No good solution to mindless killing

Published 1:38 am Saturday, December 5, 2015

This recent shooting in San Bernardino is horrific, as have been several other shootings over the past several years, including those on other continents.

Pundits at national news agencies have cried “how could they have had that much ammo? and “How could they have such weapons?” Well, you could simply go to Sam Walton’s store in town or go to the Internet and get these weapons and ammo. The only pundit that has even made any sense is the one who said (about Paris and San Bernardino) “How is it that they could not have killed more people?” Seriously, as a former expert marksman trained at Marine Corps Camp Pendleton, and humped 300 rounds of pistol and rifle ammo across its hills, I wonder how is it that these ruthless perpetrators not been trained or able to kill more? They apparently had motive, opportunity, and means, yet they were unable to carry out the means very well. I guess they were not well trained.

As would be expected, the immediate cry from POTUS and the donkey party in all of this media coverage is to institute more gun control. It sounds simple. But so many firearms have flooded the U.S. market that even an immediate halt in all sales of firearms would be futile. Any reputable count of the available firearms in the USA would show that there is at least one firearm in circulation per every man, woman, and child; perhaps even a half a billion total. Other than Orwellian or Gestapo methods, there is no conceivable way to confiscate guns or ammo that are currently in circulation.

I think that in all of these mindless, evil shootings of innocents, would the result not have been better had some trained civilian in close proximity of these incidents had a gun? Or I would take this question further: Wouldn’t the result have been better, or been a non-issue, if the ruthless perps had thought that a trained person with a firearm could have been in close proximity, and therefore, they would not have undertaken the attack in the first place?

 

Walter Boyd, III

Andalusia, Alabama