Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

The reality of the ‘March for Our Lives’ anti-gun marches

Demonstrators took to the streets in cities quite literally all over the world on Saturday to denounce gun violence. The events were spearheaded by students reacting to the most recent mass shooting, the one perpetrated by a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida against current students and faculty. The massacre left 17 people dead.

As well intended as I believe these marches were, I don’t think they will do any good. I don’t think they will do anything to end gun violence anytime soon.

You might as well march against the hot and humid weather in the summertime. No amount of marching or holding clever signs made from poster board will ever change how terrible the summer feels and it will never change gun violence.

Unfortunately, gun violence, like summers that feel like Satan’s armpit, is here to stay.

We have a disappropriate amount of violent people living in this country and more are born every day. Violent people have violent children who in turn have violent children of their own. It’s a never-ending cycle. At the same time, we have people with an almost fanatic attitude towards guns. They don’t just want to own one or maybe two guns, they want to own twenty.

The United States has more guns in circulation than it has people.

You can’t just march something like that away. No amount of well written, pithy poster boards will change that.

Compounding our gun violence problem is that we have smart people who actually believe the United States Constitution gives them the right to own military grade firearms for their own use.

Some people like to blame the Republican party and the NRA for today’s current level of gun violence. That’s fine, but the ban on military assault rifles expired during the George W. Bush administration. It was a poorly written provision signed into law by President Bill Clinton. After it was allowed to expire, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat from the Islamist jungles of Hawaii became President. Both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate were controlled by the Democrats. Why wasn’t the ban on military assault weapons reintroduced during this time of total Democrat control?

No political party has ever tried to stop violent people from having children.

The gun violence problem we have has been a long time in the making. There are many people to blame. Future historians will have no shortage of causes for our current problems, including our problem with gun violence. Something these future historians will never blame gun violence on is our lack of marches or witty signage.

March if you want to, just don’t pretend that it will change anything.

Top photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Why new gun control laws will not work

Congress could pass sweeping new gun control laws that would change gun ownership in this country as we know it. And it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if the authorities failed to uniformly uphold and enforce these new laws.

Case in point, look no further than what happened during the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

From CNN:

When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of the school shooting crisis, many officers were surprised to find not only that Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, had not entered the building, but that three other Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were also outside the school and had not entered, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.

While Nikolas Cruz was murdering children with his legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle, sheriff deputies were hiding behind their vehicles doing nothing. How they can hear the distinctive crack on an AR-15 from the inside of a school filled with children and not charge the school is beyond me. We have laws against murder. Cowardly sheriff deputies knew the murder of children was taking place, yet they chose not to even try to stop it.

It doesn’t matter what laws are passed if those laws aren’t enforced, it’s meaningless. Once again, you cannot count on the police or law enforcement to do their job. Congress could ban ownership of all firearms, yet if law enforcement chose not to confiscate every gun, but instead only some guns, the new law would again be meaningless.

The AR-15 is a good weapon for killing communists 300 yards away. For home defense, nothing beats the sawed-off double-barrelled shotgun. Make sure it’s at least 18 inches in length, otherwise you’re breaking federal law!

We now have over 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country, yet we’ve had comprehensive immigration laws on the books for decades. The reason we have so many undocumented immigrants living, working, and having children here is that for decades our law enforcement officials have failed to enforce the law in a uniform way. Worse, we’ve known this was going on, yet we chose to look the other way and ignore it.

The sad and unfortunate truth is that if you want to ensure what happened to the children of at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School doesn’t happen to you, you have to protect yourself with your own gun. Counting on the police to protect you is a gamble. The cops may come to your aid with guns drawn, or they may cower behind their vehicles like they did at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.