Sandy Hook and the Second Amendment

With emotions running high in response to the heart wrenching events that took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary School December 14, many of my liberal friends and family members believe now is the perfect time for gun control legislation.

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As heartbreaking as it is that 20 children in Connecticut will not have the chance to open Christmas presents, celebrate birthdays, go on a first date, drive a car, graduate, get married, and have kids, there are millions of kids out there who will. And they are the reason why the rest of us need to fight for the freedoms guaranteed to us in the Constitution which Progressives are so predictably willing to give away.

Before Americans were able to corporately exhale upon hearing the news about the Connecticut shooting, liberals hopped on the gun control bandwagon. One of MSNBC’s many loose cannons, Ed Schultz, went on a rant saying, “Hiding behind the Second Amendment doesn’t cut it anymore,” and described our founders as slave-owning bigots. It’s real hard to wrap your hands around the hypocrisy of those who cry giant crocodile tears over the loss of these 20 precious children (and they should), but care little about millions of children who will never see the light of day due to abortion.

And here we go again; Progressives are manipulating the Sandy Hook massacre as a way to strike down the Second Amendment. Truth is, gun control is like putting a bandage on a gaping wound. Seems to me a better solution is to do something about the culture of violence currently destroying our society from the inside out — and place armed guards in schools in the meantime.  Chances are, had one been at Sandy Hook, I wouldn’t be writing about it today.

I may date myself here, but when I was a kid, I didn’t stay inside playing violent computer games or watching violent movies; I played outside with real people who picked flowers in the spring, climbed trees in the summer, jumped in leaf piles in the fall, and ice skated on frozen ponds in the winter.  And I grew up to be a responsible citizen and gun owner.

As I’ve written before, if you listen to liberals long enough it’s not too long before you find yourself in Bizarro World. And in the case of the Second Amendment, Progressives like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) pretzel it into something it is not. On “Meet the Press” December 16, Feinstein inferred arming school guards is a crummy idea because “the rights of the few” (i.e. the millions who own guns) would, in her world, somehow “overcome the safety of the majority.” Say, what? Bizarro.

As brokenhearted as we all are over what happened in Connecticut, gun control will not stop those lacking certain emotional filters from doing bad things to children – and others.  Policies in China, for example, make it largely illegal for private citizens to own and sell guns. Possession or sale of a gun can lead to anywhere from a 3 year prison term to the death penalty. I digress to mention that because the Chinese government has little regard for human life, gun laws were devised to protect the tyrannical Chinese government from its citizens rather than the other way around.

Nevertheless, people find a way to do bad things, and in the case of the Chinese, crazy people are still hurting children. Oddly, on the same day the Sandy Hook massacre took place, a knife-wielding Chinese man stabbed almost two dozen children at an elementary school in central China. And he found a way to do it although the Chinese government recently enacted strict knife regulation measures after a spate of deadly knife and cleaver attacks on school children in China in 2010, killing 20 and wounding 50.

Before long, the Chinese will be eating steak with teaspoons, and so will we — if we relinquish our Second Amendment rights to those who would rather steal the rights of the masses than address our society’s moral decline. With that in mind, the best gift we can give our kids this Christmas is a future filled with the promise of freedom.

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Susan Stamper Brown is an opinion page columnist who writes about politics, the military, the economy and culture. Email Susan at writestamper@gmail.com or her website at susanstamperbrown.com.