Tuesday, May 7, 2013

GET THE FACTS AND SAVE LIVES WITH GUNS



 
Teach gun safety in classrooms and leave sex education to parents. Plan B won’t save young people from incurable STDs, but guns will protect women and children from being raped or murdered. The more young people know about guns, the safer our society will be.

Rush Limbaugh said on his talk radio show on May 1: “We know kids are gonna get guns anyway, why not teach them how to use them?” The king of talk was right. Instead of pushing morning-after pills on 15-year-old girls, we should be showing young people how to responsibly use the preeminent tool they have to defend themselves in the event of a violent attack—a gun.

Over the past decade, overall violent crime in the United States has steadily decreased according to FBI reports. Meanwhile, gun ownership is at an all-time high. The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is one of the best ways to gauge the number of new gun purchases. In 2011, there was an all-time record high of 16.5 million checks. In 2012, Americans set a new record for gun ownership: 19.5 million background checks.

Americans use guns to hold off assault far more than they use guns to commit murder or violent crime. Indeed, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has shown that Americans use guns to defensively prevent crime about 2 million times a year—often by merely brandishing a weapon in front of a would-be-assailant. “…most violent crimes end if the victim simply exposes a firearm. Most criminals want to leave the scene with the same number of holes they started with,” writes Michael Martin in his book, Concealed Carry and Home Defense Fundamentals.

On top of all this, the only gun legislation that has consistently been shown to reduce violent crime is concealed carry permit legislation.

All of the data on guns and crime brings us to one conclusion: More guns in the hands of honest Americans equates to less violent crime.

Here are three ‘solutions’ to mass shootings that will NOT work:

1.) Background Checks
Even Democrats admit that background checks don’t work. When they have a slip of the tongue and speak their mind, they say things like this: “…let’s be honest, criminals aren’t going to buy a gun and go through a background check.” (That is exactly what Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY recently said.)

Dr. John Lott writes for Fox News: “There is no real scientific evidence among criminologists and economists that background checks actually reduce crime.”

2.) Gun Free Zones
You can’t stop a criminal with a sign. But you can welcome a criminal with a sign that says: “Gun Free Zone,” which a criminal interprets as: “Walk Right In… And Bring Your Guns!”

Adam Lanza specifically went to a ‘gun free zone’ to fatally shoot 20 children and six adults in the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy. He brought guns into an elementary school, not into the Pentagon.

3.) Psychiatric Drugs
More and more, psychiatric drugs are being miss-prescribed or abused and President Obama’s FDA is contributing to this mess. Medications are increasingly being prescribed to young people that could be setting them up for violent behavior. Instead of prescribing talk therapy, we are loading young people up on meds that are known to cause suicidal thoughts and/or incite aggression.

Lanza was mentally unstable. Mentally unstable people do not follow “rules” printed on signs. Mentally unstable people do unpredictable things.

If you look at every mass school shooting over the past 15 years, they almost all have one thing in common, according to Lawrence Hunter of the Social Security Institute: The gunman: “…has been on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs…Yet, federal and state governments continue to ignore the connection between psychiatric drugs and murderous violence, preferring instead to exploit these tragedies in an oppressive and unconstitutional power grab to snatch guns away from innocent, law-abiding people.”

Big pharmacy is peddling drugs to youngsters that have highly questionable side effects and Hunter says: “It is pharmaceutical makers, not law-abiding gun owners or gun manufacturers, who should be held to account for the series of ‘lone-wolf’ mass shootings that have occurred since the widespread use of psychiatric drugs began.”

Expert psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin has told Fox News: “One of the things in the past that we’ve known about depression is that it very, very rarely leads to violence. It’s only been since the advent of these new SSRI drugs that we have murderers, sometimes even mass murderers, taking antidepressant drugs.”

When you look at the facts, guns save lives. And the more comfortable and knowledgeable we are regarding guns, the more lives we will save. It’s time for young people to go through gun education before their teachers brainwash them about gun control.


Katie Kieffer 

Katie Kieffer is a columnist and political commentator. She runs KatieKieffer.com