Marine reservist Andrew Tahmooressi [was] imprisoned under Mexico’s gun laws which are
some of the strictest in the world
writes
Benny Huang.
It is essentially illegal for a
civilian to possess a gun outside of his home. According to the website
of the US consulate, an American who enters Mexico in possession of a
firearm can receive thirty years in prison.
I wouldn’t mention this if it weren’t for liberals’ incessant
prattling about other countries’ “sensible gun laws.” They like to
compare gun death statistics from the United States to Japan, Australia,
or some other country that severely restricts gun ownership and then
draw the facile conclusion that the decisive factor is our laws. Let’s
just ignore that pesky Second Amendment and there will never be another
murderous rampage, or so goes the argument.
Yet Mexico, our southern neighbor, is never their shining example. Peculiar. With such a great case study in the benefits of
gun control so close to home, why do they always reach to distant Japan to make their case?
Probably because northern Mexico is a warzone where lawmen are
routinely gunned down and people have a strange habit of being separated
from their heads. The cartels still pack heat but ordinary Mexicans do
not because they want to stay on the right side of the law.
It would be just as easy to select two counterexamples to demonstrate that
gun rights
result in safer societies. Gun ownership is a right enshrined in law in
Switzerland and a responsibility in Israel. Both have well-armed
populaces and lower rates of gun deaths than the US or Mexico. See how
easy it is to cherrypick an example to illustrate a point?
… There’s no doubt that there’s something seriously out of whack about a
society that produces two or three spree-shootings a year. We’ve had so
many now I’m losing track. Who will even remember the DC Navy Yard
shooter in a few years? How about the guy who shot up the Sikh temple?
These days we only remember the biggees—Newtown, Columbine, Virginia
Tech, Aurora.
It wasn’t always this way. Something changed and it wasn’t our laws
or our “access” to firearms. The second amendment has been the law of
the land since 1791. Firearms have been with us since the Renaissance.
Automatic and semiautomatic weapons were both invented in the nineteenth
century.
At the risk of sounding corny, I must positively assert that the
change has been within us. We’re suffering from a profound sickness of
the soul. That’s the cause of our troubles, not the inanimate objects
that people use to act out their violent fantasies.
Liberals tend to get nervous whenever anyone starts talking about
spiritual illness. It all sounds very preachy to them and they worry
that someone might use the next spree-shooting as an excuse to censor
music lyrics or video games, something I completely oppose.
… Liberals will call it scapegoating if I
cast blame upon the cultural changes that have swept our country since
the mid-1960s, but I must. A few of the lessons that we’ve learned since
that time are that it’s all about me, if it feels good do it, and screw
the man. God was declared dead on the cover of Time magazine
and anyone who warned of eternal consequences was a square. Could those
attitudes be responsible for the mayhem unleashed upon our nation? I say
yes.
… Like the multiplying brooms of Goethe’s
“Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the effects of the empty, nihilistic culture
just keep propagating with no end in sight. Conservatives keep thwacking
away at those multiplying brooms, getting more and more fatigued with
each passing year. No one can deny we’re losing ground.
Guns aren’t our problem. It’s the vacuousness that pervades our
lives. In generations past our societal immune system would have had
some kind of resistance to many of the pathologies that infect us, but
no longer. So we pass laws that we think will treat the symptoms and
often don’t even do that. We can expect more of the same results in
years to come.
