Making Hay out of Death

The bodies aren't even cold, and these anti-gun Brady people are all over the place with their sanctimonious bullshit. We're going to de-construct one of the more egregious articles, this one from the Tribune:

• Parents of students at Northern Illinois University met in Skokie on Saturday to push for stricter gun control laws in the wake of the shooting on campus.
  
  "It's appalling that these weapons are on our streets," said Connie Catellani, a Skokie mother whose son is a senior at NIU. "These guns are not for self- defense. They're for mayhem."

Hyperbole and bullshit. Pistols are primarily self defense weapons. In the military, they are a weapon of last resort. You don't see armies marching off to war with pistols. And the vast majority of the injuries inflicted on the students? A Remington 870 pump action shotgun - the same type of weapon you can find in every single district police station, some with more time on the job than many captains.

• A leader of the national group Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence spoke about the need for gun-control legislation, including universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons. About two dozen parents held a news conference in a classroom at Oakton Community College on Saturday morning.
  

Not a single one of these weapons is a so called "assault weapon." The gun grabbers are going nuts over common pistols and a shotgun designed around 1950. Scare tactics.

• The NIU gunman, who opened fire in a crowded lecture hall Thursday afternoon, killing five, was able to do so much harm in two minutes because he could buy four guns easily, said Jennifer Bishop, a national program director for victim's families.

No, he was able to inflict so much damage because he surprised a group of unarmed students in a confined area with only three exits. He was able to sneak in an unlocked backstage door and he used a shotgun which is designed to scatter multiple pellets in a cloud to kill small game. The NIU police responded in two minutes and the gunman was already dead. TWO MINUTES! Nothing was going to stop this asshole from killing people in two minutes flat. Our OEMC considers a Priority 1A job (domestic, shots fired, battery-in-progress) dispatched on time if they get a car assigned in TEN minutes. And even if he had twenty guns, he still only has two hands and you need both to operate a shotgun.

• Police say the gunman, Steven Kazmierczak, brought a shotgun and three handguns into the classroom.
  
  "We are outraged because this doesn't have to happen," Bishop said.

No, it doesn't have to happen. If only his family recognized the warning signs... oh wait, they did! He was committed for over a year to a psychiatric facility for mental problems in the late 1990s. He also had experienced a number of setbacks in his personal life and was reaching out to people he hadn't seen in over a decade.

Well, maybe if someone else recognized the signs... oh wait, they did! The US Army of all institutions gave him an psychological discharge in 2001-2002 during basic training.

What if he was limited to one handgun purchase a month as has been proposed numerous times in this state and elsewhere? Oh wait, he bought one pistol 06 August 07, one pistol 30 December 07, and picked up a third pistol 09 February 08 along with the shotgun.

Maybe the State of Illinois should have caught his mental instability when he applied for an FOID card... oh wait, that's only for persons in treatment within the past 5 years. And that's only if they ADMIT it. Anyone reading think the State Police have anywhere near the manpower and money to go digging into peoples' past medical histories. Doesn't HIPPA come into play here?

Let's face facts. A gun is an inert piece of metal. In some cases, a finely machined piece of metal, in other cases a cast piece of shit or a stamped hunk of ore. It will sit there for thousands of years and never harm a soul until someone picks it up, loads it, points it and uses it. A gun is a tool.

Of the pages and pages of law written and proposed, what exactly is supposed to stop someone from killing another human being if they really want to? And if you want to kill a whole bunch of human beings, are you going to walk into a police station? An army barracks? Maybe a gun show? After all, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of guns at a gun show. The bodies must stack up at gun shows, right?

Or are you going to go to one of the soft targets where no one is allowed to carry a gun, they leave doors unlocked into rooms with limited exits, and the police are minutes, maybe even tens of minutes away?