School Daze
Everybody agrees it’s tragic when innocent people are killed. But why must we pretend that it’s worse when it takes place at a school?
Everybody agrees it’s tragic when innocent people are killed. But why must we pretend that it’s worse when it takes place at a school? How is it better if youngsters are killed at the local mall or at a movie theater or a rock concert? All of them constitute soft targets. Heck, as we saw at Fort Hood, when Major Nidal Hasan murdered a dozen of his fellow soldiers, we, as a society, have become so deranged that even Army bases have become gun-free zones.
In spite of what the kids from the Parkland school are saying, the trouble isn’t that we have too many guns in our society but too few in the hands of those who should have them.
School shootings are terrible, mainly because no parent should send his children off in the morning and then learn to their horror that the kids are never coming home. But the fact is that such occurrences are rare. They only seem to happen so frequently because so much attention is paid to them when they do take place.
And because we all know how impressionable young people are, a case could be made that by the media’s devoting so much time and attention to the tragic events, they are sowing the seeds for future crops of copycat killers.
The left-wing politicians who begin to salivate as soon as they hear they have yet another excuse to attack the Second Amendment are particularly despicable because they spend their lives being protected by men with guns.
On the other hand, I don’t object to the survivors of the Parkland massacre taking their show on the road. They’re American citizens and have every right to their opinions, even if I personally don’t regard them as the fount of all wisdom and don’t enjoy being lectured to by teenagers mouthing platitudes, who don’t appear to have spent any time wondering how creating additional laws is going to stop those who have decided to ignore the ones already on the books.
If the FBI or the local police or the mental health professionals had done what they’re paid to do, Nikolas Cruz would not have been out buying or using a rifle; he would have been institutionalized, just like most, if not all, of the loons who have been responsible for the mass-murders at Newtown, Columbine and the various churches around the country should have been.
Silly people in and out of Congress keep calling for tougher gun laws, deliberately ignoring the fact that the places with the strictest gun policies have the highest murder rates. Part of the reason for that is that these laws only restrict the law-abiding citizen. Gangbangers in Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis and Washington, DC, never have any trouble getting guns without going through extensive background checks or having to wait 10 days to get their hands on one.
Guns are not the problem, villains and lunatics are. On a per capita basis, citizens are more likely to own guns in Switzerland, Israel and Wyoming than they are in Illinois, but several hundred innocent people are gunned down every year in Chicago, and not in those other places.
When I say that the teenagers in Parkland would still be alive if the various agencies had done what they’re paid to do, I’m assuming that none of them would have O.D.ed on illegal or prescription drugs in the meantime. I’m also assuming that they wouldn’t have wrapped their cars around lampposts or ventured into certain neighborhoods in our big cities or had a vehicle driven over them by an Islamic terrorist looking for a shortcut to Paradise.
Or they might have been murdered in any of the 22 states in which the blood-thirsty members of MS-13 had been encouraged to settle by the Obama administration.
My point isn’t to diminish what happened in Parkland but to point out that those on the Left seem to view all murders through a prism of their propaganda value. If they thought they could get more mileage out of church shootings, the endless homicides in Baltimore or the attack on the Republican congressmen at the baseball field in Virginia, they would focus on those crimes. But they realize they can better utilize school shootings emotionally because of the age of the victims, even though those crimes should be the easiest to avoid, simply by using metal detectors at the school entrance, arming and training teachers and coaches, and turning over students showing homicidal tendencies to the cops. I would have mentioned the mental health professionals, but one of them had recently declared that young Mr. Cruz was not a threat to himself or others.
I am not a member of the NRA, although I joined one year in order to receive the gift of an NRA baseball cap because I wanted to annoy liberals here in LA. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t object too strenuously to mental defectives and those on the terrorist watch list being deprived of their Second Amendment rights.
The sad truth is that those calling for commonsense limitations on gun ownership are lying with every breath they take. What they really want is for the federal government to confiscate firearms, the Second Amendment be damned!
In the meantime, while the entire nation is focused on 17 fatalities in Florida, 124 Americans committed suicide today, white middle-aged men accounting for most of them. That will add up to roughly 45,000 dead by their own hand by New Year’s Eve.
And let us not overlook the one million abortions that will dwarf even that number or the fact that the same media that will ballyhoo the children’s march on Washington, DC, over guns rarely pays the slightest attention to the annual March for Life in the nation’s capital.
At the same time that all eyes are focused on Robert Mueller’s witch hunt, federal judges have taken it upon themselves to ignore our immigration laws and deny President Trump the right to use his constitutional authority to keep foreigners regarded as security risks out of the country. Whereas the Constitution is supposed to serve as their guiding principle, many of them now feel free to vent their partisan bias.
That being the case, is it any wonder that individuals working at the IRS, the FBI and the Justice Department also feel free to ignore the Constitution and conduct their affairs unbridled by the law?
We keep hearing that we can’t see the FISA warrants and other matters related to the Trump investigation because it would jeopardize the lives of American spies or foreign collaborators, but nobody has suggested how that would happen.
The folks doing the surveilling at NSA, Homeland Security and the FBI are all conducting cyber-snooping from the comfort of their offices in Washington, DC, and Virginia. They are not working the mean streets of Tehran or Moscow. The only things these armchair James Bond wannabes are risking are their questionable reputations.
The more I hear about the cutthroats of MS-13, the more they sound like the so-called Dreamers. Most arrived here from Latin America unaccompanied by their parents. Apparently, they don’t object to doing those jobs that most Americans choose not to do, including murder, extortion, drug dealing, rape and prostitution.
According to my friend Bernie Roswig, a doctor addressing a group of seniors in Miami Beach, said: “The stuff we put in our stomachs is killing us. Red meat is poison. Soft drinks corrode our stomach linings. Chinese food is full of MSG, no matter what they tell you. High fat diets are disastrous, and people ignore the germs in their drinking water at their own peril.
"But there is one item that is the most lethal of all the things we have all eaten. Would anyone care to guess what single food causes the most grief and suffering?”
After several seconds, a small elderly Jewish man in the back row raises his hand, and when called upon, ventures: “Maybe vedding cake?”
