America is not a sick country, it's just gone stupid in the head.

It was just a matter of time. After the latest school shooting last week - this one done by a teenager who is more and more turning out to be someone suffering from serious mental problems -  the gun control parrots come out of the woodwork decrying the existence of firearms and blaming them for such insane tragedies as this.

Make no mistake; while there are some bleeding hearts out there who misguidedly think they really can create a perfect world, most of these gun control advocates are all about the control. The guns just happen to be the vehicle by which they're attempting to get more control. Control over you, over me and over everyone else...well, everyone else except those in power.

To this inane and predictable hysteria I want to point out 3 things; firstly, why do you think the founding fathers put the citizens' right to bear arms second only to their right to freedom of speech and religion? Because they knew that history was then - and is now - full of examples of how populations disarmed by their government were soon victimized, terrorized and oppressed by their own governments. Why? Because any such governments were now absolutely and completely empowered over their citizenry were doomed to the prophecy that "absolute power corrupts." And hence despotism and tyranny and oppression were soon to follow the disarming of the people.

My second point is that by "disarming" the people of its moral code which the liberal left has steadily been doing more and more ever since they got prayer banned in schools. First it was prayer, then it was ability to pass out bibles on campus, then it was banning manger scenes in the town square at Christmas, and the latest is there can't be even a tablet of the 10 Commandments depicted in a public building. (Never mind that the 10 Commandments come from the Pentateuch* which Christians, Jews and Muslims all recognize.)

You remember the 10 Commandments; the list of rules where you find God's rule that "Thou shalt not commit murder?"

But, to have our society admire and display its admiration of such viciously intolerant and hateful rules as the 10 Commandments will lead to just anarchy where we have innocent people killed just walking down the street, sleeping in their beds, working at their jobs or attending school.

Oh, wait....

And thirdly, I'd like to point out how our society has so coddled our youth by providing environments of evaluative criteria of "everyone gets a trophy," pass/fail grading systems, telling them they're great even when they suck at something** and telling them that the whole world - from school curriculum to  their preferred work hours - must adapt and revolve around them in about every way to "engage" or "reach" them just so they'll do their jobs and attempt to be responsible, productive citizens.

So what has all this come to? A larger and larger group of youth that seem to be so coddled and without moral guidance that the first time they encounter something tough that they can't get "adapted" to their "preferred path" of engagement or resolution, their first reaction is to grab a gun and blast up their schoolmates.

And so the anti-gun, pro-Statist ultra-control parrots come out of the word work to blame the gun. The latest is some idiot professor from New York University (are you surprised? Remember they voted for Hilary Clinton for Senator even though she didn't even live there.). Apparently Professor Nouriel Roubini says that America is a "sick, sick country."***

Mind you, the professor doesn't say so because of our skyrocketing divorce rate, the number of teen and unwed mothers that give birth out of wedlock in alarmingly increasing numbers every year, the increasing number of people on some form of government welfare despite our "war on poverty" that was declared by Lyndon Baines Johnson during his presidency in the mid-1960s.

No, this egghead says our country is sick because...wait for it...."a teenager is allowed to receive a rifle as a birthday gift."*** Well, I have got news for you, professor. I - and thousands of other young boys my age - received hunting rifles or shotguns for our birthdays from age 9 or on. And damned very few of us committed anything remotely resembling a crime with them. 

For that matter, there were even a few of them hanging from gun racks in pick up trucks in our high school parking lots yet never - and I mean never! - did any of our fellow students run to their trucks and grab them to settle an argument or fight on the schoolgrounds. Nor did any of us ever have to worry that anyone else would.

An why was that? I purport because 1) we'd been seasoned coming up that we each were not, repeat not the center of the universe and 2) were taught to suffer setbacks and even hard knocks and deal with them in ways that were healthy to a society taught that with the right to have that weapon came immense responsibility for its safe use. 3) We'd also been taught a moral code that emphasized to us that it was an offense to society worthy of our own imprisonment for life (if not our own execution) if we were to harm someone else with the irresponsible/criminal use of that firearm. (And yes; that included the instruction that life was precious and not something to be eliminated before birth, after a certain age to be considered  no longer "productive" or any other time beyond self-defense or war.) And,last but certainly not least, 4) we'd been taught the founding fathers respect for an armed society was born out of need for national defense from external or internal oppression and individual self-defense; things that the rest of the world had suffered and died by the millions for lack of such liberties.

It's pretty widely accepted fact that American "Wild West" of the 1800s had an armed-to-the-teeth society. Author W. Eugene Hollon, in his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, sheds some additional light onpoint with these astonishing facts:

In the Kansas frontier and cattle towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, between 1870 to 1885, there was a grand total of only 45 total homicides in those 15 years. (A rate of approximately 1 homicide per 100,000 residents per year. Unfortunately, the statistic doesn't mention how many of those occurred using non-firearm weapons like knives and clubs.) 

In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870. How can this be in a society in which every cowboy carried a gun both handgun and long gun and every stagecoach carried a long gun or two?

Fast forward over a hundred years to 2007; taking a fast glance at Uniform Crime Report statistics shows the following regarding the strict gun control “paradises” of the eastern seaboard of the US:

DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 496 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 282 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
San Antonio - 122 Murders (9.3 per 100,000 residents)****

Thus, it doesn’t take a PhD in probability and statistics to see that were we to return to “wild west” levels of violent crime in these cities, it would be a huge improvement and reduction in crime for their residents.

That having been said, I say to professor Roubini and all other such opportunists who want to treat the symptoms of the roots of social decay and rot by seizing all the control they can by eliminating the power of self-defense and responsible gun ownership from the law-abiding citizenry, it ain't the gun or its availability that's the problem. It's the infatuation with a out-of-control soft-tyranny and the misguided belief in a utopia made possible by more and more control in the hands of government wrapped around the throats of individual citizens as their Constitutionally- provided liberties are wrenched from them. 

And it's people like Professor Roubini that are systematically choking the life from our once-great country. 


*The Pentateuch is the collection of the first five books of the Old Testament.Wikipedia (26 October, 2014)
**Millenials, Retrieved 27 October, 2014 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
***Ro, S. (24 October, 2014) Business Insider, Roubini: America is a sick, sick, country. Retrieved 27 October, 2014 from http://www.businessinsider.com/roubini-america-is-a-sick-sick-country-2014-10
****csmkersh, (25 Nov, 2009)  comment made in the forum Death Toll in the Old West from firearms vs the unarmed East posted on Gun Rights Media in Support of All Civil Rights, Retrieved 27 October, 2014 from http://www.gunrightsmedia.com/showthread.php?414309-Death-Toll-in-the-Old-West-from-firearms-vs-the-unarmed-East