Guns 2

 The New York Times, hardly a right-wing handmaiden of the NRA lobby, published a surprisingly honest story on Obama's plans for gun control, plans that go "beyond mass shootings".  Ah.  So the plan is not limited to ending mass murder, but control of firearms that goes somewhere "beyond"...

Key quotes: 

"The semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza used to shoot 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults complied with Connecticut’s assault weapons ban, the police said, and he did not buy the gun himself." 

and "In 2011, 6,220 people were killed by handguns, and 323 by rifles"

and "Better background checks would have had little effect on several recent mass shootings"  (more)

So in other words, the New York Times concludes that the current slew of gun control efforts would have been ineffective at stopping mass murder. 

Point being this:  Laws will do nothing if people do not obey them. 

However we address gun violence, it cannot be at the expense of the constitutional rights of the law-abiding, curbing self defense rights of the the innocent because of the crimes of a few, particularly when the laws are not effective. 

What is needed to curb the violence is not more laws, but a reawakening of moral principal so that we police ourselves instead of expecting government to create a Utopia.   Maybe it is a spiritual problem and not a government problem.

But that would be sensible.  Our president's policies do not display a sensible approach to the problem of violence.  Daniel Grfeenfield noted this week at Frontpage the blatant inconsistency of Obama's domestic violence policy, which is all about making sure law-abiding citizens do not have access to more and more types of firearms, while at the same time making sure terrorists and drug lords have all kinds of firepower.

Specifically, Egypt, under the control of the Muslim brotherhood is getting Abrams tanks and F-16s from our government.  Writes Greenfield "In addition to giving the Hezbollah-run government of Lebanon two hundred M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, Obama deliberately turned a blind eye while Al Qaeda and other Islamist rebel groups in Libya received arms shipments from Qatar."  Let's not forget the Mexican drug lords armed by the release of weapons in the "Fast and Furious" scandal, which Eric Holder still fights to keep under wraps.

If the weapons are the problem, then it would make sense that the cure to violence in the middle east is less arms, not more.  But that is not the Obama foreign policy, instead he arms those who are most belligerent and violent.  And Obama's domestic policy seems to be to disarm those least prone to violence with laws that will, according to even the New York Times, fail to disarm the most violent.

Perhaps that is why cities that voted overwhelmingly for Obama are the murder capitals of the United States, because policies that disarm the law-abiding populace leave the weapons in the hands of the criminal to commit violent acts with no resistance.  Chicago's sweeping handgun ban has had no effect on a spike in handgun violence.