Being A Judge Doesn't Necessarily Mean You're Smart

I've held off on commenting on the Zimmerman/Martin thing because we don't have all the facts in evidence yet. And I don't know that we ever will.

But that hasn't stopped the anti-gun folks, the media, and the criminally stupid (redundancy alert!) from trying to blame the law, the gun, and the NRA (not in any particular order) for what happened in Sanford, FL.

Case in point, is Judge H. Lee Sarokin over at the Huffington Post. His piece, titled How Do Gun Advocates, and the NRA React to Gun Massacres and Killings? asks just what the title implies. How can I, as a Life Member of the NRA and an avid gun collector and shooter reconcile what he sees as my complicity in mass shootings around the country.

First off, let me answer the overarching question asked in the title. I react the same way most everyone else does. Usually with empathy for the family members of those lost and sadness at said loss. That feeling is usually short-lived as I know, having payed attention to the news, that within a matter of minutes to hours the usual suspects in the anti-gun movement will be out screaming from the tallest roof in the country about 'lax gun laws' and how the evil NRA is responsible for this tragedy or that.

After reading about how this is all my fault for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of years, my thoughts then turn to the process itself. Much like the Zimmerman/Martin case, I need facts to make up my mind, keeping in mind that news stations, papers, and Internet sites generally have but a fraction of the information (or none at all) concerning the incident they're breathlessly pimping on their respective forms of communication.

So having read the good Judge's piece, one thing struck me as so totally moronic, that it made my brain come to a screeching halt. The Judge actually wrote that without guns, there would be no killing. Seriously. A Judge said that, I'm not making it up. See for yourself, he says it in the second paragraph under the excerpted text. Quote "I know the slogan - 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people', but without a gun present there would be no killing." No sir, I think you've got that all wrong. Without a gun present, there most definitely would be killing. People have been doing so for millenia, with all manner of implements that they have either devised or found handy at the time.

And speaking of 'gun massacres', that shooting the other day...Where did that happen again? Oh, yeah. Oakland. In CA, the poster child for everything the Brady Campaign to Remain Relevant wants for state gun laws. Yet with all those nifty little laws on the books in Cali, a deranged nut job walked into a school with a gun (federal felony-Federal Gun-Free School Zone Act) and killed 7 people (state level felony-murder, the last time I checked, was against the law). I'm not sure if he was prohibited from having said gun, but if he were say a convicted felon or someone adjudicated as mentally defective those would be federal disqualifiers to gun ownership and also felonies for being in possession of gun. I'm also guessing he didn't have a permit from the county sherrif to carry said guns on campus, so he was likely carrying without a permit, also a crime in CA. Since I haven't heard what weaponry he used, I can't comment on whether they were "California Approved!" or not.

So in that one incident we have several state and federal laws being broken. Tell me again why 'one more law' would've stopped this?