WhatFinger


Adam Lanza was the Devil’s gift to the Democrat anti-gun fanatics

The Connecticut Tragedy and Safety in Schools



A lot of children, and a few adults who deserve every bit as much grieving by all of us, were slaughtered a week ago in Connecticut. The evil act was accomplished in a quiet, peaceful school. It happened suddenly, with horrid noises and pain, inside the walls that everyone had trusted to protect them.
What failed? The tide of horror has almost instantly led to waves of attempts to explain how such things can happen, and an amazingly quickly assembled campaign to pin the explanation on the instrumentalities that were used, and to eliminate them. The cry is for “safety” in our schools – and everywhere else. The effort to achieve “safety” has immediately been to hold up the guns that were used as the cause. The symbolism is so much like the tokens used in voodoo to personify and then purge out devils that it is creepy. But, obviously, the school, supposedly so safe, was not. And that does need to be addressed with some clear thinking. Because those kids should not have been so easily killed.

Support Canada Free Press


So, we must ask - What is “Safety?” Safety is the capability to reduce hazards. The first step in “safety” is to identify the hazards that threaten you. We could start with a balcony that has no railings. Or a stream that goes by the house, and we are unsure how high the stream may rise in a flood. In these examples, the safe answer seems fairly simple – install a secure railing, or construct a flood wall. What about a more active threat? How about fire or mice chewing their way into the cupboard? We do all we can to keep heat or flame away from anything combustible; or we put all the edibles in plastic containers. But the hazards are not completely eliminated. Fires will still occur, due to thoughtless acts, or some disruption of the routine. Mice will still find their way in, and poop in the cupboard as they try to figure out how to get into the boxes. So, we need fire extinguishers, and mouse traps. And, still, the hazard is not totally eliminated. We have to face occasional losses. The examples of incomplete safety define all of history. We can start with the siege of Troy by the Achaeans. Ten years of success as Troy stood behind their well-built walls came to naught when the Achaeans feigned withdrawal, leaving behind a wooden horse, supposedly in tribute to the success of the Trojans. The Trojans never anticipated the deadly content of the horse, and pulled it inside to gloat on their victory. When the stowaways inside snuck out to open the Trojan gates, the army of Achaeans swarmed in, killing all the inhabitants of Troy, and leaving only traces of the grand city that were not re-discovered for over two thousand years. Jumping to more recent times, the Maginot Line was France’s “safety” plan, to meet the hazard of a renewed German nation. That line was impenetrable, capable of laying down a shattering fire all along the border with Germany. But the French dared not offend Belgium by extending the Maginot Line along that border. At deep cost to the French treasury, the Maginot Line stood. Until Hitler ignored it, blitzkrieged through Belgium, and conquered France in a few weeks in 1940. That effort to accomplish safety actually took the necessary resources away from a more active, effective defense – “safety plan” – and dumped a terrible hazard on their Belgian neighbors. How about “airport security?” Who can forget September 11, 2001? The policy was established, and the organization and procedures were implemented to be sure that the planes crossing the country that day were free of guns. They did their job perfectly. And those intent on killing figured out where the rules and equipment left an opportunity, and exploited it. On four airliners – where the passengers had submitted to searches, confident that their little sacrifice of privacy and liberty would assure them “safety,” the lost ability and readiness to defend themselves proved fatal. But their deaths did not spell the end - thousands of other Americans died, in buildings hundreds of miles away, because those in the planes had voluntarily relinquished their power to defend themselves, trusting that the problem was “gun violence.” Yet they died without a single gun being used. That leads us to consider the immediate question: How do we achieve safety in schools? What is the threat? Is it the only threat that we need to worry about? Does it occur only in schools? The hazard that has been defined in the organized response by the left and their fawning media is “gun violence.” I have always wondered why gun violence has to be addressed, and not all the other forms of violence? It seems to me that the hazard should be defined to address all forms of violence: Knives and clubs, arson, kidnapping, and who knows what other evils can be invented? To address the “gun violence” threat, the scripted response is to eliminate guns. This has proven so unpalatable to the American sense of individual responsibility and liberty that the extermination of guns has to be configured to address one class at a time, thus etching at the objective rather than simply acting like past dictators have and ban the guns in one fell swoop. Do the feigning aggrieved hand-wringers actually believe that the gun hazard can be eliminated? To eliminate a hazard entirely requires the existence of the whole class to cease entirely. If any items constituting the hazard remain, then some other “safety” measure must be planned to address the remaining threat, whether it is stowaways in the Trojan Horse, or the open end of the Maginot Line, or box-cutters on an airliner. If we settle on the nature of the hazard being guns, and no other class of weapons or destructive devices, we must then melt down every gun that has ever been manufactured. That is, of course, the exact objective that Diane Feinstein and her allies have expressed. Well, with the exception of the government – they must be encouraged to keep their guns to hold us under their control, mustn’t they? But right there, the survival of any gun at all means that the schools which we want to make “safe” must have a plan for addressing that lingering hazard. Has there been any history we can consult to determine the success achieved when guns are banned? Well, we can look to see if the evil perpetrators of such attacks were thwarted by zones where guns were in fact banned. Oops, that did not work out. Columbine – a gun-free school zone. Virginia Tech – a gun-free school zone. The Theater in Aurora Colorado – another gun-free zone. Post offices? Malls? And the Newtown Elementary School. We have to conclude that making mere zones gun-free doesn’t work. It seems as if those crazed with the plan to kill actually see the “gun-free-zone” signs, locked doors, screening machines, and threats of a few years in a “corrective facility” merely as the signs that they will not face real opposition when they start shooting. What if we actually take guns away from the entire population? Well, aside from the consequence that the government that enforces the ban will subsequently draw the criminal element that makes their unresisted power profitable, you have the even greater vulnerability that focusing on only “gun violence” requires. Let’s look at China, one of the more effectively disarmed populations in our human planet. Wow. On the same day that the children in Connecticut were being shot, a similar number of children in Chenpeng, China were being stabbed. But all survived, and what’s the big deal of a missing limb or two? And this is not just an isolated event – there have been many school stabbings, hatchet killings, and the like of groups of children China over the past few years. So, if we eliminate guns, we don’t really save the children. We just change what is used to maim and kill them. Is that “problem solved?” Not in my view. OK, next we should look at how big the problem is – several media headlines have called the killing events an “epidemic.” An epidemic is defined as “an outbreak of a disease that spreads more quickly and more extensively among a group of people than would normally be expected.” The government’s Center for Disease Control (just think – they try to convince us they will control disease!) has various standards that define “epidemic.” An epidemic has to have a significant incidence among the population exhibiting the disease. For purposes of the flu “epidemic” of 1990, the CDC's threshold was 6.7 % of total deaths. Is the rate of school shootings – or any “mass,” non-personal shooting, an “epidemic?” Well, the population of guns in America is about 270,000,000. The population of gun-owning families is over 50,000,000. If we were to use the CDC’s flu threshold, an epidemic of gun violence would mean 3,350,000 gun deaths caused by gun-owning families (just by gun-owners, not by our whole population of over 300,000,000.) If we measure by the number of guns, and count those used to kill groups of students on December 14, 2012, we find the percent at .00000037 %, or 5.5 hundred-millionths of the frequency needed to be an “epidemic.” If it occurred daily, for a year, then we could talk about changing the CDC’s definition. But that is not what is happening. So using the term “epidemic” is sensationalist propaganda, and not a clinical truth. While 3 guns were used in Connecticut, and a few more in Aurora, there were 270,000,000 guns that were not in the hands of crazy fools, and were not used to kill any innocent victims, children or otherwise. Does it make any sense to address as a supposed trend of violence acts that compose less than a hundredth of a percent of how guns are actually used? No – either those who try to convince us of that are stupid, or they are knowingly lying to get us to give up something that they know we would want to keep if they told us the truth. So we don’t want to give up the guns – it’s that simple. How do we address school “safety?” It makes no sense to build a budget-breaking Maginot Line around each school. Because, like the Nazis, those who choose to kill will find the way they want around the wall. And they will figure out the fault that those inside the barrier overlook. The only effective way to achieve “safety” is to configure a reasonably safe environment – whether it be the cupboard doors closed to keep out the mice, or a reasonable fence around a school – and then be prepared to face the determined hazard that evades the barrier. In the first example, this would be a mousetrap. In the second, it is an armed capability for self-defense in the hands of every mentally prepared teacher. Has this ever happened? Well, there were little-publicized events like The Appalachian School in Grundy, Virginia, and the school in Pearl, Mississippi. In those cases, the death toll did not rise to national headline frenzy because armed faculty or students stopped the crazy shooter early on. What about our homes and streets? You can discover, typically, 9 monthly events where home occupants or others have successfully defended themselves against burglars, assailants, and even aggressive dogs, relying on their legally possessed guns. The reaction to the murders in Connecticut is not really about safety. It is not about the children, or finding a way to protect them. The tragedy in Connecticut is not merely being taken advantage of by Obama and the folks like Feinstein, Schumer, and Boxer. They hoped for something like this. “Fast & Furious” was the 1st Obama effort to paint the color of evil on guns, but his treachery failed when patriotic insiders “blew the whistle” on the foul play. The administration’s clumsy failure has not been fully revealed – the compliant press and the manipulating Congress have sufficiently muddled the investigation and publication of the facts to protect the guilty. We can not even hope that the true villainy of that scam will ever result in prosecution of those administration officials – ATF and the like – who actually sub-contracted murder in a foreign nation (and our own) in order to build a case against the guns of citizens whose actions have never justified the prohibitions the tyrants want. They were already planning their second-term crusade against the 2nd Amendment, and were going to settle on the Aurora, Colorado shooting to feed their propaganda machine. But the public reaction to that sad night was not particularly intense. They were waiting for something better able to get excited over. Adam Lanza was the Devil’s gift to the Democrat anti-gun fanatics. Even Harry Reid, long sucking the funds out of the NRA with his feigned and shaky support for the 2nd Amendment, has finally shown his true colors. Now, claiming to be among the gun-faithful, he will use his history of NRA support to betray them with greater supposed credibility than a Schumer or Feinstein, always openly the enemy of the Constitution, ever could. And he will clamor for a gun ban. It is not just the safety of children in schools that we must preserve. We have to realize that the safety of our lives and liberties is in immediate peril, and those in power will “not ever let a disaster go to waste.”


View Comments

Hal Rounds -- Bio and Archives

Hal Rounds is a resident of Tennessee.  Born in California, his undergraduate degree was in Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  He is an Air Force veteran of the Viet Nam war, working with munitions including rockets, bombs and, later,  nuclear weapons.  During a career in air express he attended law school and entered practice.  He is presently a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and the Supreme Court of the United States.


Sponsored