Killing the 2nd Amendment won't stop the killing

Yesterday President Obama applied his “pen and phone” approach to announce executive actions on gun control since he could not persuade Congress to enact new laws directly. Never mind the many, many gun laws already on the books that either aren’t enforced or are no deterrent to criminals determined to commit crime.

The president feels that asking Congress to provide funding for 200 new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents and 230 new FBI examiners and staff will suddenly do the trick in stopping gun violence.

As he shed crocodile tears in remembrance of Sandy Hook (though he never shed one for Americans beheaded by jihadists) Obama also called for increased government access to mental health care records (I warned about this in one of my recent print columns).

Obama said he will task the Social Security Administration to ensure that “appropriate records” are reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System pertaining not only to people who have been determined to be mentally ill or legally incompetent by a judge, but also to people “who have a documented mental health issue, receive disability benefits, and are unable to manage those benefits because of their mental impairment.”

This means that anyone prescribed anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication could now have “a documented health issue” that could exclude him outright from his 2^nd Amendment rights. Even someone receiving Social Security benefits though a third-party representative could now be deemed “unable to manage those benefits” because of some “mental impairment”.

I don’t see any of these measures deterring gun violence. Instead I see this as a big deterrent for those seeking the care of a mental health practitioner. Under Obama’s reasoning, you now must make the choice of seeking care or possibly giving up your 2nd amendment rights.

The question is, would any of these "executive actions" have prevented even one of the mass shootings we have had in the US in the past eight years? No. How about enforcing some of the hundreds of laws on the books and start putting offenders away? That would be a great change for starters.

A plan to truly make America safer would be to announce an enforcement effort to round up the law breakers and put them away. It would send a message and take the lawbreakers off the streets, thus at least taking a step toward making it safer for all of us.

Instead, Obama is trying to use ineffective bureaucratic processes to solve a problem that cannot be solved by more regulations. Reducing crime needs to start with law enforcement. We have laws right now that would put felons, gang members and others who are in possession of firearms unlawfully in jail for five years. Why do we fail to enforce these laws?

The bureaucrats seem to think that making guns hard to buy or sell will reduce gun crime. No again. That will just make guns more expensive. Illegal drugs are expensive too. Drug users still obtain them. The costs of weapons will have no impact on crime other than to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to afford them as a measure of defense against crime. 

In fact, all the political "feel good" regulations and illegal executive orders in the world won’t change a thing, except take more guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, who then become sitting ducks to the criminals who will still have the guns. It can’t be stressed enough that the shooters in the most recent mass shootings consistently targeted “gun-free zones” over areas where citizens are free to “pack heat”. How many more times does a mass shooting in a gun-free zone have to happen before the light bulb comes on?

The other thing we need to start enforcing besides existing laws is family and cultural values. Some people hate to hear this, but the more we scoff at and reject morals, the more societal decay and violence we see. It’s been happening for decades now.

Maybe appealing to parents, schools and Hollywood to positively shape young minds would be more effective than further eroding the rights of decent citizens to protect themselves from evil-minded murderers.

Reason alone reveals that taking guns away from good people only subjects them to the dangers of bad people. At the very least, let’s apply some good old-fashioned common sense to the issue.