With the tragic shooting at a Washington Naval base early Monday morning, American’s Second Amendment rights will undoubtedly be scrutinized. The attack garnered a death toll of 12 and resulted in multiple other injuries, with the shooter’s motivation, as of yet, unknown.
The first question Americans ask when hearing of an outbreak of violence such as this is, “How many killed?” and immediately from there, “Why?”
Each mass shooting in our nation’s history comes with a complex why, which legislatures have thrown under the bus in favor of the more propaganda palpable how.
It’s far easier as a society to use AR-15s and other high-powered rifles as the scapegoat for the mental unrest that is the cause of these shootings than to self-examine our culture.
The last military base shooting comparable to the Navy Yard of Monday was the Fort Hood shooting. At the latter tragedy, Major Nidal Hasan, in an act of jihad (holy war), opened fire, killing 15 soldiers and wounding 32 others.
It was not Hasan’s access to a firearm that enabled the massacre, but our culture’s refusal to evaluate within our populace. In this case specifically it was jihad-denial syndrome, i.e. the government’s determination to turn a blind eye to radical Islam and its violence. This deliberate oversight fatally applied when Major Hasan was left to fester with his dreams of jihad and martyrdom in our very own military’s ranks.
The logic of gun-grubbers within the babbling brass of the U.S. military seems to be, “We trust soldiers with weapons overseas to protect themselves, but heavens no we can’t trust them with weapons on military bases here to protect themselves.”
If military bases allowed the soldiers on them to be armed, the death toll surely wouldn’t have reached the levels it did at Fort Hood.
Which leads us to examine the logic, or gross lack thereof, behind excessive gun control and gun free zones. The last three mass shootings, Fort Hood, Newtown and Navy Yard, have occurred in gun free zones. Such is a result of the hubris of lawmakers and their stooges who so willingly craft the soapboxes from which they vilify gun usage.
Whether anti-gun activists are emotionally ready for it or not, guns are the weapon of choice in today’s world. It would be impossible to stop the worldwide illicit arms trade, or regulate illegal gun production.
The problem of the mentally or morally unfit acquiring guns doesn’t cease to exist upon entering a gun free zone. And yet most lawmakers seem to think if they just hold enough press conferences with gun violence survivors serving as their backdrop that criminals and those plotting workplace violence will opt out of their lunacy. Diminishing gun violence should be an action-oriented strategy instead of an emotional one.
The solution to gun violence isn’t in gun banning, but is in gun education in the subcategories of gun usage and gun responsibility. The more Americans are able to protect themselves, the safer they will be and the more deterred criminals will be from mass shooting behavior. Reasoning so straightforward surely even Biden, the administration’s gun control poster boy (read: the village buffoon), could follow.
By choosing gun free zones, gunmen are attacking where they know people cannot defend themselves or fight back. It seems even Obama has an awareness of this, as yesterday he dubbed the act “cowardly,” and indeed it is. Let us not be gun shy only to end up on the wrong side of the barrel.
Look at it this way: If the children of Newtown didn’t need armed protection, neither do members of Congress. Suddenly banning all guns doesn’t sound so appealing, now does it, public servants?
Whitney Greer is a sophomore English major from Medford, Ore.
