20 dead this month in Illinois spree killings, but the state's gun-grabbers will never get it

By Gerard Valentino

How long does this have to happen? How many of my home state brethren have to die? When will people like Chicago Mayor Daley and Governor Blagojevich realize they are leaving their citizens at the whim of thugs and the deranged?

The sad truth is they will never get it – they will never learn that their draconian gun policies don’t work. Chicago leads the nation in murders nearly every year, yet Mayor Daley doesn’t get that criminals know Chicagoans are disarmed. The same is true for colleges where students are easy victims, left to die in masse without the ability to defend their life.

The ivory tower is instead becoming akin to the Town of London, where people go to die in tragic and often gruesome ways.

Ever wonder why mass shootings don’t take place at rallies in favor of the NRA? Ever wonder why people don’t go on spree killings with a gun in Israel?

It’s because the common thugs and mentally deranged people know where to find defenseless victims. You would think the outcome of the recent church shootings in Colorado would make the point more clearly.

But the anti-gunners don’t get it now and never will. We have to accept that changing their minds is not going to happen. We will never shift them to our side or get the anti-gun establishment media to see things our way. Instead, we have to do everything in our power to eradicate such thought from the public arena by electing pro-gun and pro-common sense officials.

Clearly, the anti-gun minority is well represented in the Illinois legislature to keep concealed carry from becoming a reality. This is despite the fact that gun control laws are ineffective in Illinois. Right now, the anti-gun movement has about as much evidence to back their claim as the Flat Earth Society does to prove the earth is flat.

All you have to do is look at it logically. Guns kill people, so banning guns means they won’t kill people anymore. That takes about as much logical thought as standing in front of your house and looking down the street. What do you notice? It’s flat; therefore, the earth must be flat, right?

That is about as deep as anti-gun rhetoric goes. They see the earth is flat, so it must be.

Such primitive thinking has no place in government. If it was pervasive in other governmental areas of control, we would still be burning witches at the stake, cavorting with druids and living in caves. Thought has to evolve, and part of that process is realizing after 30 years of strict gun-control unarmed victims are still dying in droves. In contrast, armed victims fight back and the death toll drops, all the time, every time.

Still, the anti-gun leaders in Illinois stand in the way of giving their citizens the one chance they need to survive – legal concealed carry.

They must all be card carrying members of the Flat Earth Society, as well as Democrats or Republicans. By blocking concealed carry in Illinois for so long they are, in effect, standing up for the unenlightened and backward in society. Being anti-gun doesn’t make them progressive thinkers; it eliminates them from the roll of thinking people everywhere.

In the last month, ten people from my home state have died in spree killings and over twenty were wounded. Based on cases elsewhere, we know the anti-gun policies of the Illinois government are responsible for the majority of those deaths. We know that because in cases where someone resisted a spree killer with a gun the death tolls are much smaller. No longer can we claim to guess that people would be alive today if there was a victim willing to resist with a gun, we KNOW that is the case.

The sad part is Mayor Daley, an anti-gun zealot and the most powerful man in Illinois, doesn’t care to look at the evidence that proves he is on the wrong side of he gun issue. He is happy to keep his head in the sand while the very people he is supposed to try and protect are dying by the hundreds every year.

Even sadder is that the rest of Illinois is a rural area where gun ownership is a right of passage. But, Mayor Daley’s position as the mayor of Chicago gives him nearly outright control of the state legislature because he is seen as electorally unbeatable despite his crazy anti-gun ways.

Chicagoans need to take back their city and help the rest of Illinois take back the state by evicting Mayor Daley, and his cohorts in the Flat Earth Society, from government.

Only then will the citizens of Illinois be able to carry a gun for their own protection. Until that happens, the state will be lumped in with Wisconsin as the only states in the Union that don’t let law abiding citizens have the right to self-defense.

Seeing people from my home state and from my hometown of Cicero, Illinois die in such a tragic way saddens me.

It also angers me, because it doesn’t have to be this way.

Gerard Valentino is the Buckeye Firearms Association Centraol Ohio Chair.