The Orlando Sentinel, which is my region’s version of a big-city newspaper, has a columnist named Mike Thomas who ran a very interesting piece the other day. Thomas, for the most part a liberal, revealed a crisis of conscience he’s been having lately with regard to his long-standing belief in gun control.
One thing I’ve always liked about Mike Thomas is that he’s not one of those illogical ideologues who find the liberal stance on every position, embrace it, and then concoct the arguments to support the end result at which he initially arrived (to be honest, I don’t like it when conservatives are guilty of that behavior, either). While I don’t always agree with his stance on things (he writes on a wide variety of topics, some of which are relevant to national events and others that are more locally-based), I’ve never finished reading one of his columns without thinking that he has at least a grain of a point in whatever perspective he’s presenting that day.
In the particular column to which I’m referencing, he had much more than just a grain of a point. Mr. Thomas addressed the problem with gun control in a Central Florida that has become terribly violent in recent years. In a nutshell, he admitted that gun control laws do nothing more than make life tougher on the law-abiding citizen, and that the ultimate answer to individual safety in an increasingly lawless society is for each person to have ready access to a firearm.
I couldn’t agree more. I have lived in our society long enough to know that social experiments in gun control (Washington, DC is the shining example here) are downright dangerous to the average citizen who wishes to do no more than sleep peaceably in his own bed each night, or visit an ATM or gas station after sundown without fearing he will be killed.
Have we not been exposed to the failures of gun control long enough? I daresay that the answer may well be to not only shelve gun control, but actually encourage (horrors!) responsible gun ownership among the populace. After all, we assume that all the bad guys have the guns when they commit a crime; should we, the good guys, not instill the same expectation within them?
James L. Paris
Agree or disagree, click on comments below.
My main website is www.christianmoney.com
Comments