Even gun-control advocates are admitting that if it hadn’t been for the actions of Jack Wilson, there would be more people killed by gunman Keith Kinnunen in the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas.
Kinnunen, who had a history of mental problems, entered the church with a concealed weapon, which he pulled out during church services. Within seconds, he killed two people, Deacon Anton Wallace, 64, and Richard White, 67.
At that point, he was shot dead by Wilson, a firearms instructor who was carrying a concealed weapon.
As I have repeatedly written in the past, mass murderers ordinarily go where they have the best chance of inflicting the most deaths. That would be gun-free places. For example, in my June 18, 2015, article, “Repeat after Me: Gun Control Doesn’t Work,” I wrote:
In South Carolina, it’s illegal to carry a gun into church. Even people with concealed-carry permits are prohibited from doing so without the express permission of the church. How many people with concealed carry permits are going to go to the trouble of asking for that permission?
Ask yourself: what goes through the mind of a mass murderer, especially if he’s hoping to get away without getting shot, as the South Carolina killer did? Is he likely to pick a place where people can be armed or do you think he is he more likely to pick a gun-free zone, one where the law prohibits people from being armed?
To me, that’s a no-brainer. Have you ever heard of a mass murderer attacking people at a gun show? No, mass murderers are much more likely to go after people in schools and churches, where they can safely assume that the people they are targeting are unarmed and, therefore, unable to defend themselves from the onslaught.
Texans obviously understood the logic of that argument because they amended their concealed-carry law to permit people to carry concealed weapons into church. That’s what saved many more people from being killed at that church in White Settlement.
Of course, the gun-control crowd is saying that if Texas had strict gun-control laws in the first place, the killer would not have been able to kill anyone in that church in White Settlement. But as I have repeatedly written in the past, that’s a ridiculously fallacious argument. For example, in my August 7, 2012, article “More Gun Control Nonsense after Wisconsin,” I wrote:
Why would the killer care that the law made it illegal for him to carry a gun into church? Was he really going to say to himself, “I’m going to go kill those people but I have to figure out a way to do it without a gun because it’s illegal for me to carry a gun into church?”….
So, why would it be better to make it illegal to carry guns into churches? All that they are doing with such a law is disarming peaceful, law-abiding people who might choose to have a gun to defend themselves from killers who aren’t going to obey the law anyway. That doesn’t necessarily mean people will exercise the right to defend themselves. It simply means that the right is available to be exercised.
The fact is that when a mass murderer wants to get a gun to kill people, it is a virtual certainly that he’s going to be able to get one. All that a gun-control law does is prevent his would-be victims from defending themselves. Texans did the right thing by amending their law to permit people to conceal-carry in churches, and today there are more innocent people than there would have otherwise been, as even gun-control advocates are acknowledging.
Unfortunately, there is one common error among gun-control advocates that needs to corrected time and time again. In an article in USA Today, Elvia Diaz, editorial columnist for the Arizona Republic, where the article first appeared, Diaz writes: “The Second Amendment gives Americans the right to bear arms.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Second Amendment does not give people the right to bear arms, any more than the First Amendment gives people the right to free speech. Those two amendments prohibit the federal government from infringing on people’s rights. The right to keep and bear arms, like the right of free speech, is a natural, God-given right that preexists government. Thus, people would possess these rights even if the Bill of Rights and the Constitution had never been enacted.
The real issue though is the massive violence in American society. Is it because there are too many guns or because buying guns is fairly easy to do? If that’s the case, then why aren’t there the same types of mass killings in Switzerland, where gun ownership is widespread?
As I have repeatedly written in the past, my thesis is that the massive violence in the United States is because of the culture of violence that the U.S. government has brought about, both here in this country as well as in foreign countries.
Overseas, the U.S. government has become a veritable killing machine. For decades, the U.S. government has been killing people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. We don’t know the exact number of people killed but the total has to be at least in the hundreds of thousands.That includes deaths from sanctions, invasions, occupations, shootings, assassinations, and bombings, including bombings of wedding parties. On top of all those killings is the massive destruction of people’s homes and businesses.
It’s important to keep something in mind: None of those people who have been killed or had their homes or businesses destroyed in foreign countries were in the process of invading and trying to conquer the United States. Even the several terrorists attacks, such as the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa, the 9/11 attacks, the Fort Hood shootings, and others were retaliation for U.S. killings abroad rather than an attempt to invade and conquer the United States.
The notion has always been that if the U.S. government could keep its death machine operating over there, with minimal casualties of U.S. troops, it would have no effect on life here at home, especially if the mainstream press played along by not publicizing the deaths of foreigners or publishing photographs of their bodies. The idea is that the American people could go on with their regular jobs, sporting events, vacations, and pastimes, while the U.S. government was wreaking untold death and destruction overseas.
That’s impossible. Over time, the massive deaths and destruction being wreaked by the U.S. death machine over there has to ultimately seep into American society. My thesis is that the irrational mass killings here at home are subconscious copycat killings by people here who are a bit off-kilter mentally.
After all, off-kilter people exist everyone, including Switzerland. Why aren’t off-kilter people engaged in those types of irrational killings in that country? When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, there were off-kilter people in my hometown. Everyone knew that they were off-kilter just by the way they acted. But they never killed anyone.
Second is the violence of the drug war, which is one of the federal government’s most failed, deadly, destructive, immoral, and racially bigoted government programs in U.S. history. That’s what has brought into existence the drug cartels, drug gangs, and drug lords, along with the violence that comes with them. The drug war has also produced violence among drug users, who engaged in robbery, muggings, thefts, and burglaries to acquire the money to pay the exorbitant black-market prices for drugs.
How can this culture of mass violence, both foreign and domestic, produced by the federal government not have an effect on American society? Violence begets violence.
Rather than going down the gun-control road, which would make Americans prey to both mass murderers and tyrants, there is a better way: Let’s bring all the troops home from everywhere and discharge them, and let’s legalize drugs, all of them. That would cause the level of violence in American society to plummet, which would mean that the gun-control crowd will lose its principal rationale for gun control.