After the latest killings by an assault weapon in Tucson, one would think gun sales would go down. Nope. Just as in the case after the Virginia Tech massacre, they went up. Forget logic. Apply the knee-jerk emotion of fear. Fear drives the weapons purchase, and only afterwards does the person come up with a justification for the action. It’s hard for people to admit that they have been ruled by the brain’s limbic system. Therefore, it is almost impossible to have a rational conversation about gun control, and…the epidemic of deaths by all kinds of guns continues in the United States. Bob Herbert of the New York Times in an Op-Ed yesterday takes on the political environment that has allowed over a million gun deaths since Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Read the couple of paragraphs from his column reprinted below and tell me it's not ludicrous for us to walk around as an armed nation.
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We’ve allowed the extremists to carry the day when it comes to guns in the United States, and it’s the dead and the wounded and their families who have had to pay the awful price. The idea of having large numbers of college students packing heat in their classrooms and at their parties and sporting events, or at the local pub or frat house or gymnasium, or wherever, is too stupid for words…. The slaughter of college students — or anyone else — has never served as a deterrent to the gun fetishists. They want guns on campuses, in bars and taverns and churches, in parks and in the workplace, in cars and in the home. Ammunition everywhere — the deadlier, the better. A couple of years ago, a state legislator in Arizona, Karen Johnson, argued that adults needed to be able to carry guns in all schools, from elementary on up. “I feel like our kindergartners are sitting there like sitting ducks,” she said.
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