This morning, I watched videos of an insane, non-law-abiding citizen shooting out the doors to a church-school on his way in to murder six people.
It’s horrifying. Once again, we (culture/society/laws) collectively failed to protect the most innocent and vulnerable of our world.
We need accurate pre-cogs like The Minority Report to accurately (somewhat) predict who is going to commit homicide, and when, and where.
In the meantime, we absolutely must harden the typical targets (of course then perps will change to different targets) of the crazy people who want to do this sort of thing. And contrary to the blather of the extreme left, churches and schools can absolutely be hardened without looking or feeling like prisons. That’s just such baloney.
But to be clear, as we all already know, this is not because of a gun problem. To wit, consider the following documented facts:
Early in the founding of of our nation, some 54% of property-owning men, and about 19% of women, owned guns. (https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1489&context=wmlr)
Today, about 32% of all legal citizens own guns. (What Percentage of Americans Own Guns?)
Over the last 323 years, homicide rates have continued to fall:
Homicide rates:
1700: 30 per 100,000
1800: 20 per 100,000
1900: 10 per 100,000
2000: 6 per 100,000
2018: 6 per 100,000
The nightly news notwithstanding, we are actually living in a relatively safe period in which there are 80% fewer homicides per capita while gun ownership declined by only 22% per capita over the same period.
The DATA simply does not reveal a causal relationship between homicides and guns.
“in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” includes taking all necessary steps to protect all citizens in our great republic, including and especially our children, from the menacing harm of the sick, evil people among us, while at the same time granting freedom and liberty to those who love our nation and desire to protect innocents from harm.
The problem is a human one. When we allow crazy people to own guns (can of worms there!!!) and fail to protect innocents from harm (like we do the whitehouse, congress, governors, court houses etc…) we only enable and embolden evildoers to keep perpetuating this nightmare.