Understanding crime and criminals is the basic element in being able to promote public safety. But I’m going to say there’s an even more basic step that needs to be mastered, understanding who the criminal is.
Witness the State of California and the latest legislative session in Sacramento, California as evidence. Under the pretense of pubic safety, the administration passed sweeping, draconian gun control legislation against whom? Law-abiding citizens. The ONE firearm related bill that made it to the Governor’s desk that would have actually targeted criminals, the people who break the laws, was vetoed.
But then, California has a history of coddling its criminals at the expense of the law-abiding citizenry. The adverse effects of Proposition 47, which reclassified many crimes as misdemeanors, put more criminals back on the streets and increased the crime rate in every city and town in the state, is well documented. Nationwide we’re told it’s now discriminatory to call people criminals or convicts. The new politically correct term for them is “justice involved individuals”. Why hold people responsible for their own illegal actions when it’s possible to blame the law-abiding for discriminating against them.
Keep in mind the anti-gun zealots have bought into the theory of “everyone is a law abiding citizen, until they’re not”. Since the law-abiding own deadly weapons of war, death and destruction, it’s only a matter of time before each of them will go off on a killing spree of their own. Since we don’t have a Minority Report inspired PreCrime Department to arrest people before they commit their crimes, it’s far more efficient to just to go after all gun owners. Everyone should lose his or her rights because someday, somewhere, someone is going to break the law – maybe, or maybe not.
The problem with this logic is that everyone is being punished for something they did not and never will do. The vast, Vast, VAST majority of legal firearm owners will never commit a crime, to say nothing of committing a crime with their firearms. Add to this the estimated one to two million lawful defensive uses of firearms – outnumbering felonious uses by 30 to 80 to one, by law-abiding citizens in the United States each year. According to the gun banners, these incidents never occur and the Good Guy With A Gun is merely a piece of gun lobby fiction. To this I reply: Read the news for yourself.
To make the public “safe”, our politicians are pointing to law-abiding citizens and lawfully owned firearms and saying: This is the problem; this is why you can’t feel safe in your home, your office or on the street. Your friend, your neighbor, your store clerk, your doctor, your bus driver, your lawyer, your programmer and your family – the people who bought their firearms lawfully, own them lawfully and use them lawfully – these are the people to blame. So our politicians make laws that turn these otherwise law-abiding people into criminals and take away their firearms. Then and only then will you be safe.
Of course, banning firearms is only going to remove the firearms from the people who legally own them. The criminals, the ones who illegally own them, are not going to line up to drop off their newly banned guns, the guns they already are banned from owning in the first place.
It’s time for California to wake up and smell some reality. Instead of coming up with laws that target the law-abiding, target the people who are committing the crimes. If you commit a crime, you should be punished. Yes, it really is that simple.
Instead we coddle our “justice involved individuals”, we reduce and eliminate penalties for committing crimes and we tell the rest of the nation that we shouldn’t hold people who commit crimes responsible for their own actions, now or any time in the future. In a nation where there are no consequences for breaking the law, who is going to bother to follow it?
How exactly is this promoting public safety?
Bob
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