Good Read: Anti-gun Writer on Gun Control

It's not guns we must control

By MICHAEL COREN Sun Media

I hate guns. They terrify me. I have never owned one and never will. I
have little sympathy for the gun culture or the gun lobby. Both seem
crass and crude. If I had my way, guns would not exist. But - and this
but is the size of a Liberal grant - we do not live in a perfect world
and I am prepared to admit that reality sometimes stings.  More than
this, the relative lack of gun control legislation in the United
States had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with a 6-year-old in
Michigan shooting another child to death. Nor had it anything to do
with other child killings, with murders by street gangs, with any of
the shootings in Canada.

Indeed, gun control is one of the great misnomers of modern times. We
cannot control guns and we don't have to either. What we have to
control is the decaying social fabric of North America and our
headlong rush into an ethical vacuum.  Good God, this one isn't rocket
science.

A few fundamentals:  Guns are extraordinarily common in Canadian and
American rural communities, where the crime rates are lower than
anywhere else in either country. Farm kids shoot from an early age and
are in the company of firearms before they can walk. Yet there are
hardly any violent rampages and so-called accidental discharges of
weapons. Guns have existed in very large numbers for more than two
centuries. They were common among ordinary families from the 1740s.
Children did not kill with them.

After 1945 Canada was flooded with handguns brought home from Europe
and Asia by soldiers. Teachers of the time report of half of the class
bringing dad's shooter to school. These were military weapons, deadly
and efficient.  Were there mass slaughters? Of course not. But
according to some zealots, it's all about registration.

So just who are these people so anxious to tell us what to do and how
to do it?  Curiously enough, the activists campaigning for draconian
gun control seem to be the same activists who are calling for a lower
age of sexual consent, for more children's rights, for increased
funding of daycare rather than support for families, for a wholesale
dismantling of the society that has served us so well for so long.

If you doubt me, just take a look. It is an almost infallible rule
that the more permissive a person is on social and moral issues the
more in favour they are of strict gun control. Coincidence? Please. It
is not that such people are sinister, simply that they are wrong.
Dangerously wrong. Ignore the disease, misinterpret the diagnoses and
then prescribe the wrong medicine.

It's too late for that nonsense now. The patient is dying and we have
to operate fast. As for the ailments, they should be obvious. 
Single-parent families and the absence of male authority figures.
Parents never seeing their kids because both are working and junior is
parented by the television. Teachers emasculated and unable to
chastise children who instead revel in their thuggery. An obsession
with the self-esteem of kids who in fact scream for boundaries and
borders. Endless discussions about children's feelings, encouraging
them to act out the slightest whim.  Constant attacks on the virtues
of family, chastity, faith, respect, order and tradition. TV that
deadens the mind and the sensibilities with graphic violence,
grotesque pornography and vacuous pop videos, and then hosts long
discussions wondering why kids are going wrong.  I want, I need, I
must have, I know, I am, I rule, I'm cool, I'm everything. You're
nothing, you're not me, you don't understand, you suck, you don't
matter. And I'm the centre of the universe. I know it because I feel
it and nobody dares tell me otherwise.

Laugh when Jimmy uses obscene language, believe that Susan can do no
wrong even when the cop and the teacher tell you otherwise, decide
that your "self-fulfillment" in some job is more important than Jake
seeing his mother when he comes home from school, and say you can't
control what Brittany watches on television when you haven't even
tried.  It ain't about guns, it's about you. And you, and you. Don't
blame mechanics for your own madness.

Michael Coren is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster

Good read.  I'm not used to much common sense in the media.

Truth is most people are in the middle neither ultra left or ultra right however the ultra left seem to intensely despise anything right of center because they think they are so much more enlightened and educated than everyone else.

An armed society is a polite society - for a reason.