Keeping It In Perspective

So our former mayor has been blogging since he was removed from office, and it's more aggravating than ever. When he was mayor you only had to hear him when he had something official to deal with. Now we get to have him weigh in on whatever strikes his fancy. And what has stricken him recently is the Trayvon Miller slaying in Florida, along with the one in Slinger, Wisconsin. There are some similarities. Both victims were young, unarmed, African American men. They were both killed by gunshots from men who claimed self defense. So Citizen Dave has determined that it's the gun that is at fault, and wants to repeal the Concealed Carry law that only passed in Wisconsin last fall. His logic is that if the gun was not there, nobody gets killed. True. But this happy result does not extend to every situation. There was a case in Oklahoma earlier this year when a woman living alone with her infant, had her house attacked by two men trying to gain entrance. When the first one came through the door they broke down, she shot and killed him. For some reason the other guy left. So if there is no gun? Hmmm maybe it's not such a happy ending.

Then I see a column by a New York Times writer where she links to a list of 400 people who have been killed by people who held CC permits. This is supposed to get us outraged. She is playing off the fact that in the Florida shooting, the shooter had a CC permit. She of course portrays him as a cop wannabe who shouldn't have had a gun to begin with. And Citizen Dave offers up a bit of Catch-22 logic, saying that if you think you need a concealed weapon, then that just proves you are unfit to be armed. (You may recall from the book, that in order to be grounded as a pilot, you had to request so on the grounds that you were crazy. But if you asked to be grounded, that just proved you weren't crazy at all, because only crazy people would keep going up there flying missions.) Both of these clowns come to the conclusion that these particular guns need to be off the streets and these laws repealed.

The 400 people killed by permit holders is over a 5 year period, across the entire United States. I sent her this link http://homicides.redeyechicago.com/ which tracks the murders just in Chicago. They've already passed 100 for the year and that was before April. 90 of the victims were black. More than a dozen were under the age of 20, with one of them 14. They had six shot dead in one day. Chicago is bad, but are they unique? Hardly. A young black kid in Florida died when he jumped from two stories up to elude some mall cops who were chasing him. At his funeral a fight broke out with multiple guns and 14 people were shot, with two dead. Of course we don't know for sure, but who would like to bet me as to whether or not anybody had a permit?

For every one case where a permit holder is the shooter, there are a thousand where he is not. But nobody wants to take those guns away. All the effort is to take the guns away from permit holders only. And the truth is, that's a law that would actually be "effective," in that it would be followed, because these are people who respect the law.