Tragedy, and Tragedy Averted

Consider two Newark crime stories with very different endings. Assuming that the papers got the facts right, the stories ran like this:

First, a group of young people run afoul of some murderous thugs, who line them up against a wall and murder them in cold blood. The crime captures national attention because the victims were young, bright, hardworking, students, but, in reality, it’s an all to common experience in Newark, in which five dozen other folks met similar fates so far this year.

A scant two days or so later, another altercation on the streets of Newark commenced with in similarly ominous fashion. Another miscreant approached an innocent, produced a gun, and shot his victim in the foot.

But, this time, the story ends very differently, because the "victim" possessed the wherewithal to fight back: a pistol. Instead of a dead innocent – yet another statistic in the seemingly endless list of innocents who relied upon the tender mercies of criminals, only to discover that criminals display no mercy – the evening ended with a dead assailant.

Again, assuming the facts to be as the papers report – a VERY chancy assumption, of course – the second story ended with an unmourned death, that of a criminal who got precisely what he deserved. A law abiding citizen (in this case, an off-duty corrections officer) with a firearm turned another potential murder into a story with a happier ending.

This sort of thing happens all the time in those states enlightened enough to actually trust their people to wield the force necessary to defend themselves. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of potential crimes, and uncounted numbers of likely murders, never occur because the victim selected has the moxie – and the instrumentality – necessary to fight back.

Typically, the Left asserts that the easy availability of guns causes the problem. Just TRY getting a pistol permit here in NJ. And getting a carry permit requires little less than permission from God Himself. Murderers and thugs – who, obviously, care little about ANY law – pay not attention to NJ’s effective ban on (legal) weaponry and encounter little difficulty securing firepower; if the country can’t keep 12 million illegal aliens (the initial reports suggest that the murderers in the first case were illegal aliens) and vast quantities of drugs out of the country, what chance exists to prevent criminals from getting guns? Unfortunately, the burden of draconian anti-freedom gun laws falls upon those who obey the law. With deadly consequences.

The inanity of the gun-grabbing perspective defies description. In order to buy into such nonsense, one must believe that the gun, and not the miscreant behind it, causes the problem. In the second case described, gun grabbers must believe that the pistol in the hands of the victim was every bit as evil as that in the hands of the criminal, a patently silly proposition.

Or consider the recent massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a lunatic with a gun found himself the ideal hunting ground: a place full of unarmed victims, in which the forces of enlightenment officially proscribed possession of firearms. And ask yourself a simple question: were the students at VT safer when only one person had a gun on campus, or later on that day when hundreds of armed men descended on the school?

Obviously, it's the bad guys, not the guns, which present the problem.

Starting with the incontestable proposition that the Bad Guys will ALWAYS be able to get guns, and that when evil arrives at your doorstep, it tends to show up heavily armed, society has, effectively, two choices: go quietly like lambs to the slaughter, and read ever more heartbreaking stories of young lives cut short by criminal conduct. Or let the good people fight back and trust them to make the right decisions.

The headlines of the second story – bad guy dead, good guy alive – should suffice to demonstrate the logic of trusting the people. But since the gun-ban mentality owes nothing to logic, the bodies of innocent victims will, alas, continue to mount.