Gun Control and Never Again; My open letter to set this straight (trigger warning)

My dear wife believes that social media is making me too much of a negative person. She may be right. But I have to tell you, I have seen some of the ugliest and foulest things this year than I have seen in many years beforehand. And I’ve seen death up close and personal. It takes a lot to make me think things are more heinous than death. But in my point of view, that’s exactly what this is.

Children. They’re children. At the end of the day, compared to the rest of us who are supposed to be adults, they are children. Not only that, this is about children and their freedom of speech (1^st Amendment) versus the right to bear arms (2^nd Amendment) and how far people are willing to go to silence them.

I have never seen any portion of the Constitution that people are so willing to kill or die for than the right to bear arms. Nothing else matters. Nothing else exists. You would think it’s holier than Jesus Christ himself and the slightest breath that only appears to be a threat to it must be silenced forever. The threat need not be confirmed by any form of actual logic. Imagined is more than enough to set some of you off. You can tell me it isn’t true but you’ll never prove it so long as thousands of internet comments say things like:

“Go kill yourself”

“You’ll pry my gun from my cold dead fingers”

“Come and get my guns, I hope you’re bullet proof”

“When you come for MY guns, you’re dead”

And the real whoppers:

“These kids need to go kill themselves”

“Someone needs to teach them what real guns mean”

“They need to shut up because we are about to not give a shit anymore”

That’s how we react to the concerns of these teens who recently survived ground zero of a massacre. Isn’t it easy to be armchair quarterbacks spouting venom at people who just finished burying a friend. A friend I would add who probably bled all over them. A friend they saw die. Yes, because the 2^nd amendment is the holiest of holy things and it doesn’t matter if you saw a child’s head chopped off and had it tossed in your lap, you have no right to talk about it. Yes, it’s so easy to tell them to shup up about your rights because that’s all that really matters here. Because you didn’t have to be there. You didn’t have to wipe the brains off the wall. How nice for you.

I swear I have never seen any class of people so morbidly desperate to silence any other. Desperate to the point of photoshopping or searching for dirt to discredit. To name calling and threats. It’s these acts of hate that make me want to puke up my heart. I find them that sickening. And that’s for all you smug people out there who have doing exactly these things and making disgusting claims that don’t change a single thing about the fact that children are dead. And all because of one simple thing you don’t understand.

You clearly don’t have the first damn clue about what it actually takes to change an amendment. Allow me to quote the “Constitutional Amendment Process” from the National Archives as follows in paragraph 2:

The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. None of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention. The Congress proposes an amendment in the form of a joint resolution. Since the President does not have a constitutional role in the amendment process, the joint resolution does not go to the White House for signature or approval. The original document is forwarded directly to NARA's Office of the Federal Register (OFR) for processing and publication. The OFR adds legislative history notes to the joint resolution and publishes it in slip law format. The OFR also assembles an information package for the States which includes formal "red-line" copies of the joint resolution, copies of the joint resolution in slip law format, and the statutory procedure for ratification under 1 U.S.C. 106b.

This means you cannot just waltz in to some government building and rewrite the Constitution. Hell, even the President can’t do that. This requires a massive process and vote and guess what; there is no vote active for changing the Second Amendment. None. Zero. Zilch. Let me put that another way:

THERE’S NOTHING THERE!!!

No. The only changes that are possible are state by state restrictions that don’t infringe on the second amendment in any way.

Here’s another tidbit you seem to lose in translation. The right to bear arms says only that you have that right. It does not say what those “arms” have to be. That’s why you aren’t allowed to have a 50 calibur machine gun. That’s why you aren’t allowed to have fully automatic weapons. That’s why the AR15 can be brought under scrutiny and banned if the majority of American’s want it that way. Not having the exact kind of gun you personally want, does not mean your rights have been trod upon. You can still buy a gun, but when people take to altering and abusing one form of gun over all others, it’s going to get scrutinized. The same thing happened back in 1988 when Maryland banned a 22 calibur lovingly called the Saturday Night Special because it had become a number one murder weapon and was deemed too easy to conceal.  The AR15 is the number one abused weapon utilized in mass shootings. That seems important. Losing it will not mean the loss of all your guns, no matter what you think. For that matter, it’s already nearly banned in Florida via a new law just passed.

Finally, one more thing you don’t seem to understand and that’s the definition of the word AMENDMENT. It’s an amendment meaning that it was added or changed after the fact. By it’s very definition it can be legally changed again. If not, there would not be a process to do so. That process would not exist. But it does exist and you are actively pushing people to do everything in their power to pursue it.

While most gun zealots have stomped away from this in seething fury by now, there is still more to say. If you are still here, maybe there’s hope. But I’m not done. Now that I’ve explained the truth of an amendment, I’m going to call out some more of the sick behavior that I’ve seen adults utilize on these kids. I’m talking about the most ridiculous tropes I’ve ever seen.

First of all, if I see one more person compare gun control to abortion I’m going to summon a demon of hell to burn down a gun store. The two have zero to do with each other no matter what bizarre line of imaginary logic you concoct. Someone said Planned Parenthood donated funds to the Never Again movement. That doesn’t make the connection either. Speaking of money. I’m going to point out this doesn’t change the fact that children are dead. If you are a “right to life” person, I would think you could grasp that reality.

No, these people are not paid to march. It doesn’t matter where the money is coming from when the opponents are people like the above. Why doesn’t it matter? Because people are dead and we are sick and tired of them getting dead where they should be safe. So it’s just fine that George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steve Spielberg all matched donations of 500,000 dollars to march for change.

No, these are not crisis actors. This has to be one of the sickest displays of heartlessness yet. Demanding proof of the dead like you and your armchair have that authority in the slightest way. Because these kids and their families should send you personal photos and obits and government or personal records to prove their dead children ever existed just so you feel satisfied that they have the right to grieve or utilize their own Constitutional rights. That isn’t just wrong, it’s horribly immoral. It’s sick and sickening. It’s a plague on morality and human decency. Some of these conspiracy theorists have gone so far as to track down families who claimed dead in mass shootings to harass and accuse them. How full of yourself do you have to be in order to do this?

Actual comment from someone on Facebook: “ It’s very easy to manipulate kids, because they don’t have all of the true stats and facts about gun deaths, gun ownership and crime. “   Like I pointed out above, apparently watching your best friends brains get spattered on the wall just isn’t enough of a qualification for you to care about any of it. Apparently you need to satisfy people like this with some sort of special test before you speak out against the atrocity you barely survived.

These are the things that are forcing me to pick a camp some of you won’t like. Because no matter how many times I say I’m not after the 2^nd amendment and there are no current actions against the 2^nd amendment, you gun zealots absolutely can not stay in that reality. Yes. You are forcing my hand to stand against you because I value protecting the lives out our children over a bang bang paper weight and the ability to wield it with abandon. What have we done to ourselves that we value any such thing over the lives of our children. What have we become?

Everything wrong with "more guns in schools".

Every time there's a school shooting that hits the front pages of the media, this national social media explosion happens. Gun supporters go nuts and yell, "throw more guns at it" and frankly, that just isn't the answer. Before you jump on my post and start berating me about how guns save lives and I'm just so wrong because I don't think exactly like you, there are couple things you better consider:

1: I am not against your right to own a gun. I don't want to take your guns away. So just don't go there with me.

2: Read everything before you comment anywhere (whether it be my facebook page or right here). If you are going to react or heaven help me, get triggered, you could do that much. But if it looks like all you read was the title and you just want to dismiss every point I make, then don't bother. Knee jerk reactions help even less than the idea that guns solve all problems. They don't.

I've read a lot of ideas about protecting schools too and most people make these suggestions without taking a few important issues into consideration. Things like actual demographics, locations of schools, what kind of neighborhoods the schools are in, and frankly if the school is a troubled one or not. You can't just throw guns in all schools and expect to change things. I am in particularly going to address the idea that we should now arm all teachers. Now the response I keep getting sidesteps my points.

"I'm perfectly okay with a teacher being armed if they want to be."

I'm not talking about "if they want to be". So don't go there. And before you say this isn't an idea that's out there, you should look at this LINK. This teacher seems to think someone expects her to carry a gun. Now why would she think that? And she isn't alone.. LINK.

President Trump said, and I quote: "An armed teacher woulda shot the hell outta the Parkland shooter."

Really? How does anyone know this? What scale of evidence is there that some random teacher would have shot the hell out of anyone? There are no supportive facts here. It's a knee jerk reaction and a fantasy. It's the land of IF. IF, IF, IF.  It's also the land of ASSUMPTION. Let's just assume any random armed teacher would have stopped the shooter cold. But that isn't what happened. The statement also ignores practically every single detail of how the shooting happened.

Guns do not make people magically pop up in the right place at the right time. Please reread that until it sinks in. If they did there would be no more crime in out country at all. And this is literally the assumption people make when they say, "just put more guns in there".  Guns are not magic talismans so stop acting like they are.

If you aren't willing to foot the bill for what teachers actually need in their classrooms, how can you justify arming them all?  I have literally seen people argue that they are okay with paying taxes to support guns  in schools but not for smaller class sizes or actual educational material. We have schools in poor neighborhoods in need of repairs and services but the response of the taxpayer has been.... "Nuh uh! Not my taxes! I won't pay for that!" But then they turn around and go, "Oh wait? Guns? Yeah I'll pay for guns!" School lunches for kids? Let em starve if they can't pay their own way! But let's put guns in schools, that's a great fix.

Do you understand what arming teachers costs? No? Are you willing to give that teacher a pay raise along with the training needed to carry a gun? No? Are you willing to pay the difference in insurance costs to the schools? There is another class of thought that teacher's should be armed but at their own expense. Well, they are sure used to that since they are expected to do their jobs and buy educational materials at their own expense. To which I call bullshit. If you are going to sit there and say that teachers should be armed, you better damn well be willing to pay for it. Same goes for claiming we should have armed guards in schools, or concertina fences. You want to pay into your taxes for it? No? Then shut up.

It's literally not the teachers job to play security guard! No teacher signs up for their job thinking they get to become paramilitary. That is not their job. I even posted a link above from a teacher who explains the same thing. Teachers are not security guards, or police, or soldiers. They are teachers. In our country we barely pay police enough to carry a gun and God knows we take a massive crap on our veterans when they come home, so lets move on to teachers. If you absolutely must have armed people in any of our schools, you better make sure they are qualified and paid appropriately. Give the job to the proper profession. Would you have an auto mechanic do heart surgery? That's what you're asking teachers to do when you expect them to carry a gun. Amazingly, people still argue with me on this.

Armed security has it's own risks that are ignored.  I've mentioned the insurance rates (yes they exist and you pay for them in your taxes). Hiring the right profession would still cost less than arming teachers in 98,817 schools (that's how may US public schools there are). Thing is, accidents happen. As soon as one does, that security guard will be villainized and the whole debate gets turned on its ear. Having a gun and even the proper training does not make a person a super human or infallible. Gun supporters keep acting like it does. Even having armed security does not guarantee there won't be a shooting. Before you jump on me and yell "YOUR WRONG, IT ABSOLUTELY DOES BECAUSE SHOOTERS WON'T GO TO A POLICE DEPARTMENT!"  I would point out that a certain Las Vegas hotel had armed security  and that shooting still happened and with a historical death record. Why?

These shooters don't care what they are up against. If you take the time to compare all the mass shooters we've had in the news you may notice something. Just about every single one of them has zero regard for what they are up against. All of them know that they are going to face law enforcement at some point. 99% of them planned to die ahead of time. Pres. Trump and others call them cowards but that's not what they should take into consideration. The important factor is that they are suicidal and want to take as many people with them as they can. Not one mass shooter has ever cared if there were guns on the premises they went to shoot up. Again I cite Las Vegas, but it sure wouldn't be hard to cite more. Many schools have police who visit regularly and you can't plan for when they will be there. These shooters do not care. The sooner we can understand that, the sooner we can move on to how to stop them effectively.  I'll repeat, shooters don't care if people have guns where they plan to shoot.

Troubled schools don't need teachers with guns. We have a lot of troubled schools in our country and taxpayers who fight tooth and nail to do absolutely nothing to make them any better. All it will take is one kid getting his hand on a gun that's already there for another shooting to take place. "Well if it's secured, blah blah blah." Stop making assumptions! It's a school, not a bank vault. And a troubled school cannot secure a bunch of guns. It can't even secure it's students, control gang issues, get proper educational material, stem bullying or other violence, and you think they can secure guns?

There is even more to point out but I can tell you that this covers a lot of it. I know people will still shout about how wrong I am, but that's on them. If we can't figure out that it will take more than just throwing guns at the problem, we are doomed to keep having the same problems. It's as simple as that.