Post Newtown: Time to Just Ban Everything?

http://clashdaily.com/2013/01/post-newtown-time-to-just-ban-everything/

By Steve Pauwels / 10 January 2013 /

Perhaps the Christmas 2012 season was bloodier than normal — or perhaps December 14th’s particularly heinous Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in suburban Newtown, Connecticut only makes it seem so. In any case, lots of people died violently over several pre-holiday weeks. And, adding to the awfulness, the widespread reaction has been an exasperatingly predictable exercise in distraction and misdirection.

Actually, to clarify: it’s the reaction to the Connecticut atrocity that’s been vocally wrongheaded. December’s other outbreaks of firearms carnage have, by comparison, been forgotten pretty quickly by the national press and commentariat.

In case you don’t know, three days preceding Sandy Hook’s slaughter of a score of pre-adolescents and handful of school personnel, an amply armed Oregon man walked into a Portland shopping mall and opened fire, killing two and wounding a third before taking his own life.

Exactly one week after the Newtown mayhem, Jeffrey Lee MIchael launched a central Pennsylvania killing spree, taking the lives of three civilians and injuring a trio of State Troopers before they finally shot him dead. Days later — Christmas Eve morning — a 62 year old ex-con cut down four Webster, NY firefighters who responded when he set his own home ablaze; two subsequently died. As the inferno spread through his neighborhood, the shooter, William Spengler, Jr., was pinned down by an arriving policeman before dying himself from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It’s certainly understandable why Sandy Hook’s nightmare has garnered the gruesome lion’s share of attention: weeks later, photos of its angelic victims , never mind the heart-rending accounts of helpless school officials sacrificing their lives protecting the children, continue to mesmerize. Still, it’s not like these other depravities are exactly run-of-the-mill: holiday shoppers targeted in Oregon? A shoot-out with PA State Police following the execution of, among others, a woman who’d been innocently decorating a church? A Christmas Eve crossfire, complete with a literal conflagration and the slaying of devoted public servants? Not exactly the yawn-inducing stuff of “just another” news cycle; but nearly disregarded when contrasted to the school shooting focus.

Could it be — just asking — that for the 2nd-Amendment spurning mainstream media the non-Sandy Hook killings don’t square sufficiently with their anti-firearm agenda? Perhaps, even less permissibly, contain elements that jam up their gun-grabbing narrative?

In the Oregon mall pandemonium, for instance, a masked, AR-15-toting Jacob Tyler Roberts was halted, in part, when bystander Nick Meli confronted him with his own Glock 22. Notice: whereas the villain used a firearm — one he’d stolen the day before, by the way — to wreak sanguinary havoc, the good guy used his to stymie it, likely diminishing the body count in the process. In this scenario, guns weren’t only part of the problem, but played a role in its solution — dismaying, no doubt, the “firearms-are-the-devil” set.

Ban guns because Sandy Hook’s Adam Lanza employed them to horrific ends? Just like December 21st’s Pennsylvania perpetrator? Then, perhaps motor vehicles should be outlawed as well — since the Keystone State killer also assaulted two of his victims with his pick-up truck. Though not widely reported, in the course of his rampage Jeffrey Lee Michael rammed head-on into not only a car, but a state trooper’s cruiser, as well.

A firearm was misused. So, too, a motor vehicle. The only solution? It must be to make them both across-the-board illegal, right?

Except that — slightly complicating this tidy deduction — it turns out an off-duty cop attempted to protect the fallen firefighters with his car; an action Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering praised as “heroic”.

Hmm — motor vehicle as instrument of evil and of heroism? It’s all so very confusing. Maybe we should just stick with the former.

Which, inevitably, prompts the question: at what point do all these “bannning” proposals overreach?

People abuse bladed tools all the time — is it time for knives to be removed from general circulation? Racial-radio-huckster Al Sharpton recently suggested as much: “What happens when the criminal goes to knives … ?” a December 28 caller asked the talk host.

“Then you deal with knives,” Sharpton replied. “The job of society is to deal with whatever problem confronts it.”

For the record, Sharpton’s not alone in these anti-cutlery cogitations: the UK‘s BBC is reporting that a team of “Accident and Emergency” doctors is decrying the availability of intolerably long “domestic knives” — ie, kitchenware. Shorter blades? They should still get the nod. Not their lengthier brethren, however — time for a ban in Britain!

Thus, ixnay on the: Guns. Cars. Knives. Anything else?

Since you ask: why not matches? Accelerants?

Recall, Webster, NY’s Spengler fiendishly lured those first-responders into his ambush by staging a raging inferno. Not only did two end up dead and three more wounded, but seven homes were consumed. What was his fuel of choice? Kerosene? Acetone?

Furthermore, in an especially macabre twist, this is the second Christmas season in a row the Rochester suburb has experienced fire-related violence: in December 2011 a 15-year-old boy set his gasoline-doused house afire, killing his father and two brothers and injuring his mother and sister.

Which settles it: whatever their utility, flame and fuel have gotta go — must get to work on that!

Meanwhile, what goes unaddressed? Matters like: a feckless, pasta-spined court system which paroled Spengler in 1998, after his serving a paltry seventeen years for the pummeling death of his grandmother. Free, thereafter, to blissfully ignore his state’s well-meaning, but too often irrelevant, gun-control restrictions, he burned down his block and gunned down brave men.

Matters like: The Oregon mall-shooter‘s similar flouting of firearms law on the way to transgressing yet others. (Criminals have a disconcerting, if reliable, habit of conducting themselves that way.)

Matters like: the beneficial service honorable citizens — law-enforcement or layman — can render society when they’re at liberty to “keep and bear arms”, (our Founders’ phrasing).

Finally shunted aside is the notion that a principled community shouldn’t punish responsible folks by denying them access to the worthwhile rights ill-used by irresponsible and wicked folks. Currently, that’s a perspective not much abided, even though, not that long ago it was the popularly accepted one.

But that was before common sense was banned.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:W_interdit_w_forbidden.svg; author Mikadiou; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Lower image: source: originally posted to Flickr; author: Dwayne; Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

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Friday, January 11, 2013