Emotional, ineffective gun legislation

The Newtown, Conn., massacre has once again placed the spotlight on the issue of gun control. There are many cries in the wilderness for more stringent gun-control laws. However, the application of such laws would not have prevented the most recent massacre.

The guns used were perfectly legal and the cold-blooded murderer had no criminal record. So even if you had removed from the streets all individuals with criminal records and removed all illegal weaponry, the incident would have still occurred.

Logic would demand that we begin to search for alternative solutions to ideologically driven and ineffective legislation. We should be asking ourselves, what could have prevented or lessened the senseless deaths? Analyzing the story, one can see that the principal and many of the teachers were incredibly heroic in their attempts to physically disarm the shooter and save the children. If they had been trained for physical combat or had access to appropriate weapons which they had been trained to use, the outcome would probably have been most significantly different.

In some schools there are armed guards and policemen already; unfortunately, there are not enough of them to be in every school. So we need to find a way to create an equivalent situation of having a trained armed individual in the school. Whether this is a specific teacher, principal, resource officer, or member of the National Guard is not important; what is important is that this individual is in place.

It is living in a fantasy world to believe that you can legislate these problems away.

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