After the horrific shooting in Tucson, the country has to reflect on our laws about personal weapons and license to carry. Whether or not you agree with bearing arms for personal protection or not, it is the Second Amendment of out countries Constitution. Of coarse in a perfect world weapons would not exist but this is not a Utopia. At this point, even if the government created a law against owning personal arms all together, there will always be a black market for fire arms. A lot of crimes committed with fire arms are with illegal fire arms, not always by those who do it the right way, with a license to carry. Fire arms and right to bear arms is not going to go away. The question is not how to make guns go away but how can we regulate and keep them out of the hands of the criminals and lessen the black market of illegal weapons. There are a million ways and opinions to think about.... WHAT DO YOU THINK? WHAT IS YOUR OPINION? I love to hear what everyone thinks!
I've done alot of thinking about this since January ... I'm going to say the following without politics in mind because it's really irrelevant to what's really going on here.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that struck me is that i see the Giffords shooting kinda bookended between the healthcare debate last March and the WI CBA protests this year.
I remember Pelosi and company walking through a crowd of people that were decidedly unhappy with them but were not excessively belligerent (yeah I know there are stories about racial slurs and the such, but if Pelosi and her group really were in any fear of physical harm, there would have either been a heavier security presence or they could have skipped the show and taken the underground tunnels connecting the Capital to most Congressional offices).
Meanwhile in Wisconsin, the protests were never really considered belligerent, yet it was suggested that the Repubs did what they did at the end in part because of security concerns of what could happen if a full 24 hour notice was given and protesters had that kind of time to mobilize.
I'm not trying to compare apples and oranges here or critique the situations, but it brings me back to the Giffords shooting.
Rep Giffords knew and understood that her district and AZ in general have pretty lax gun laws and that gun ownership is correspondingly far higher there ... yet, by everything I read she had pretty light security in place for that event.
My point with all that is, there's no magic formula for security; just educated guesses and experience. Look at 9/11. Before that day, guys who hijack planes didn't arm themselves with only box cutters. Hijackers didn't crash planes into buildings. Everybody on the planes that collided with the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did exactly what were taught: stay calm, don't cause trouble, the plane would land and a ransom of some sort would be negotiated.
The only difference between them and the flight over Pennsylvania is that on that flight the passengers got a chance to put two and two together and do something. And that's the thing here; sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but the only way you can do this ultimately is to navigate what people could do and what you belive they will do.