Gun owners get tired of being stigmatized by groups willing to relieve themselves of the burden of the Constitution and the exercise of our God-given rights, not government given.
The El Paso shooting is being blamed on Donald Trump, but the Dayton shooting has not been blamed on Elizabeth Warren, or the GOP Congressional baseball shooting on Bernie Sanders. In those cases, the blame went to the shooter.
Who are these shooters? They tend to feel cast off from society, are active on “social media” and have had many interactions with law enforcement where their behavior was excused. Many of these could have had interventions, but did not. The Aurora, Illinois, workplace shooter passed a background check because a bureaucrat didn’t submit his name into the firearms prohibited list, despite being a felon.
Gun control groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety or The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and their political allies propose a laundry list of gun safety regulations after every incident. Background check bills wouldn’t have stopped many of the recent shootings.
Safety to me means that safety programs be funded to teach the public about how to use a gun safely, but the regulations are about bans and limits that have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with control.
Common sense should mean that a cause for these incidents has been identified and a solution is offered that will actually fix the problem. Bans and limits only infringe on the rights of the innocent and embolden those that are prone to violence.
This cookie cutter approach to gun regulation is doomed to fail because the reasons behind them are more complex and varied than regulation can fix and the need points toward societal and cultural change.
Gun groups, their political allies and the media have focused on the firearm and not on the factors that created these shooters. These same gun regulations have been proposed since a shooting at Virginia Tech and have not stopped the violence.
William Aherin
Southampton