Pamela Geller, Monday WND Column
Pulling the trigger on gun control

My take on the debased exploitation of the slaughter of children by a madman:

DEFENDING THE WEST

"Pulling the trigger on gun control" WND, December 24, 2012

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Exclusive: Pamela Geller sounds off on Obama 'exploiting deaths of children'

Obama’s selective sympathy concerning the
Newtown massacre is political exploitation at its most cynical and
debased. Where were Obama’s concern, his empathy and his calls for a
thorough investigation of the Fort Hood and Benghazi massacres?

Obama’s knee-jerk opportunism, trying to exploit
the horrible deaths of these children to pursue his political ends
(harmful gun-control legislation), is in sharp contrast to his response
to the Fort Hood mass murder. When Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13
Americans in the name of jihad, Obama attempted to silence concerns
about jihad, declaring that no one should “rush to judgment” – despite
the fact that Hasan was wearing the garb of the shaheed the morning of
his jihad, was giving out Qurans that same morning and was screaming
“Allahu akbar!” while mowing down Americans.

And now he is trying to destroy the Second
Amendment. This is the poison fruit of the left’s decades-long war on
American values and morality. The problem is not guns. The problem is
our societal glorification of violence and death. We need to recover
love of life and respect for human beings in the society, and teach such
things in schools.

Our societal nihilism is what leads to these attacks.

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American children are fed a daily diet of
violence from early childhood on. A nonstop feed of gratuitous, mindless
violence on television, in movies, on the Internet and particularly
video games dehumanizes and desensitizes. How many open-chest cavities
do we need to see on “CSI” or “Law and Order”? When I was a kid, “The Twilight Zone”
and Alfred Hitchcock could scare the living daylights out of you
without so much as a knife or gun drawn. Add to that the porn culture,
the lack of morality and virtue …

That lurid and amoral violence of Hollywood and
the music industry, the breakdown of the family and a reckless
abandonment of the mentally ill – all have contributed to this
horrifying phenomenon of mass shootings. In the recent past, the
mentally ill were institutionalized. But in the late 20th century,
psychiatric hospitals got a very bad name; the left decided that the
mental institutions were wrong and cruel. Institutionalizing someone
became the bogeyman. The hospitals were closed, and we basically tossed
our mentally ill onto the street. We medicated them and then threw them
to the wolves. Now we’re raising a generation of mentally ill children,
with limited mental health resources and a system with hands tied until after the tragedy happens.

Outlawing guns will not deter criminals, who
will not hesitate to obtain illegal guns. It will just render the
populace utterly defenseless.

In the U.K., where there is no right to bear arms, gun crime has gone up 89 percent in the last 10 years.
Gun-control laws haven’t stopped that. The only way to stop a man with a
gun is with a gun. It is little reported in the enemedia that the
Clackamas mall shooter faced a shopper with a concealed weapon who cut
his spree short. The Clackamas Town Center, two weeks before Christmas,
was teeming with humanity, but the shooter managed to kill only two
people. Concealed weapons save lives. John Lott reminds us, “Similar
stories are available from across the country. They include shootings at
schools that were stopped before police arrived in such places as
Pearl, Miss., and Edinboro, Pa., and at colleges like the Appalachian
Law School in Virginia. Or attacks in busy downtowns such as Memphis; at
a mall in Salt Lake City, or at an apartment building in Oklahoma.”

 The NRA‘s Wayne LaPierre said Friday: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away?
… The National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of
qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired
military…We can deploy them to protect our kids now.“

Those who recoil at the prospect of armed
guards in schools, and who think banning all guns will solve the
problem, should remember that on the same day as the Newtown massacre, a knife-wielding madman slashed 22 kids at an elementary school in China. I guess we’ll have to ban all knives, too.

Also, anti-gun hysteria is ignoring key distinctions. After the theatre shootings in Colorado last summer, Obama said: “AK-47s
belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.”
However, the killer didn’t use an AK-47; he used an M&P 15. Lott noted:
“The call has frequently been made that there is ‘no reason’ for such
‘military-style weapons’ to be available to civilians. Yes, the M&P
15 and the AK-47 are ‘military-style weapons.’ But the key word is
‘style’ – they are similar to military guns in their aesthetics, not in
the way they actually operate.”

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Gun-control laws simply don’t work. In Obama’s hometown of Chicago, the murder rate is skyrocketing,
despite some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country.
Everywhere guns have been banned, murder rates have gone up – whether
it’s Chicago, D.C., England, Jamaica or Ireland.

What can we do? We need laws that require
treatment and supervision of the dangerously mentally ill, so that
violent and unstable people aren’t roaming around unsupervised as they
are. We need to repeal sections of the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act that – as unbelievable as it sounds –
actually prevent doctors from telling parents of mentally ill children
the truth about their condition. We need to make sure that hospitals
aren’t releasing mentally ill patients solely for reasons of expense.

Read the rest.