Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Monster spray

I've let this blog go sort of inactive lately, but it's hard to let something as horrific as last week's shootings in Connecticut to go by without comment.

When children are very young, they often harbor a fear of the dark that manifests itself as a fear of monsters under the bed or in the closet. As parents we do our best to assuage these fears, and sometimes play along with those fears with such monster countermeasures as spraying air freshener in the room while explaining to the troubled youngster that it's "monster spray" which keeps monsters out.

This is, in effect, what the anti-gun crowd is doing with all the gun laws they'll be proposing over the coming weeks. What happened last week in Newtown, CT was as awful an event as we're likely to see for some time, and it goes without saying that nobody on either side of the gun debate wants to see anything like that happen again. But while the anti-gun crowd is clamoring for monster spray, the pro-gun side of the debate is begging to do something about the monsters.

But don't take it from me, take it from St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch:
If there’s somebody that’s really hellbent on doing something like this, they’re not going to care what the law is.
Chief Fitch advocates arming school personnel much like many airline pilots are now armed as a last-ditch defense against skyjacking.

Doug Ross points out the futility of gun-free zones in this post, and Gateway Pundit points out that besides gun-free zones, the other thing all these recent cases of mass shootings have in common is undiagnosed (or untreated) mental illness.

But this won't stop politicians from rushing out useless legislation rooted in emotional response and wasting everyone's time and energy on equipping us all with monster spray.

Update: Oh, and by the way...don't count on the media's vast expertise in firearms to correctly frame the debate.