libertybelle diaries

I came across this video on the 2nd Amendment last night on another blog.  Definitely one of the most eloquent explanations of the gun control issue I’ve ever come across.

Well, after rattling on about gun control for a few days, I thought I’d do a flashback to Benghazi.   The President wants to protect Americans from guns, but he couldn’t even be bothered to protect his own ambassador in Libya.  So, let’s face the hypocrisy straight on, what the heck was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi?  All clues lead me to believe that President Obama had Ambassador Stevens engaged in gun-running for the Syrian opposition.  What are the odds these guns turn out to be more of those infamous “assault weapons”?  So, this administration wanted to do a end run around Congress and funnel weapons to some rebels, no problem.  The press suffered collective amnesia and didn’t bother to investigate or question.  I must have missed their calls for an Iran/Contra type investigation.  Why didn’t the State Department do a better job protecting the ambassador?  Why didn’t the White House or anyone in our national security chain lift a finger to help the ambassador and those former Special Forces operators who begged for help when they were attacked by Al Qaeda thugs?  The press never wanted to touch this story and they kept burying this shameful display of dereliction of duty.  Now, with the media ready to whip up the public sentiment about gun-control, the mainstream media will avoid the Benghazi story.

The Washington Post reports (here) that the commission Hillary Clinton appointed to investigate Benghazi presented it’s report to lawmakers today.   Serendipitously,  Hillary faints, suffers a concussion and dodges appearing before Congress Thursday.  What amazingly convenient timing…….  She can make her exit, reputation intact, and dust off any lingering specks of  Benghazi desert sand from her coattails.   Expect more tightly scripted responses, a’la Susan Rice’s “there’s no terrorism here” style,  from the minions who will testify in Hillary’s place.

This President’s administration has let guns walk into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.  He let his own ambassador die at the hands of terrorists while said ambassador appears to have been engaged in arranging arms transfers to Syrian bands of rebel (some of who are Al Qaeda affiliated).  Now, when a radical Islamist opened fire on innocents at Fort Hood, well, his administration did nothing about that.  They  insist on calling that act of terrorism, simply “workplace violence”.   Funny thing, I don’t know off-hand what type of weapon MAJ Hasan used and I am sure if the press had emphasized that detail, I would remember.  I’m wondering  if it was an “assault weapon”.   I found this  ( a hand gun and another weapon) from The New York Times.   A quick search and alas,  here’s the UK Telegraph report.  I must have missed the President’s concern about that mass shooting in the barrage of wailing about how our troops needed to not use this incident to denigrate Islam. And in the wake of that our military launched, not an investigation into radical Islamist activity within our military, but  instead they rammed into place Islamic sensitivity training  for the military.  So, our troops will know that when Islamic radicals try to kill them in the name of Allah, never fear, Islam means peace and it’s our troops failure at sensitivity and that instigated the murder….  They’ve hired on Islamic “experts”, many with dubious backgrounds, to re-educate our troops about Islam……..   I recall the many reports about how in Afghanistan this President  insisted on very restrictive rules of engagement, placing more concern on Afghan sensitivities than on our soldiers’ lives.  Yes, President Obama likes  battlefield gun control too.  No talk of victory or neutralizing the enemy – no, no, none of that.  We were on a mission to win the hearts and minds….  Even when it became obvious our troops faced a serious threat from the very Afghan recruits they were training and arming, this administration still downplayed  this and emphasized that our troops lacked enough awareness of Afghan sensitivities.  No word about the dangers of placing “assault weapons” into the hands of people with a culture decidedly geared toward barbarism.  Nope, it was our troops fault for angering them.

So, putting guns into the hands of Al Qaeda affiliated rebels in Libya and Syria is okay.  Putting guns into the hands of Mexican criminals is okay too.  Putting guns into the hands of Afghan recruits, with an alarming propensity to turn them on our troops  was okay too. But this President wants to make sure he limits access to guns by law-abiding American citizens???  What is wrong with this picture???  Oops, I detoured back to gun control again.  I promise tomorrow I’ll talk about something different.

On a more serious note here are links to very thoughtful pieces on the school shooting.  The first piece, by Pat Buchanen will make you think about evil.  The second piece offers a straight-forward take on this tragedy by Thomas Sowell.

The sheer horror of the murder of so many innocent schoolchildren causes such a well of heart-wrenching sorrow, anger and dismay.  We all want answers as to “why”, but the truth is even if  the investigation uncovers that the killer left an explanation, the explanation probably won’t make sense to us.  We can’t know what Adam Lanza was thinking, if he was hearing voices, if his mind had slipped into complete madness, what caused the anger that drove him.  So, in the absence of clear answers, the quick answer is more gun-control laws, despite the fact that Adam Lanza took guns that weren’t his and killed the legal owner of those guns.  Many politicians on the left began using these slain children as political weapons to ram more gun-control laws through.  This politicizing of this tragic event sickens me and it alarms me too.  Way too many Americans get sucked into these national melodramas, allowing their emotions to be played by these political opportunists.  Facts and rationally assessing whether the proposed solutions would have had any impact at preventing this mass murder won’t play any part in the “national dialogue” many prominent left-wing media mouthpieces have suggested.

The media truly runs wild with baseless stories and few journalists seem to be alarmed at how many “facts” they’ve gotten wrong so far.  First, they reported it was the brother, Ryan Lanza, who was the shooter.  Most of the reports I read or saw on TV the first 2 days reported that the mother was a teacher at the elementary school and the classroom the shooter entered was his mother’s.  With so much on-air time to fill with live reporting the complete left me full of questions.  Like, I heard the shooter used an automatic weapon, I heard a lot about “assault weapons” and I heard lots of other dire warning about large round capacity magazines.  Along with that some reporters ran with long rambles about Asperger’s, autism and the mental illness angle.

Here are the things I think I understand, by consulting two gun owners, one is my son (who happens to own an “assault weapon” and several hand guns) , and  a friend who owns guns and has a lot of experience with guns and the law.  The term “assault weapon” is sort of wishy-washy.  The media uses that term rather loosely to define weapons that look like military issue weapons or long guns that hold more than 10 rounds.  Lots of  shotguns have more firepower than these so-called “assault weapons”, but let’s not let facts stand in the way of the Diane Feinstein-type gun “expert”.  One can only marvel at the overwrought hysterical rantings of the gun-control crowd.   Like, I said in a previous post, I don’t own any guns, nor do I have any desire to use any guns ever.  However, I don’t care how many guns my neighbors own or Jim-Bob two states over, because the odds are my neighbors and Jim-Bob two states over aren’t going to turn into homicidal maniacs who go on a killing spree.  Sure, we can say we should make sure these events never happen again, but the truth is we have no way to identify nor prevent the occasional homicidal nutjob from bursting on the public stage and creating havoc.  Mass murderers aren’t some new phenomenon.   The killer in this case, as in every other case, doesn’t obey the law and taking one option out of his hands won’t stop mass murders.  In the same breath that reporters mention the assault weapons, they remind us that while Adam Lanza had some psychological problems, he was very intelligent.  The whacko in Aurora, James Holmes ranked as a genius and even without access to “assault weapons”, he would have devised some other heinous method to perpetrate violence.  His apartment certainly left clues to that intent.   We can’t regulate intent nor can we legislate mass murder out of existence.  And in today’s computer age information on how to do just about anything is just a few clicks away.  The media is sure to regale us with lots of dishonest “facts” to propel new gun-control measures.  To quote Fox News’ Juan Williams, when confronted with facts that new gun-control wouldn’t have prevented Adam Lanza’s rampage, “I don’t care, we need to do something!”  And that’s the mentality of the political left in this country.  They want the federal government to  manage our lives from cradle to grave.