Bruce Walker "Gets It"

Bruce Walker is another person who "gets it." His article today, in the American Thinker entitled Bombs Don't Kill People, Terrorist Do is a classic argument against the instrumentality theory of crime. The Left, in an attempt to absolve the perpetrator of the crime, wants us instead to get rid of the tools that he uses.  In this case, he is arguing against searching every airline passenger, in the benighted belief that all are guilty until proven innocent.  He also notes that the criminal himself never cooperates. If a gun isn't handy, a knife will do. If neither a gun nor a knife is handy, a baseball bat, a chain saw, even a rock will do.  As Walker says:

This is precisely the disconnect which the Left faces with airport security and passenger examinations. The danger is not that someone will bring a handgun, a knife, or even an explosive on an airliner. Properly stored and maintained, none of these will do the slightest harm to anyone. In fact, if every passenger on September 11, 2001 had been armed, the terrorists would almost certainly have been stopped. Disarming the innocent never stops violence.

Moreover, the "things" which can be used to cause injury are as endless as human imagination, and in the hands of terrorists, almost anything can be used to murder large numbers of people. The variety of methods and tools of destruction are as broad as the bored minds of evil men. Anyone who has toured a prison can hear from guards about the remarkable ingenuity with which inmates can make real-looking "guns" or very real knives and other weapons.

With the new Tea Party driven Republican majority coming into both houses of the State legislature, I can only hope for more sanity and common sense to follow. We have had in recent years, laws proposed to keep concealed handgun licensees from carrying their handguns in a McDonald's, for heaven sake-for the children, of course. Once again, the emphasis is on the instrumentality - handguns - and not on the type of persons wielding them. People who have gone to the trouble (and it is considerable expense and trouble) are not likely to be the ones threatening their children. Rather it is those who don't obey the law in the first place who are most likely to be the ones who shoot up a McDonald's.  Yet somehow these soccer moms believe that if they can keep their children from a knowledge of violence, they will be able to inoculate them for life against any violation of their persons.  Using that logic, they should also be against sex education in schools.

As it is, the law current excludes concealed carriers from most anyplace where one might have a need for a gun:  banks, movie theatres, restaurants, riots, parks, schools, including college campuses, and on, and on, and on.  If a man can be trusted with a gun, he can be trusted almost anywhere with it.  If he can't be trusted, he can't be trusted anywhere.  We need to get rid of the "criminal free fire zones" the State has set up.  But more importantly, we need to stop looking for the instruments of killing, and instead do the real police work of looking for criminals.