Of Course The Solution to Domestic Terrorism is Gun Control

There is something unseemly about using tragedy to pursue a political agenda, but the San Bernardino massacre provided an opening that was too good to resist. The killing in San Bernardino was actually all about … wait for it … guns.

You could hear the excitement in their voices. They found an entirely new angle to talk about guns. Before the bodies of all the victims were even identified, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest tied guns to the No-Fly List.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on September 3, 2015. AFP PHOTO/NICHOLAS KAMM 

President Barack Obama used his Saturday address to double down.

"Right now, people on the No-Fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That is insane. If you're too dangerous to board a plane, you're too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun."

The president repeated the refrain during his Oval Office speech Sunday night. It was the only new policy recommended for fighting domestic terrorism.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cali.) agreed: “When a terrorist who can’t board an airplane can buy an assault rifle in a gun store, that’s a problem.”

If those on the No-Fly List are known terrorists why aren’t they in detention? The San Bernardino killers flew last June. Why weren’t they on the list?

And why are 72 employees of the Department of Homeland Security on the list? What are they doing making decisions about homeland security?

If your life’s work is to disarm the proletariat it has to be terribly depressing when your entire argument is reduced to a non sequitur.

For those who are on the list, which other constitutional rights must they forfeit because someone somewhere in the bowels of the bureaucracy chose to put their name on a list?

While we void their gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment without the due process guaranteed in Fifth Amendment, we may as well throw them in jail without the fair trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.

If the Second Amendment means nothing why should the Fifth and Sixth be sacrosanct?

And for God’s sake don’t let them pray.

It must upset the gun grabbers to read stories in their Party Organs that utterly destroy their arguments against guns.

The Washington Post points out that while the number of guns in America has increased by 60 percent in the last couple of decades the number of homicides by firearms has fallen by half.

As more Americans arm themselves the killers are seeking gun-free zones, the redoubts of the left, to do their damage.

Eric Roof in Charleston, South Carolina, James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado and Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara, California all changed their original target locations based on that very calculation.

This is often ridiculed, but nevertheless true: The communities that have ordinances requiring gun ownership have less crime.

I lived near Kennesaw, Georgia when they passed their local ordinance requiring a gun in every home. After the ridicule ended and the laughter died the crime rate declined by 89 percent.

While we get wall-to-wall television coverage on every mass shooting we seldom hear about those that were prevented or stopped by an armed citizen.

In the past 18 years that happened in:

Pearl, Missisippi, 1997; Edinboro, Pennsylvania, 1998; Santee, California, 2001; Grundy, Virginia, 2002; Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2007; Winnemucca, Nevada, 2008; San Antonio, Texas, 2012; Clackamas, Oregon, 2012; Spartenburg, South Carolina, 2012; Plymouth, Pennsylvania, 2012; Chicago, Illinois, 2014; Darby, Pennsylvnia, 2014; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2015; Chicago, Illinois, 2015; Conyers, Georgia, 2015.

These events did not lead the evening news, but they were instructive. Good people with a gun can stop bad people with a gun.

Since proponents of gun control laws insist that tougher laws will stop the violence I have an even better approach for them to consider.

What if we passed strict laws to make it illegal to kill anyone for any reason? We could make the law so tough that anyone convicted of breaking it could go to prison for life or even, dare I say it, be subject to capital punishment.

That would surely end all killings whether by gun, knife or even pipe bomb. There would be no reason to single out guns and thus not encroach upon the Second Amendment. The debate would be over and we could all go home winners.

Or, perhaps not.

Perhaps the left doesn’t really want gun safety as much as they want the gun issue. They can haul it out and dust it off for every election and inflame their base.

If they sincerely believed that tougher gun laws would save lives they would have passed them in 2009 or 2010 when they had absolute control over the legislative process. They chose not to.

Feature Image: Shutterstock

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