One Time to Save a Life

By Gerard Valentino

The establishment media’s immediate vilification of guns whenever a mass shooting happens means they forget that it only takes only one person with a concealed handgun license to stop a killer. They also refuse to accept that despite the leftist anti-gunners' cries to the contrary, when someone resists with a gun the death toll in these cases is much lower.

Every single one of the spree killings with the highest death toll have one thing in common, nobody was there with a gun during the early stages of the event to challenge the coward. Yet, in the case of the Pearl, Mississippi School shooting, the Alrosa Villa shooting in Columbus, Ohio and the Appalachian Law School tragedy someone was there to stop the murderer and the death toll was lessened.

Contrast those cases with Columbine, the Luby’s massacre in Killeen, TX, and the McDonald’s massacre in California, where nobody was able to defend themselves due to being legally disarmed, and it becomes apparent that people are safer from spree killers when they resist with a gun.

There are also hundreds of thousands of Americans each year that are alive because they chose to fight back with a firearm.

All the anti-gunners have to show for their 30 year crusade to disarm Americans is a constant parade of murders in areas where guns are specifically banned. Schools and workplaces being the most common gun free zone where homicidal maniacs ply their trade. Doesn’t anyone ever ask why the murders that do this don’t choose police stations or other government buildings to vent their rage at society?

The answer is plainly obvious, those places either have people there to resist with a gun or people have the perception that the locations are somehow secure.

Gun advocates have written on this issue for years but it can’t be brought to the forefront often enough. The moral high ground is also a part of the gun debate that gun owners can claim. Arming a law abiding citizen in the face of possible criminal attack is a moral act, to leave that same person unarmed is, in contrast, morally bankrupt.

On another note, such an occurrence should make all Americans angry. Not that there are guns on the street but because the government disarms us and then fails time after time to protect innocent people. The issue of gun-control is no longer about whether law-abiding citizens should be able to carry a gun, that has long since been resolved. The question is what are reasonable limits on where people should be able to carry a gun.

The short answer is the law-abiding should be able to carry a gun anywhere and everywhere. It’s time for the gun movement to take off the gloves and call it like it is; there is no longer any viable reason to keep citizens from carrying guns for self protection wherever they chose to do so.

Our elected representatives also need to give up their little control game on the issue. Gun advocates need to start fighting for our rights as if it’s the difference between life and death, because it is. We need to band together and force the government to return to people the right to protect their own life. Living without a means of self defense invalidates the long held American belief that we all have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Those in politics that try to paint the gun debate as a fringe issue are off base in their assessment. Basically, there is little value to economic development if you can’t live freely and safely to enjoy it. The same for better schools or any other political issue on that is currently on the front burner.

Only the war on terror, another issue marginalized by the left matches the importance of freeing up law-abiding citizens to carry guns for self-defense without restraint.

As the gun debate shapes up today it is clear that gun-control has failed to protect Americans. Even if the studies are correct that claim crime isn’t affected by permissive concealed carry laws that is a win for the gun movement. To claim that allowing everyone to carry a gun has a negligible effect on crime either way means that by carrying a gun people can protect themselves without risk to society.

Even in their best argument the anti-gun crowd once again loses because their bases to disarm the American people are emotional and based in faulty logic.

To agree with them puts everyone in danger because until the ability to carry a gun for self-defense is unfettered another Virginia Tech, Columbine and Luby’s massacre will happen.

If, as voters, we let it happen then it is shame on us.

Gerard Valentino the Central Ohio Chair for Buckeye Firearms Association, BuckeyeFirearms.com, is a professional freelance writer in Columbus, Ohio.