We Don’t Need Stronger Gun Laws. We Need Stronger Communities.
By Raynard Jackson
(NNPA Newswire Columnist)
Raynard Jackson says that even if guns were outlawed in the U.S., a person determined to commit an act of violence will always find a weapon.
Here we go again. Another school massacre and another overreaction by liberals who want to play politics with the Second Amendment.
On Valentine’s Day, 17 students were murdered by a former classmate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a small community west of Boca Raton.
As tragic as the murders were, sometimes I am confused by the way people react to tragedies. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, many people want the government to immediately pass new gun control laws. The hard truth is that there is absolutely nothing the government can do to protect you from tragedies like the horrific massacre in Parkland.
Tragedy, by definition is, “an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe.”
Sometimes good people are beset by tragedies, randomly and without warning.
If you ban guns, do you really think violent tragedies will go away? One need look no further than Japan to find the answer.
In Japan, it is illegal to possess, carry, sell or buy guns. So, it is extremely rare, if ever, for a shooting death to occur in Japan.
For example, in 2014, Japan had six-gun related deaths compared to 33,599 in the U.S.
In 2016, however, nineteen people were killed and 26 injured in a stabbing massacre in Tokyo, which was Japan’s deadliest mass killing since World War II. In 2008, a man ran over a group of people with his truck and then stabbed 18, killing seven in Tokyo’s Akihabara gaming district. In 2001, eight children were killed when a former employee, a janitor, entered an elementary school in Osaka and stabbed them to death.
So, the point is that even if guns were outlawed in the U.S., a person determined to commit an act of violence will always find a weapon of choice to unleash their diabolical schemes.
Irresponsible mainstream media outlets take advantage of these crises, broadcasting the anguish and misery of distraught family members just to boost their own ratings. As they say, “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Let’s game out one of the liberal arguments that outlawing guns is the solution to these mass shootings, that seem to happen with more frequency.
So, Japan has outlawed guns. Now, killers in that country use knives and cars to inflict massive carnage upon their fellow citizens.
If the U.S. outlawed guns and preemptively banned, let’s say, ice picks and utility knives, then individuals that are committed to killing other people will simply use whatever else they can get their hands on. Cars and trucks might become the weapons of choice; should we ban them, too? If we go down that road, where will it end?
What liberals refuse to address is the lack of values and morality in our society. Religion instills in a society a sense of right and wrong and demands some type of structure in our lives, but liberals have run prayer out of our nation’s schools; and any mentions or references to God in the public square are questioned, mocked or maligned outright.
Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, can anyone legitimately argue that the Ten Commandments are not good standards for any society to live by? Thou shalt not murder, lie, covet, etc.
In American society today, many people have bought into the notion that man, not God, is the measure of all things. There are no rules. No restraints. American society has cast the traditional nuclear family by the wayside. For liberals, normal is whatever you feel like doing at any given moment.
Liberal Hollywood elites, the most vociferous advocates for gun control, refuse to take responsibility for the violence and lack of morals that are constant themes in their movies and TV shows; most of them won’t even acknowledge the negative effects that their industry has on the minds of young people.
The result is generations of children who become desensitized to violence and mayhem, who then lash out in real life, without ever considering the repercussions of their actions.
These kids don’t wake up one day and decide to go on murderous rampages at their schools, simply because someone picked on them during lunch or they experienced a bad breakup. We have all gone through that as teenagers and young adults and we got through it without killing and maiming dozens of our classmates.
What is different now? Today, it’s very hard to get teenagers and young adults to think critically about the world they live in. No one wants to accept personal responsibility for anything that happens in their lives; everyone gets a trophy; everything bad that happens to them is always someone else’s fault.
The state of Florida and the F.B.I. are going to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out why this kid killed students and faculty members at that school in Parkland. There are no simple solutions to most problems that we wrestle with as a society.
Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to good people and banning guns won’t change that.
Raynard Jackson is founder and chairman of Black Americans for a Better Future (BAFBF), a federally registered 527 Super PAC established to get more Blacks involved in the Republican Party. BAFBF focuses on the Black entrepreneur. For more information about BAFBF, visit www.bafbf.org. You can follow Raynard on Twitter @Raynard1223.