(Misguided) Mayors Against Illegal Guns

By Gerard Valentino

The organization Mayors Against Illegal Guns is in the news again for announcing an ad campaign to raise awareness of how illegal guns are often used in crimes. While everyone agrees that stopping the flow of guns to criminals is of vital public interest, the organizations stated goals are worthy of a “Captain of the Obvious” award.

Led by the rabidly anti-gun Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, the group’s stated goal is to keep guns out of the hands of criminals or the mentally ill. As if anyone in America is saying they are for putting more guns in the hands of criminals.

Such a notion is absurd. So is the notion that the Mayors Against Illegal Guns is anything but an ineffective publicity stunt. The laws needed to deal with guns used illegally are already on the books and proper enforcement is what is needed.

Most violent crimes are committed by convicted felons who are out on parole or probation. It is already illegal for any convicted felon to be in possession of a gun so another bunch of laws are completely unnecessary. By creating more gun laws all the Mayors will accomplish is making gun crime more illegal.

Being more illegal is equivalent to the old joke about being a little pregnant. Either something is illegal, or it isn’t. As we already know, guns that are stolen or bought on the black market can be taken out of the hands of criminals through proper enforcement of existing laws.

The Mayors can’t admit that the tools to punish criminals who possess illegal guns already exist. Doing so is to admit they’ve failed the citizens of their city. Failing to take guns from criminal also proves what concealed carry activists have long said – the government is incapable of protecting individual citizens who should instead make personal protection a personal priority.

To leave your safety to the local police force is a recipe for disaster. That isn’t a knock on the work rank and file officers do everyday. But, intellectually honest officers will readily admit it’s almost impossible for the police to stop a deadly criminal attack. Usually, all they can do is show up and make a nice chalk outline where the body is lying.

Still, the Mayors want the American public to believe that the most regulated consumer product in the United States isn’t regulated enough. They also claim that people who get guns illegally will somehow stop if the legal process to buy a gun becomes more difficult.

Anyone can see the hole in this donut. Criminals are not showing up at the local gun shop to try and buy a brand new gun. Even if they do, the current background check system is a great resource and does a great job of catching anyone trying to beat the system.

Gun grabbers are always going on about reasonable or common sense gun control schemes but somehow miss that the most effective common sense plan is to enforce the laws that already exist. It is the cheapest way to combat gun crimes other than greatly increasing the rights of law-abiding citizens to carry guns for self-defense.

But, the Mayors won’t admit that they’ve failed, and more importantly they won’t admit that the gun ban extremists' policy on how to combat crime has failed as well.

It is a common trick for the Mayors to claim that handgun bans fail because surrounding cites or states don’t have similar restrictions. Unwittingly, they make the pro-gun case through that argument since under those circumstances only criminals disobey the ban and commit their crimes with complete freedom.

Criminals won’t turn in their guns and will prey on people they know can’t fight back. That is the first fundamental truth of fighting crime. Always assume that a criminal will act like a criminal, which is truly using common sense to battle gun crime.

Everyone has heard this before and we know it will never get through to Mayors who blame guns for their inability to fight crime. The same people are the type who sees the use of a gun for self-defense as a criminal act. Instead, they put forth the old cliché about dialing 911 and hoping for the best.

Nobody doubts the good intentions of the rank and file police officer, but people should rightfully doubt that the response time is fast enough. If someone is stabbing you, the three minutes it takes for the police to get to your house, figure out a way in, and stop the attack can be all the time you have left.

Pro-gun advocates are forced to respond to the same tired anti-gun gibberish so often the arguments are beginning to fall on deaf ears. At first, it seems like good strategy to turn your opponents' arguments into monotonous babble. The problem is the anti-gun schemers aren’t astute enough to come up with such a subtle plan. Despite a complete lack of the bloodbaths they predicted, the anti-gunners still think a gun can turn an otherwise normal person into a bloodthirsty killer.

Their willingness to cling to a failed social program is no longer proof they are dedicated, it is instead proof they are misguided. Only fools trots out the same failed arguments time after time and still think the masses will be fooled.

Fools are also prone to try and combat a social issue by rehashing existing laws and passing them as a new tactic. That is exactly what the Mayor Against Illegal Guns are proposing. Whether they are the fools, or whether the people who elect them are fools, is still up for debate.

Gerard Valentino is the Buckeye Firearms Association Central Ohio Chair, writes for the ValentinoChronicle.com and teaches the Ohio concealed carry class through CenterMass LTD.