In View of the Texas Mass Murder, Should the NRA's Convention in Houston Be Cancelled?

In the The Epoch Times, Frank Fang reports that

Donald Trump said he will still deliver his scheduled speech at the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual meeting in Houston on May 27, following the deadly school shooting in Uvalde that killed 19 students and two teachers.

In the wake of the Uvalde incident, the question has arisen: should the NRA event be outright cancelled? 

All over the planet, we are told by leftist Americans and foreigners alike that nowhere should guns be owned or held by private citizens — which is nothing less than insane — that weapons should be left in the hands of the police.

I discussed this on French television last Wednesday, when I was the very first American, Republican, and/or pro-Republican to accept an invitation to a debate on the children's massacre in Texas.

Well, what do you know? It seems that, if anything, the Uvalde incident proves nothing less than — get  this — the very necessity of private citizens to own and bear arms.

The parents and other citizens of Uvalde made the (understandable) mistake of trusting the police. But the law officers sat (or stood) around for an hour, not just refraining from engaging the killer at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but actually using their powers to arrest a number of people. As it happens, the people that the cops arrested were the frantic parents and citizens of the town begging them to intervene, hand-cuffing said civilians in the back and unceremoniously laying them on their stomachs, their noses in the dirt.

No, Democrats. No, leftists. No, drama queens. No, people around the globe who say that security should be entrusted exclusively to the police: cops cannot be entrusted to do the right thing. (Not always, in any case.)

(In that perspective, see also the actions, or lack thereof, of police officers during Florida's Stoneman Douglas High School standoff as well during the ordeal of Doctor Petit prevented from saving his family members from being burned alive in his Connecticut house in 2007.)

Any real red-blooded American, whether a civilian or in uniform — and provided they had a weapon — would have stormed the school building immediately.

Instead, the cops — police on all levels (local, state, federal…) — seem to have gotten tangled into command issues and/or into bureaucracy.

So far, the NRA has released a statement, which, truth to tell, sounds a bit lame. Also disappointed in Ted Cruz for once (very rare), who said we shouldn't politicize the issue. True, but instead, everybody should be punching back twice as hard.

As the convention starts in Houston's George R. Brown Convention Center, I hope they come up with something that sounds like the following:

We have been told that it's inconsiderate, or uncouth, to hold our meeting in the wake of the tragedy of Uvalde, and that is something we have been told by people, American as well as foreign, claiming that guns belong in no one's hands but those of the police. Even if our support for law officers is theoretically unconditional and second to none, we ought to take a hard look at how the cops acted or, rather, failed to act in Texas.

This is the reason — this is precisely the reason — that citizens need to be armed.

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Or, in the case of the Robb Elementary School, minutes that turned into an hour. 

Think of another mass shooting, also in Texas, unreported in America and across the globe, because in December 2019, as it happens, only three people were killed. Hold on, you ask: Three people? Certainly a tragedy, but why, then, call the West Freeway Church of Christ event a "mass" shooting? Well, because that low figure was due only to one parishioner pulling out his weapon and gunning down the (would-be) mass shootist. Jack Wilson is what we call "a good guy with a gun."

Welcome to Houston, NRA members…

Update: Ann Althouse (via Glenn Reynolds): 

If the police don't arrive and save us from violence, how can this event support the argument for restricting guns? This is the very situation that makes the most responsible people want to own guns. It reminds me of the summer of 2020, when there were riots, and the police stood down.

• FBI Reveals How Many Active Shooters Were Stopped by Citizens (via Stephen Green)

Related:

• What Is to Blame for the Connecticut Shooting? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere? (Ten-year-old post, but still entirely pertinent)
• T'is easy to tout the success of gun control laws in the rest of the Western world when you ignore certain pertinent facts from Europe
• Mourning "all lives lost to gun violence" is like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence”