Cannily, the President surrounded himself with kids from early elementary school when he gave his “gun control” speech today.  Since he speaks for the symbolism-side of this polarized debate, that was hardly unexpected.

It was a shame the young ones didn’t get the chance to discuss it themselves.  Suppose you asked a second-grader, “Kids, if a bad boy in your class took crayons and wrote all over the walls of your classroom, would it be right to take the crayons away from the boys and girls who behaved?”

I suspect the children would unanimously answer, “No! That’s not fair!  Take them away from the boy who did the bad thing, not the rest of us!”

And of course, they might also ask, “Where was the teacher?  Why didn’t the teacher stop the boy who did the bad thing with the crayons?”

THERE is the logical question: why wasn’t someone there in Sandy Hook Elementary School who could stop Adam Lanza?  Because we’re not talking crayons here, we’re talking innocent lives. The school custodian can scrub crayon graffiti from the school walls.  We can never wash away the innocent blood that was spilled at Newtown, never paint over the grief of the bereaved.

A few weeks ago, when NRA’s Wayne LaPierre explained that his organization wanted armed security in schools, the mainstream media and the anti-gunners alike excoriated him.  One New York tabloid devoted its front page to a headline that said something like, “Gun Nut: NRA Loon In Bizarre Rant.”  Yet this morning, our President said one of his own priorities was to put cops in schools in hopes of preventing a repeat of the Newtown Atrocity.  Will the same New York tabloid run a headline tomorrow that reads, “White House Loon In Bizarre Rant”?

Somehow, I doubt it.

Because some people don’t have the common sense of a seven-year-old.

1 COMMENT

  2. I find it ironic that the President was surrounded by children who were surrounded by men armed with fully automatic firearms.

  4. The sleepers are uniting to bring us down. I believe the tears Mr. o spent at the meeting after the shooting were fake. I want to believe he is a good man and a good president but the chill I get when I think about what he says tells me otherwise. Whether he is a puppet or the puppet master I feel things to come will not be good. Not for those who have loved our country and stood strong for our constitutional bonds.

  5. Friends, Ruger has made available to the public a petition that stands against pending gun legislation. I have found it well worded, legitimate, respectful of both sides, and to the point. Here’s the URL to cut and paste http://www.ruger.com/micros/advocacy/
    to view the petition. When you enter your address, your state’s representatives are automatically chosen as recipients. Kudos to Ruger.

  7. Mas, I posted some thoughts about a few ideas (which I’ve seen advocated by others, so all I can claim credit for is putting them together and joining the advocacy fight) over on GunHub, but thought I’d repost them here and ask for your and other readers’ ideas on refining. I’d like to think these in tandem would be FAR more effective than punishing the law-abiding…

    1. Harden classroom doors, more along the lines of an airliner cockpit door–door is more resistant to fire (at minimum I would advocate stop a .44 Magnum slug, ideally a .223, pipedream a .30-06 or .308), door is locked at all times and for entry you have to be buzzed in by the teacher, much like how in some apartments or hotels you have to be let into the building by a remote-unlock from the front desk. By doing this to classroom doors, it prevents the “break window and enter” Adam Lanza used, or if our spree-killer uses it to enter one classroom, once he’s out in the hall he can’t get into another room.

    2. At minimum, authorizing staff who desire to carry and have Concealed Weapons Permits to do so, subject to the restriction that they use a minimum caliber of .380 auto (or maybe 9x19mm Parabellum), they must keep it ON-BODY (no purse-carry) and CONCEALED so nobody knows who the armed staff are except maybe the principal. Alternate for the squeamish: establish an educational-institution variant of the Federal Flight Deck Officer armed-pilot program, with training and firearms run through the Marshal’s Service.

    3. We DO need to overhaul the mental-health system… both to make it easier to identify and manage the violently insane, but also to de-stigmatize clinical diagnoses and reassure the Good Guys that not only will voluntarily seeking help NOT cost them any rights, but shows them to be better people for recognizing what needs to be done and doing it. (I speak from personal experience on this, living with Asperger’s; when I first started serious training I had serious worries about how it would affect my eligibility for a carry permit, and in reply one of the cops who trained me gave what I consider some of the highest praise I’ve ever received, telling me that after completing standard police training he would be quite comfortable swearing me in as a member of his department. Though I know there ARE people who are like “Autistic? With a gun? *empties bladder and bowels*”) I do not know HOW to fix it, but the first stage of remedying a problem is recognizing that it exists, and I think any sane person is at that point. Perhaps penalties for obstruction of diagnosis and treatment, since Peter Lanza spent a great deal of money trying to cover up that he had a not-quite-right son, and even now that $1-million-plus annual salary is being used to great effect in creating a “wall of silence” between his homicidal son’s head and those trying to get inside it to figure out what triggers lit him off and what could have been done to recognize early-warning signs and save his mother’s life and the lives of those people at Sandy Hook. (It appears that his mother trying to take steps to get him diagnosed and into care may be one possible flashpoint–he liked his gravy train of having Mommy take care of him with Daddy’s unlimited money and didn’t wanna grow up, she wanted to have a chance at a life of her own rather than being chained down with a trial-size Frank Breitkopf*, and he took lethal exception when she wanted out of what he saw as his quite comfortable arrangement.)
    *UNSUB in Criminal Minds episode “No Way Out”: a brilliant but sociopathic kid whose mother tries to isolate him from the world to contain the damage he can do, but the downside is that after she dies he’s set loose on the world living on her money and what he lifts off those he kills.

    I’m also coming from a somewhat different perspective on this: the summer after Virginia Tech, a couple friends of mine in Campus Security and I got approval from our college’s Chancellor to “War Game” out the scenario after-hours using airsoft, and a couple friends on faculty playing the roles of “noncombatants.” In a nutshell, in several run-throughs we found that other things can slow things down and buy time, but the only way to STOP a truly determined spree-killer is swiftly applied overwhelming force, with equal or preferably superior firepower. Campus policy was that Security had to go with no more than Mace, and even though we made a persuasive case to the Chancellor for better equipment in our demonstration, his Executive Assistant (an anti, who liked neither the fact that there was an off-duty cop in Security NOR the fact that CCW permitholder students weren’t preemptively expelled just for having that cred) somehow had some bureaucratic dirty tricks up her sleeve and killed any chance of implementation… (Though the policy at my alma mater, at least when I mustered out several Chancellorships ago, was that if you have a carry permit, as long as you keep it concealed so nobody finds out about it, or nobody raises a stink about it, you’re golden, if somebody finds it AND complains then it goes or you go.)

  8. Please keep up the great work! You always seem to shed light on things just a little different than most, usually making it easier to comprehend and explain to others.

  10. I saw the text of one of those letters; it was from a child asking the President to make sure “machine guns were not around” any more. That sounds to me like the brainwashing of this country is complete…and also that The Current Occupant has absolutely no morals whatsoever in using those children as human shields for his lies.

  11. The one thing that just makes my head want to explode is the complete lack of common sense these politicians display. What is so hard to understand? Automobiles, alcohol, incompetent doctors and several other things kill more people than firearms each year. Do we hear these people that are so concerned for our safety proposing that we should restrict these things? After all, as Obama said, if it might save JUST ONE PERSON we need to try. What a load of crap they all spew.

    I’m not a pot head, or a user of any type of drugs, however, I personally know of at least three people from which I could purchase illegal drugs and I live in an solid middle-class community. I guess all those laws restricting the use of said drugs just don’t work very well. Go figure. In addition, right now I could drive on over to the local bar and get myself rip-roaring drunk. Not a single person would move to stop me when I got back into my car and proceeded to mow down the innocent. Would there then be any uproar about my right to buy a car. Where are their priorities?

    A few weeks ago I read a rather funny little bit that compared gun control to motor vehicles: A small town had a problem with the local youth racing through town violating the 25 mph speed limit. Their solution to this problem was to lower the speed limit to 20 mph. Yup, that will have as much affect as gun control. The bad guys will still have access to anything they want while the good guys will be restricted.

    I pray that those misguided people who voted this buffoon into office for a second term will now see him for the tyrant that he is. What’s next, our right to free speech, or maybe our right to assemble? After all, we can’t have people questioning King Obama now, can we?

  13. I agree with Jim above. Thank you Mas for your continued pro 2nd amendment support for something I feel so strongly about.
    Obama is trying to change the gun laws which will have no effect on criminals committing crimes. He fed those folks today a bunch of malarkey.

    Lets face it me and you have guns, we were in police work we have our high capacity magazines and so forth but for our families and future young generations they will not have the freedoms to purchase any of these guns or magazines because these rights have been stripped.

    There are 300 million legally owned assault weapons that are already on the streets that would be banned weapons, how long would they take to not available? We have a broken criminal justice system broken mental health system and free violent criminals all over the place that issue should be addressed.

  14. Well, now we fight back, our president did his thing. Now, it’s our turn. With so many new firearm owners, it seems to me we’ll have more supporters.

    Look at the amount of fallout, these new gun control laws are going to cause law enforcement, in New York, and other places. We may see some class action law suits.

  15. Ladies and Gents,

    Many US president have used children to promote some of their goals in the past so let’s not just focus to what Obama did today and this is why: What Obama and company are doing is calling their plan “proposals”, as though they intend to have some sort of give and take discussions with all the interested parties. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a very subtle form of incrementalism, where things get done in easy ‘bite-size’ pieces. The GDP (Genrealy Dumb Public) takes these proposals as pretty much as facts and accepts them as the new reality. “After all”, they say, “it’s only a small matter”. And each and every time one little piece of their plan falls into place until the whole plan is finally implemented to their satisfaction and we are left with nothing. TPTB have learned their lessons the hard way and they suspect that if they implement too much too soon that their could some serious push-back. You drop a frog into a pot of boiling water and it will jump out to save itself. But put that same frog into a pot of water and slowly heat it up and the frog takes little notice of the ever increasing heat until it’s too late. That’s the plan this time, to slowly cook us until we’re done. I hope this clears things up.

  16. What if that ” bad boy” marked the walls with all 64 different colored crayons from his crayola pack…should we limit everyone to just 7 colored crayons? Do you really NEED 64 colors?

  17. Mas did you notice that he said Congress would have to pass his E.O. So if it does not get passed then Congress would be the Bad Guys. Obama is using the kids to get his agenda passed. The mainstrem media were like a pack of dogs today going after the NRA and all the NRA was doing was pointing out that the one who consider themselves elite have always had their kids protected by armned personal. There kids are no more special than ours but they call us crazy because we want the same security for our kids. This should outrage every parent in America. If they are Progun or not. But I guess they are to busy being sheep to even notice.

  18. This is off topic, but…Today I had an interesting conversation with a young man in my 5th grade class. This is a student in which I see potential but with whom I have had more than a few harsh words. He, in passing, asked me what a youth hunt was. It started a conversation about hunting opportunities for kids and I found out he was going deer hunting this weekend for the first time. Strangely, last week I would have been concerned about the thought of him with a gun. Now I’m anxious for him to get a deer and look forward to hearing about his hunt next week. Any one out there ever felt threatened in hunting camp, at the shooting range, etc. by all of those heavily armed “gun nuts”?

  22. This is only the beginning.

    One has to wonder, when these little children come of age, will they be able to.exercise their second ammendment rights? Will such rights.still exist?

  23. Excellent Mas.

    Today was just another example of why the United States of America is in the shape we’re in. Our leadership can’t see past the end of their nose. They are so narrow minded and incapable of seeing the big picture. If we don’t have programs in place to help the mentally ill, the violence is not going to stop.

    By the way, when was the last time a gun shop or shooting range was robbed or was the scene of a mass murder?

  25. “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
    ~ Adolf Hitler

  26. Sums it up pretty well.

    If the President actually held news conferences, one would like reporter with more allegiance to the truth than to his career to ask “Mr. president, are you going to ask the Secret Service and Congressional Police to download to ten cartridge magazines?”.

    Never Happen

  27. I suspect the children would unanimously answer, “No! That’s not fair! Take them away from the boy who did the bad thing, not the rest of us!”

    I realize that things are still evolving, but I think it bears acknowledging that Obama’s terrifying proclamation-from-on-high, that so many on the Internet were predicting would be some kind of draconian reinstatement (or worse!) of the AWB… turned out to be nothing of the sort. The Executive Orders that so-called Dictator Obama issued ranged from good sense to toothless. Lots of education, a dab of “enforce existing laws rigorously,” and a little bit of “do a study,” to make the egg-heads happy. Frankly, I was underwhelmed.

  28. I appreciate you sharing with all of us.thanks uncle mas hope to see you next time you’re at Saukville Ps be safe

  29. Newtown school superintendent rejects NRA proposal to arm teachers

    Robinson, speaking on Capitol Hill during a House hearing on gun violence, said she felt remarks made in the wake of the shooting suggesting that Principal Dawn Hochsprung could have killed the shooter had she been armed were “insensitive.” Robinson said, “She wasn’t at her desk and no good principal is.”

    Robinson flat-out rejected the NRA proposal to place armed guards in every classroom in America, noting that the weapon used in the Sandy Hook shooting was a semi-automatic. “They didn’t have a chance,” she said.

    And she added that she doesn’t envision elementary school teachers “packing” weapons while they sit on the carpet with small children—children who she said could be at risk around inexperienced gun owners.

    Robinson called on Congress to help offer long-term support to her community. “Mental health is a big piece when you have lost your whole sense of safety,” she said, noting that Newtown residents want concrete signs of safety including a visible police presence.

    The hearing, hosted by House Democrats, was designed to gather input on how to combat gun violence. Though Congress was out of session, the event drew more than 60 members from both parties to a standing-room-only venue that required an overflow room.

    Earlier on Tuesday, President Barack Obama, standing beside Vice President Joe Biden, had unveiled a sweeping plan to combat gun violence.

  30. Right out of the terrorist playbook, hide behind the children. I have read that Clinton wanted cops in schools. In Obama’s last budget it was removed, the one before it was funded at 0. And the NRA is ridiculed for it.
    It never was and isn’t about guns anyway. Power and control. Everything Washington does is to gain more power so they can exert more control over us.

  32. Nobody has done the math yet on funding for resourse officers, just enough for about a thousand. Man that’s pretty telling in his concern for our childrens safety. We care for a fraction of a percent of the school children out there. Man this guy is all smoke and mirrors.
    Oh and there is the comming armor piercing ammo ban that the ATF is fixing to slip in by reclassifiying what is “armor piercing”, do’nt need congress for that one, do’nt you just love those executive orders, more gun safety on the way. Good luck buying any hunting ammo in a month or two. It will be banned because it is would pose a grave risk to our law enforcement officers with body armor. I feel safer allready.

  34. Excellent points, Mas, in the same line of thought as “everything I ever needed I learned in Kindergarten”. Common sense and rationality are so lacking in most of the debates revolving around gun control and elsewhere. Grandstanding and feel-good measures rule the day.

  35. Has President Obama been reading from someone else’s playbook?

    “The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.” – Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin, 1943, p. 403.

  38. I find it interesting that children, of their own free will and without the prodding of adults, write the president asking for more gun control. When I was a child, I was thinking of playing and, if i had to, school work.

  39. It’s not about the children. It’s just Obama and the Gun Grabbers exploiting the tragedy at Sandy Hook to push their gun grabbing agenda. We knew this would be happening after the election.

  40. Over on Huffington Post, one of the disarmanuts wanted to argue that a school resource officer was not an armed police officer in a school. Called me names over it; said it WASN’T the same thing the NRA advocated.

    Some people are stoopid.

    I personally think that if the Sandy Hook principal and counselor who so bravely and futilely rushed the shooter had been trained and armed with even Smith & Wesson Model 64 .38 Specials we wouldn’t be talking about more gun control right now.

    ECS

  41. Hi Mas,

    Thank you for your continued service to our country. The same for all of you fighting the information wars. I came across this interesting article in my readings- it is a scientific analysis/numbers exercise in regards to the medications these perpetrators were on. I believe it is a good angle to work in to this national conversation. It is hypothetical, yet practical.

    http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=215962

  42. New Massachusetts Gun Law Revealed: One Gun A Month, Seven Round Mag Limit, Etc.

    Massachusetts Governor Patrick’s office has released the text of An Act To Strengthen and Enhance Firearms Laws in the Commonwealth [Click here for the text of the bill. Click here for the Governor’s Press Release touting the civilian disarmament package]. TTAG legal eagle Chris Dumm parsed the laws and provided the following bullet points. Make the jump for the key text change on magazine capacity.

    – Seven round mag limit – Magazines are now limited to seven rounds (10 round mags are grandfathered, one year to ditch of pre-existing ban higher capacity magazines)
    – One Gun A Month – Sales – Bay Staters may not purchase more than one firearm per month. To exceed that rate is a felony. (2.5 years in prison, $1000 fine)
    – One Gun a Month – Rental/Lease – Citizens may not rent or lease more than one firearm a month (2.5 years in prison $1000 fine)
    – Universal background checks – All firearms sales (including private sales) must be preceded by a NICS criminal background check
    – Gun show registration – Gun shows must report every seller at a show to the Department of Criminal Justice Services and pay a $500 fee to same
    – Habeas Corpus gone – If a gun is used in a violent crime the offender may be held without bail until trial
    – NERF-free schools – Airguns, BB guns, paintball guns, air rifles and yes NERF guns may not be possessed on school property ($500 and a year in jail)
    – “Rat Rule” – Any staff or administrators who fail to report a violation of the above law are criminals ($500 fine)

    Chapter 140, Section 121 “Large capacity feeding device”, (i) a fixed or detachable magazine, box, drum, feed strip or similar device capable of accepting, or that can be readily converted to accept, more than ten rounds of ammunition or more than five shotgun shells; or (ii) a large capacity ammunition feeding device as defined in the federal Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. section 921(a)(31) as appearing in such section on September 13, 1994 containing more than seven rounds of ammunition; or (iii) obtained after the effective date of this act and capable of accepting, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than seven rounds of ammunition.. The term “large capacity feeding device” shall not include an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with,.22 caliber ammunition.

    Chapter 140, Section 131M. No person shall sell, offer for sale, transfer or possess an assault weapon or a large capacity feeding device that was not otherwise lawfully possessed on September 13, 1994; or (ii) a large capacity feeding device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than ten rounds of ammunition; or (iii) a large capacity feeding device that such person lawfully possessed before the effective date of this act that has a capacity of, or that can readily be restored or converted to accept, more than seven but no more than ten rounds of ammunition, where such device contains more than seven rounds of ammunition.” Whoever not being licensed under the provisions of section 122 violates the provisions of this section shall be punished, for a first offense, by a fine of not less than $1,000 nor more than $10,000 or by imprisonment for not less than one year nor more than ten years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, and for a second offense, by a fine of not less than $5,000 nor more than $15,000 or by imprisonment for not less than five years nor more than 15 years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

    The provisions of this section shall not apply to: (i) the possession by a law enforcement officer for purposes of law enforcement; or (ii) the possession by an individual who is retired from service with a law enforcement agency and is not otherwise prohibited from receiving such a weapon or feeding device from such agency upon retirement

  43. “There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state (or Federal) against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predators but it does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution. The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: it tells the state (gov’t) to let people alone; it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order.”

    (Bowers v. DeVito, U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, 686F.2d 616 [1982]).

    We trust teachers and school administrators with our kids for 8+ hrs a day for instruction and after-school activities. Can’t those that are willing and mentally prepared to be trained to carry concealed weapons to protect those kids be afforded the opportunity to do so? Even President Obama is calling for more resource officers in the school. Well armed teachers and school administrators can contribute to the security of our kids. If we have the means and the will to do this, as other states are already doing, can we afford not to provide this extra layer of defense against a degenerate that wants to carry out another atrocity?

    The police can’t be everywhere all the time, and the U.S. Court of Appeals has declared that “There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state (or Federal) against being murdered by criminals or madmen.” We have to take personal responsibility for our safety, and for our loved ones’ safety, as well.

  44. Mas,
    You should know better than to use sane logic with liberals . . . you must be tolerant of them, of course don’t expect the same tolerance in return.

    “The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.” ~ George Tucker

  45. Can go 2 ways: Military, police and gun owners band together and frag the politicians and the wealthy megalomaniacs that control them or…

    Military, police and gun owners kill each other in large numbers, the blood flowing like a swollen river in springtime.

    Is it not obvious to everyone the better choice is to frag a few hundred tyrants acting to destroy our Constitution??

    The haters of liberty are proceeding with the total citizen disarmament agenda via incremental actions. The average gun owner is not reacting as the ban implemented on 1/16/13 only affects New Yorkers. There isn’t an O3 in any of our armed services that couldn’t organize “Operation Clean House” and rid the USA of key gun grabbers from Blankfein to Bloomberg, Feinstein to Hugh Grant of Monsanto in an efficient manner.

  47. If the 2nd Amendment is, as the Hollywood and MSM geniuses claim, only valid for 1780’s muskets; then it follows that modern media and movie makers are not covered in freedom of speech or press by the 1st Amendment cause there were no movie making, radio or TV technologies.

  48. The creep who would be president uses children as his “strike-force” in his attacks on the Constitution. These children should be writing letters that ask how come their daddys are out of work and mommy has to wash floors for strangers to put the meager amount of food they can afford on the table. Or why they no longer can live in their home since daddy is out of work.

    He distracts us in his attacks on our rights from his destruction of our very nation and the laws upon which it is built.

  50. NY Gun Ban Bill Forgets to Exempt Police

    “It appears someone forgot to exempt police officers from the ban of ammunition clips with more than 7 bullets in New York State’s new gun control law, ” wabc.com reports. “It’s a big oversight that apparently happened in the haste by the Cuomo Administration to get a tough package of gun-control measures signed into law.” Haste as in Cuomo somehow waiving the Constitutional requirement for a three-day waiting period between a bill’s introduction and a vote in the General Assembly . . .

    The NYPD, the State Police and virtually every law enforcement agency in the state carry 9-milli-meter guns, which have a 15-round capacity. Unless an exemption is added by the time the law takes effect in March, police would technically be in violation of the new gun measure.

    Technically as in actually. OK, ready?

    State Senator Eric Adams, a former NYPD Captain, told us he’s going to push for an amendment next week to exempt police officers from the high-capacity magazine ban. In his words, “You can’t give more ammo to the criminals.”

    Or citizens. “Technically.”

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