Disspelling the Myth of Gun Control Laws

With the events this past weekend in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where 12 people were killed and 58 injured by a gunman, the renewed controversy of restricting private citizen's rights to keep and bear arms has been raised by many Democratic leaders.  So does restricting the possession, sale or transferring of firearms or ammo actually work?

The city of Chicago, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, has the toughest gun laws in the country with an all out ban on the possession, sale and transfer of handguns, as well as limiting the size of the magazines and restricting certain types of ammunition.  They have had aggressive buy-back programs that offer a $100 gift card for every firearm turned in to the Chicago Police Department and $10 for toy guns or replica firearms.

One would believe that Chicago should be one of the safest metropolitan cities, yet according to the Chicago Police Department, 2012 has seen 272 murders to date.  That is more than the total number of U.S. servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan in 2012 to date. 

This weekend alone, there were 35 murders in Chicago.  That is one shy of three times the number killed in Aurora, Colorado.  Three times!!!  This is in a city that every handgun is illegal.  Since 2008, 530 children under the age of 21, have been killed in Chicago.  Yet they have, along with Illinois state laws, the strictest gun laws in the country.

The Constitution''s Second Amendment guarantees the right of the individual to keep and bear arms, but not in Chicago, Illinois.  And they are paying the price.  Why?  Because the government authorities in the city of Chicago and the State of Illinois systematically disarmed the law-abiding citizenry.

You see, the person that wants to kill someone, doesn't care about the law.  The laws clearly state that you can't intentionally kill another person.  They don't follow that law either.  And then there is the circumstances of the psychotic killer.  These people have no regard for human life, let alone gun laws.

90 seconds passed from the first to last shot.  While the police response time was admirable, it was time enough to take 12 innocent lives, and injure 58 others.  Liberals say that if private citizens would have been able to carry their guns into the theater, filled with tear gas and chaos, they could have caused more deaths and created more chaos.  Wouldn't the same be true with armed police officers in the same conditions?

The liberals also claim that it wouldn't have done any good anyway as the gunman had body armor on.  Not true.  He had on a Kevlar bulletproof vest.  This man didn't want to die.  Maybe confronted with death, he would have stopped.  Maybe his arm or legs could have been shot dislodging the weapon.  And Kevlar can be penetrated by a .45ACM handgun or 9mm, the preferred choice of conceal carry.

One thing we do know for sure.  That left unchecked and undetoured, he killed 12 human beings and hurt another 58.  And we know that one way or another, he would have obtained the weapontry he needed to carry out his attack.

And given the statistics in Chicago, we also know that violence perpetrated by guns will be carried out in higher numbers when the killer knows that he will face little resistance.

There are no guarantees that there would have been less carnage if someone was carrying a fire arm in that theater, but we will never know.