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Interesting editorial
In the Naples Daily News.
"Most of us would be safer and air travel would be somewhat smoother if we the people form our own well-ordered militia aboard airliners.
Why stop at airliners? Current gun control laws haven’t done much to prevent nut cases from walking into a school or office and opening fire on whoever happens to be there. Every now and then a person usually described in the news as “disgruntled” blasts away at his fellow workers. Postal employees seem particularly prone to this. Frankly, I’ve wondered for years why some disgruntled writer doesn’t spray the offices of a New York publishing house with bullets.
Be that as it may, gun control advocates have not been very successful at controlling the wackos who kill people with guns. And those who oppose gun control point out — correctly, I’m afraid — that when guns are illegal only the crooks will be armed. It seems quite true that if the students or faculty of Virginia Tech had been able to shoot back at their attacker, many lives would have been saved.
You see where this is leading. Instead of trying to restrict ownership of guns, we should make it a requirement that every adult citizen owns a gun and takes regular lessons in how to use it. Those lessons would include instructions on gun safety, so that children won’t have access to loaded weapons."
Hat tip to Dan Gifford...
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I have long thought the answer to airline security would be something closer to handing out military knives as you board the plane than making sure everyone was given plastic cutlery. Maybe handing out firearms would be a little extreme but...
Way back in the 70's I advocated and still do issuing a firearm with every boarding pass at the option of the passenger. Said firearm to be turned in at the destination.
Go back and see how many hijacked airliners would not have been hijacked and how many lives would still be among us.
I hope this is not too metaphorical to make sense. The current security system at airports (and to a lesser extent, schools, is a sort of hard-shell approach to safety. A system of armed citizens carrying concealed would be a sort of immune-system approach to safety. In the novel, Andromeda Strain, there was a drug that would wipe out any bacterium/virus in the body but would also wipe out the immune system. After the drug is administered, the patient dies of weird, previously unknown diseases. The current gun laws for airliners, schools and many other places apply a sort of hard shell, Andromeda Strain approach to the hazard of crime. The area is sterile of weapons, but any bad agent that manages to get a weapon in has free run. The real answer to security is to have the white cells (armed citizens) as close to the potential infections as possible, and that means widespread CCW.
That editorial was VERY tongue in cheek, but he did seem to be genuinely admitting the basic fact that gun control is not crime control...or crazy control for that matter. He freely admitted that gun control has been an abysmal failure at attaining the goals it purports to seek.
However, I would point out...and I'm sure you agree...that forcing people to own guns is no less tyrannical than prohibiting same. The right of the people NOT to keep and bear arms is as much of a right as the one TO keep and bear arms.
With that said, however, I would have no problem with mandatory gun safety classes (real ones...where they actually teach safe gun handling and storage practices, not just "don't touch" type "gun safety") in public schools. I just don't think mandatory ownership laws can be reconciled with the concept of freedom. If someone chooses to be defenseless and vulnerable, they are free to do so...as long as they accept the consequences of that choice when the wheels come off.