So Much For Good Guys With Guns

The latest violence from Kansas City reminded me of the words from Wayne LaPierre, former CEO of the NRA, that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

The bloodied sidewalks of Kansas City’s Union Station stand as a rebuttal to LaPierre’s argument. In Kansas City, a permit is required for open-carry, but no permit is required for concealed carry.  If the Responsible Gun Owner was present at the parade, their presence did not deter the shooters, and apparently did not stop it before two dozen or more had been shot.

This Valentine’s Day massacre is not to be confused with the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High six years ago, or the mass shooting at Northern Illinois University sixteen years ago that killed five people. The murders of seven mob members in Chicago in 1929, the original Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, seems quaint now, and few remember it. Mass shootings are so common that days of the year are not specific enough to commemorate them.

The suggestion that more guns is the answer to gun violence prompts another question: is this the best we can do, as Americans? We are the only country that experiences mass shootings on a daily basis (over 600 last year!)  To suggest more guns as the answer is to say that we must go to work, to church, to public celebrations, expecting carnage. The horror of realizing those pops are not fireworks, the screams, the stampeding crowds blind panicked sprint for cover, this is all to be taken for granted. The only hope is to become a gun owner yourself, and go out into the world ready to use it.

As I’ve written before, in the name of freedom, we have all become conscripts in a war. Is this the free society I have heard so much about?