A Gun in Your Hand is Still the Best Protection

By Alan Caruba

Here’s an excerpt from Steven Goddard’s excellent blog, Real Science:

“Navy Issues Security Clearances To Delusional Paranoiacs With Multiple Gun Arrests"

Posted on September 17, 2013

The DC shooter had two gun arrests, including one where he fired a bullet into his neighbor’s apartment and didn’t even bother to check on her. He suffered from delusional paranoia, heard voices, and had a security clearance and a concealed carry license. And the Navy let him slip through security yesterday carrying a rifle.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. law enforcement officials are telling The Associated Press that the Navy contractor identified as the gunman in the mass shootings at the Washington Navy Yard had been suffering a host of serious mental issues, including paranoia and a sleep disorder. He also had been hearing voices in his head, the officials said.  Aaron Alexis, 34, had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the criminal investigation in the case was continuing. The Navy had not declared him mentally unfit, which would have rescinded a security clearance.”

A gun in your hand is still the best protection against such a random killer or against anyone threatening your life or the lives of others.

On November 11, 2009, in the week following the killings at Fort Hood—still labeled workplace violence, not a terrorist attack—a Washington Times editorial noted that “Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection.”

It makes you wonder why we refer to our military as “armed forces.”

Thanks to the usual delusionary liberal claptrap cited to oppose gun ownership, military bases, schools, malls, and even movie theatres remain places where few, unless they live in a state that permits concealed carry, can shoot back when under attack.

On Tuesday, September 17, the nation celebrated Constitution Day, the ratification 226 years ago of the Constitution. When sent to state legislatures many demanded that a Bill of Rights be included and it is significant that the Second Amendment right to own and bear arms guarantees the rights enumerated in the First Amendment.

As Thomas Jefferson noted, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” That was never more true than today!

Michael Savage, the radio talk show personality, is fond of saying that liberalism is a mental disorder, but there is ample proof, given the irrational way they keep demanding more laws to control guns, limit gun ownership, and create other obstacles to a populace that clearly demands to retain the rights spelled out in the Second Amendment.

Before the bodies of Alexis’s victims had been counted and removed, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and longtime gun control advocate was denouncing “the litany of massacres” over the past few years, asking “When will enough be enough?” but not answering why Monday’s killings and those at the Newtown, Connecticut school, earlier at Columbine high school, or the movie house killings in a Denver suburb last year all involved perpetrators who were found to have been mentally deranged. Sen. Feinstein ignores this fact.

Millions of Americans own guns, mostly for personal protection as opposed to hunting. There are 13.7 million hunters in the United States over age 16 according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As CNS News reported in February, “That means hunters constitute only 15.9 to 18.1 percent of the estimated 70-80 million gun owners in the U.S. in 2001—the last year for which statistics are available.” There are an estimated 300 million firearms in the U.S., about 100 million of which are handguns.

Liberals and gun control advocates would have you believe that the nation has been awash in mass shootings or that our murder rate is soaring. There is no truth in either of these assertions. Indeed, in states that permit concealed carry of handguns the murder rate is lower than those that do not. Chicago, famous for its strict gun laws, has a high rate of murders and is being joined by Newark, NJ and Trenton in my home state of New Jersey where it is virtually impossible to secure a concealed carry permit.

While mass shootings are frightening events, Bloomberg News reported there had been 78 such events over the past thirty years; incidents in which four or more people were killed at random. There were 547 victims and “over the same three decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of one percent of the 559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered over that same time period.” According to the World Health Organization, statistically America ranks among nations with the very lowest murder rates per 100,000, many of which have total gun bans.

A May 7, 2013 article in the Los Angeles Times, reported that “Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show. Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.”

Americans are constantly being harangued over the issue of gun ownership. That issue was settled 226 years ago when our Constitution was enacted.

© Alan Caruba, 2013