Supporting The Second Amendment Is Not About Emotions

Policy Decisions Should Be Based On Logic

Six years ago today, my friend, coworker and academy classmate Bob French was murdered. The man who killed him was a longtime felon, who despite all of California’s feel good gun laws, had no problem getting his hands on an AK-47 which he used to kill Bob.  I carry the challenge coin pictured in my pocket every single day.  I will never forget Bob, but I also will never call for banning guns. Why not? Because I am not a moron ruled by his emotions.  Let me explain.

I was there at the scene the day Bob was murdered. I arrived after the gun fight but got there in time to see Bob being loaded into the ambulance for the five minute drive to the hospital that he would not survive.  Once I found out Bob had been killed, the rest of the day is a blur in my memory, until I got home, told my wife what had happened and broke down and cried.

I remember learning that the suspect had used an AK to murder Bob, and I’m not going to lie, I also remember thinking for a few fleeting moments that maybe we should ban “assault weapons.”  I remember having a conversation with myself in my head about whether or not banning them would have made any difference, and I quickly decided, yet again, a gun ban would not have changed anything.

How did I come to that conclusion? What facts brought me to the very same conclusion I had come to many times before?

• The suspect was a multi-time convicted felon making him a prohibited person under both state and federal law.  

• The weapon he used was already banned in the state of California.  

• The magazines he used were illegal in California.  

• The mere act of possessing the ammo was a felony for the suspect.

Long before the suspect decided to commit any other crimes, like multiple counts of attempted murder, he had already committed 3 felonies and at the time, violated a mostly unenforceable misdemeanor.

Are some people really naïve enough to think that a guy who has no regard for the lives of others gives a rat’s ass about violating another gun law?  Sadly, yes. Some people are indeed that gullible, and they make up one portion of those pushing gun control. I refer to that group as the emotional supporters.

Emotional supporters are not motivated by ill intent.  They really do want fewer people to be killed, as do we all, but they see things from an emotional point of view rather than from a logical one. They, just like the rest of us, get upset when innocent people, especially children, are murdered by some psycho with a gun.

The difference is they let their emotions get the best of them. They let their emotions overpower their logic. They want something done for the sake of doing something, even if every ounce of evidence demonstrates that “something” has no hope of making a statistically relevant change.

The biggest problem for us to overcome is that for the emotional supporters who constantly push gun control as their solution to violent crime, the gun is bad guy. They look at the scary guns, especially the “military grade weapons” and the “assault rifles” and they see a thing that embodies evil and ill intent.  Those people are ruled by their emotions.  That is the only way a person can attribute motivations to an inanimate object.

At the same time, those emotional supporters almost always ignore the person who used the gun.  In the case of Bob’s murderer, the suspect should never have been on the street.  If it were not for the actions of a liberal California judge, the suspect would have been in prison.

Immediately after Bob’s murder, the usual talking heads resumed their calls for gun control, but they never once mentioned the stupid, criminal coddling decisions by the judge or the “criminal justice reform laws” that were responsible for the murderer being loose.  The ONLY people to discuss those far more relevant issues were the cops and those who support them. The emotional supporters of gun control were completely silent in regards to Bob’s murderer.  It is much easier for them to imagine a gun being the evil entity as opposed to another human.

(Our friend Cody, whom you may know as Donut Operator, put the above video together based on a piece I wrote the day Bob was murdered)

The other group of people pushing gun control are those who do so for far more nefarious purposes.  They are the tyrants, the wanna be dictators.  They want American’s disarmed because it is much easier to force one’s will upon an unarmed population than on those capable of armed resistance.  Most anti-gun politicians fall into this category, as do their sycophants, the mainstream media.  

They are the benevolent dictators who think they know better what society needs than society itself. This is the far more dangerous group because they see themselves as the good guys, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to gain the support of the emotional supporters, including using lies and manipulated statistics to gain support.

They will “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” They use every crisis to rile up the emotional supporters, and it works almost every time.

As I sit here thinking about Bob’s death, and the deaths of several other murdered coworkers, I am reminded how fragile life is, and how important it is for those of us who can, to stand in the way of those who seek to make everyone weak and vulnerable. It does not matter which of the two groups they represent, they need to be opposed.

A quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin is very fitting in this situation. “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Even though the context in which Franklin originally used it was far different, it makes it no less true in this case.  

A gun in the hand of a good person is not a threat to anyone other than those who seek to do evil, whereas anything in the hand of an evil person can be used as a weapon to carry out evil acts.  The problem is not the gun, the problem is the evil person.

The sooner we can all agree on the real problem, the sooner we can start working on a solution that will actually have a chance at making a difference.