.

Until we do all that, as politically incorrect that will be, we’re begging for a repeat.