There was a terrible tragedy this last weekend across the bay in Maryland.  A teenager shot and killed the members of his family after a long running dispute with his politically and socially well connected father.  Now the media scrutiny is focused on a kempt suburb and the anger and frustration that follows because nowhere in the prelude to the crime did anyone yell stop.  This morning’s lead editorial in The Sun newspaper of Baltimore calls for gun confiscation and the disarming of the masses.  All I can offer is that I’m surprised it took the editorial board this long to offer the expected reaction after a tragedy strikes their own kind.
 Three hundred plus million Americans and most of them have never even considered killing another human being, however.  In any population there is aberrant behavior.  In three million, three hundred thousand and in three hundred.  Yet the “progressive” response is to disarm all. 
Firearms are a recent addition to human history but homicide has a much more distant past.  The jawbone of an ass, poisons, knives, these things all were the weapons of the angry, the psychotic and anyone looking to silence a perceived enemy.
This past day the wife of former Reagan media assistant James Brady, Sarah Brady, telephoned my program.  The Brady family, as students of history can attest, was deeply wounded by gun violence.  I share sympathy.
 One morning long ago when I was a student in the fourth grade I rose for school and my dad wasn’t home.  My normally talkative mother had little to say; only that he had been called out during the middle of the night.
 More details followed at school.  A woman had been killed near the Oil Springs Indian Reservation, which sat just outside the state park where my father was a patrolman.  I would also later hear that she had been gunned down, shot in the back, while walking along the side of the road.  My father was part of the investigative team.  She had crossed park property while walking.  Later I would learn that she had been at a bar at lakeside and that there had been an argument with a man.  These things I learned after my dad picked us up at school.  While pick-up wasn’t rare we usually took the bus home. 
Dad explained that day that mom was spending time with members of her family.  Her cousin had been killed during the night.  She had been killed by a man from our neighborhood, a man married into an influential family. 
Thirty six years have passed and I still don’t have all the facts.  Many of the people who could’ve told me are now dead after living long lives.  What I did learn from later conversations with dad was that the neighbor wanted to silence his victim and even without a firearm would’ve likely found another method.  Would we then have heard calls to outlaw knives, rocks or jawbones?
There are going to be people coming forward in Maryland this week saying the signs were evident.  These same people likely didn’t act because the accused was from a “good family” and the family itself may not have acted because, after all, what would people say at the club?
This is the Virginia Tech defense.  A student may be bats but, you know, the loonies and minorities need to be handled differently.  Lord, forbid he files suit and wins the quad as judgment and then develops condominiums on the spot.  Better we sacrifice a few dozens students and professors to the gods of political correctness, and, oh yes, disarm the masses. 
It may sound trite but bad guys aren’t going to follow any confiscation orders.  The aberrant already flaunt law and social convention. 
Meanwhile, as thousands of Chinese froze to death in recent weeks the government sent in soldiers to shoot anyone demanding shelter, warmth and accountability.  The Chinese masses were long ago disarmed but for a pitchfork or two and these devices won’t defeat an oppressive regime.  A few Chinese civilians may have guns, those that prey on the cold and hungry.  You will also find that when homicides do occur in the Chinese countryside the pitchfork often gets a good workout.  It has yet to be confiscated as the party leadership wants to be fed and agricultural tools it appears have a good public purpose.  This is protection against famine.  Like firearms protect against oppression.    
Spare me The Sun’s drivel and drive to control our actions and lives.
 

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