Didn’t take long, on the same day as the shootings, the Anti-Gun Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy started trying to leverage the incident into a political grandstanding act for her Anti-gun legislation (she’s the anti-freedom person responsible for trying to renew the about to sunset gun ban, and she’s trying to modify it to include as many firearms as she can)

You can view her initial grandstanding attempt on her website here.

I say initial attempt, because while pretty much every other politician has had the decency to state that now is not the time (The governor of VA even states that he doesn’t want anyone to turn this into a political agenda – (quote from CNN.com)

“People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them,” Kaine said at a Tuesday evening news conference.

Senator McCain has also commented on the issue, but, his statement was pretty much the opposite of McCarthy’s..

“I do believe in the constitutional right that everyone has, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, to carry a weapon,” he said. “Obviously we have to keep guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.”

So, I’m sure there will be another round of “oh no! there was a gun! we must ban all guns!” cries in our anti-gun press (you’d think they’d realize, that the 2nd Amendment, is what keeps the 1st one possible). Because, its convenient for them to overlook the fact that Laws only affect law abiding people..so, by definition criminals wouldn’t be affected by the law (and look how well complete bans on guns work for England, Australia, and even Japan, where handgun ownership is banned completely had a Mayor shot in the back with a handgun…yeah..bans work well…. not).

In addition to the ease with which the media and anti-freedom politicians choose to overlook that bans don’t work (prohibition anyone?) they also choose to overlook (or at least, minimize the coverage of) anything that could portray guns, and the people who carry them in a positive light. For example, in Pearl Mississippi in 1997, there was a shooting at the high school, the assistant principal ran out to his car, retrieved his weapon, and subdued the shooter (CourtTV article here).

How much faster could he have subdued the shooter, if he hadn’t needed to run out to his car to retrieve his weapon?

Or look at the 2002 shooting at the Appalachian School of Law. There, two students (who also had to run back to their cars to get their weapons) also subdued the shooter at gunpoint. The most interesting tidbit about this one, is that all the ‘mainstream’ media articles I found on the shooting, never mentioned that the students doing the subduing, were armed. (Wikipedia article here)

Again, how much faster could the response time have been if they didn’t have to go out to their cars first?

The solution isn’t more legislation, since criminals ignore our existing legislation, it stands to reason, that they’ll continue to ignore new legislation.. which means the only thing passing more gun “control” laws will accomplish, is to de-arm the people who are legally in possession of weapons to utilize their rights, as protected by the second amendment of the Constitution to keep and bear arms (you know, the one that “shall not be infringed”).

This guy here… he gets it. The solution is not to get rid of guns, its to encourage more people to use their existing right to defend themselves.

“An armed society is a polite society” – Robert A Heinlen.