About the guns
by digby
An excerpt from this article about the guns in the wake of Charleston:
Some more conservative commentators seem to be advocating for arming priests and pastors in the same way that they’ve argued in favor of having armed guards in schools. What are your thoughts on this proposal?
That’s a very typical reaction. In the last decade, this is exactly how the gun rights crowd would’ve responded to this. They take these incidents as a call to arms. I’m not surprised that they think Christian pastors should be armed to prevent these kinds of incidents. The interview you refer to is with a guy named E.W. Jackson, who was on “Fox and Friends” this morning. He was the one who suggested that this was more of a hate crime against Christians and not against African Americans. He himself is African American, but clearly he and the host completely ignored that there was an obvious race element to this though the shooter himself said it. What was interesting about Jackson is that he is no average or ordinary black pastor. “Fox and Friends” picked him for a reason. He was a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia and for the Senate and is a Tea Party favorite, staunch defender of guns, big critic of the black political establishment in complaining that they’re always claiming racism, but that’s beside the point. The major point is this is not anything new. This is part of the larger gun rights agenda to flood our society with guns.
The other piece of interest on Fox News was actually in the written portion. John Lott, who is a major gun rights advocate, wrote a book called “More Guns, Less Crime.” He has been repeatedly discredited, disproved by the public health establishment, but he keeps coming back because he cites data and statistics. His methods have been disproven, but he is called on as an expert in favor of gun rights. He wrote a column this morning for Fox News saying that the real problem was that the church was a gun-free zone, and that makes it an easy target for killers. But that again is a very common argument that we heard many times about the shooter in Aurora, Colorado. They said that that theater was also a gun-free zone, and that’s why he chose it. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary: that that doesn’t come into the minds of the shooters at all.
What they are really saying is that we must accept that people are going to die in mass killings from gun violence. That goes without saying. But they believe we just won’t have as many deaths if more people are armed because someone in an armed crowd should be able to cut down the first shooter before he succeeds in killing all of his intended victims. He will, of course, kill some of them. Nobody can read his mind and know ahead of time that he is going to start firing at people. But once the shock wears off one of the armed accountants, schoolteachers and elderly people should be able to get their weapon out and fire at the shooter before he kills every person in the room (as long as he doesn’t see them first.) That’s it. That’s their solution.
Unless we all walk around with guns loaded and drawn and ready to fire at a moments notice, this is the best scenario that they can come up with. The worst, of course is that bullets flying all over the place from multiple shooters will inevitably hit the wrong people and cause even more death. But in the best case, what we will have is possibly fewer victims before someone cuts down the perpetrator. And that is good enough for them.
So, in effect, they are saying that mass shootings are just part of life and we are going to have to live with it. And apparently, that’s what most Americans believe as well. There is nothing to be done. Well, that’s not true. The gun proliferation zealots are succeeding in state legislatures in loosening gun laws and putting even more guns into circulation everywhere. So there’s that. But that’s it.
.