Without a thought

The sorrowful events at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, have inspired a new and ferocious round of calls for "gun control", by which they generally mean dis-allowing the Second Amendment and taking all guns from law-abiding citizens everywhere.

The events at the school are terrible.  They are, however, no worse than the Benghazi murders, except in scale.  They are no more of a tragedy (and no less!) than any of the murders that take place routinely in this country.  The sad fact is that if the  gunman had no access to firearms, he could still kill.  The progress of this twisted soul was aided by the legal requirement that no law-abiding person in that place have a gun, unless he or she might be a police officer -- which apparently was not present at the school.  There was no one who could have effectively responded to the evil-doer with the gun.  That requirement is part of the agenda of those who now use these unfortunate deaths to promote further gun-control.

Scale doesn't actually justify calling this a tragedy.  For each family involved, it is a horror and great sorrow, but for mankind, or even for this nation, hardly a tragedy.  The events in Newton equal about ten minutes worth of our daily average of abortions; all children, all helpless, all murdered, deliberately, by a heartless killer.  The only real difference is that the killer in abortion has the apparent complicity of the mother of the child.  But the roughly 4,000 that die each day in abortion is surely a greater tragedy than those twenty murdered children.

Except, abortion is defended as a "right" and celebrated by many of the same people who now cry out for the disarming of the decent, law-abiding people who had nothing whatever to do with the murderous rampage of that sick man.  One Democrat politician in New York, a member of Congress, was refreshingly honest about it, saying that we need to "exploit" these shootings to advance the gun-control agenda.  Apparently, this is not a tragedy, it is an opportunity.

Do not misconstrue my remarks: I feel great compassion towards those who suffered a loss in this shooting.  For the families involved it is a tragedy.  We would only compound it if we were to withdraw from Americans yet more liberties as a response to this event, and disarm those who obey the law in the face of those, well-armed, who disregard the law and have evil intent toward the innocent.

Let us pray for those who suffered loss, and let us approach the issues before us rationally and not merely on the emotion of the moment.