In a national poll of our nation’s police officers, 81 percent say that teachers and school administrators need to be armed to stop tragedies such as the one happened in Florida recently.
Our nation’s responders have a point — because the alternative is not working.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Since then, at the demand of gun control advocates, Congress has enacted over a dozen gun control measures, including a 1996 ban on guns in schools.
Do you really believe this stream of gun control has made the country — or our schools — safer?
In the 1950s and 60s, kids brought guns to school in all parts of the country, including New York City. Junior ROTC students walked the campuses, often in street clothes, carrying their government-issued semi-automatic M1 rifles.
But the passage of school gun ban was followed, a little over two years later, by Columbine — and by a cycle of copycat mass shootings which continues to this day. The only thing the federal gun ban achieved was to alert school shooters to the fact that they could seize their “15 minutes of fame” by shooting up a school with no fear that anyone would fire back.
I would ask you to give some thought to the repeated failure of repeated gun control enactments before you assume that another one would have any positive effect.
William Burroughs is credited with saying, “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”
Instead, why don’t we focus our attention on the psychotropic drugs being given to kids, and the welfare state that destroys families and leaves young men rudderless, and eliminating all forms of immigration at least until our law enforcement community can catch up with the overwhelming backlog of vetting millions of potentially hostile persons?
And by all means, we absolutely have to eliminate gun-free zones, where the only one who is safe is the person with the gun.
I’m calling on you to reject every new “gun control” proposal and to pass H.R. 34 (or something like it) repealing the legislation that established gun-free school zones in the first place.
Greg Raven, Apple Valley, CA
