Like clockwork, every time there is a mass shooting the religious wingnuts look to capitalize and the gun nuts trot out the NRA talking points. Yesterdays shooting at a Connecticut Elementary School is no exception.
First you have folks like the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer and Mike Huckabee among others saying ridiculous things like God wasn’t able to help the children because he isn’t allowed in public schools.
Really? A supposed omnipresent deity (that’s right, unlike a vampire he is everywhere and doesn’t need your permission to be somewhere) couldn’t help because our Constitution bans government endorsed religion? Maybe Fischer and Huckabee should stop using this tragedy to politicize their agenda and instead ask themselves how their benevolent and caring god would allow 20 innocent children to be killed?
Once the religious nuts have had their say, we have the gun nuts coming out of the woodwork with the tired and overused NRA talking points like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (It really should be “guns don’t kill people, crazy people with easy access to guns kill people”) or if the kindergarten teacher was packing, many lives could have been saved as if putting more guns on the street is the answer to all our problems instead of in reality being the root cause of most of them.
And while on the subject of guns, could someone please provide me with statistics showing the number of people saved because they own a gun versus the number of people killed by those that previously had no criminal record and obtained guns legally? I can’t find any valid stats but if one just does a cursory search, it seems to me a lot more innocent people are killed than are saved by allowing us as a society to stroke our “my gun is bigger than your gun” manhood.
I am under no delusions that this tragedy will change things in our country, in fact our elected leaders are already bowing to special interests like the NRA whenever the “gun control” question is raised and believe me I get it. Just please the next time some whack job goes off in a school or shopping mall, don’t give me the same old lame excuses for why it happened.
Banning guns will obviously not prevent murders nor will it prevent the bad guys from getting them. But as long as nut jobs can go down to the local Walmart and pickup a gun or easily “borrow” one legally purchased from someone they know, events like yesterday become that much easier to commit and will continue to happen.
And as far as I am concerned those continuing to push the NRA agenda all have the blood of those killed yesterday on their hands.
we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams, 1798