IGNORING WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY

From my 80+ year old (and very wise) father-in-law. He nails it. It's not the gun.

We are supposed to learn from history, but we do not even learn from recent history. In the 30s we saw half the children living on farms and ranches with parents that fed the other half of the country. We all had guns almost since we can remember. My first rifle was waiting for me in Dad’s closet for my 11^th birthday. It was a hand-me-down .22 caliber single-shot which was shorter than my height at the time. I was a locally well-known marksman; could knock a squirrel out of a tree at near 50 yards.

We hunted jack rabbits at night on big ranches from the back seat of a Model A Ford (with the top down). Very few girls bothered with guns, but a few had them. Had my first BB gun at age 9, It was a Daisy model; they came out just before the Red Rider models. I could use Dad’s db. bbl. 12-gauge shotgun for bird hunting with the guys.

We never dreamed of using these arms against humans. Nowadays, people have conniption fits if they see a boy of 15 with a BB gun, once a natural American sight (and at younger ages). Any teenager could go into a hardware store and buy any gun or ammunition, no questions asked. With a note from my Dad, I could buy dynamite (we dug wells and post holes by hand using dynamite for the rock). If you could bear it (carry it) you could buy it. There was no legal age limit.

We never knew school shootings, although several of the guys had rifles or shotguns hanging in their vehicles (parked just off campus) when I was in high school (some guys had old cars or pickups their dads got for them). Guns were not only plentiful; they were a natural part of life - especially for us guys living out of the city limits.

This is how we know with absolute certainty that the availability of guns has nothing to do with their present misuse by certain individuals. We know that the shrill demands of emotional children and their emotional parents are from misled fallible human brains as to the cause of school shootings. If we ask ourselves about the differences between the culture of the 30s and today’s, we have the cause of contemporary gun misuse in an instant.

Further, the FBI statistics on today's banned rifles and all other kind of rifles as being 368 out of 17,250 homicides. Banning rifles of all/any kind will have almost zero effect on the murder rate with guns. Calls for more restrictive gun ownership are part of a larger strategy to outlaw gun ownership. This would leave private gun ownership strictly in the hands of outlaws.

Discarding with dead certainty that gun availability can be blamed for either school shootings or mass shootings; can be blamed for most of homicide with guns; we are faced with what gun haters are avoiding: School shootings are a part of and reflect the declining moral values of our culture. The definition of progressive liberalism is: The degeneration of a culture through the legitimization and/or the normalization of deviate behavior.

All around us and in the media is reflected: disrespect for those in authority; disrespect for accountability (in ourselves and others) for anti-social behavior; gutter vocabulary language, even in the media and from our youth; the anti-religious activities toward Christianity (source of peace) which reinforced morality and an acceptance of Islam (source of violence); disrespect of creditors (failing to pay debts); tolerating theft by government which forcibly uses one American for the purposes of less worthy Americans (legalized theft) and which accounts for about three quarters of government spending that will eventually lead to total poverty/bankruptcy through the eventual devaluation (collapse) of the Dollar. Defending our children will cost more than a bundle.

JIM N. TAYLOR