Ten Years After Columbine, TIME Still Doesn’t Get It

It was ten years ago that two mentally ill boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, armed themselves and entered their high school killing 13 and injuring scores more. TIME Magazine marks this anniversary with an article about how, after 10 years, it’s no more difficult for lawful citizens to get guns. As a matter of fact, TIME claims it’s easier and they are probably correct.

Like with most similar tragedies in this country, for some strange reason, of which probably shrinks can’t understand, Americans seem to want to avoid the real root of a problem and attack a symptom. Why did our focus, at least a good part of it, become centered on guns, even 10 years later? TIME Magazine wants to know why we haven’t done more to restrict guns since Columbine.

My question is why are TIME and others still focused on guns and why aren’t they asking what has been done to get into the minds of kids like Harris and Klebod or Cho Seung-Hui who mass murdered students at Virginia Tech? What has been done about that? After all, it is mental illness that brings people like this to the point of killing someone.

TIME went to the trouble to interview John Woods, a University of Texas graduate student, about his take on guns and in particular guns on college campuses. Woods opposes a bill that would allow college students in Texas to carry guns to school.

According to TIME, Woods even thinks addressing the “psychotic” aspect of acts like at Columbine and VT would be a better way to go.

Woods concedes that getting help to the psychotic, would-be killers of the world would probably be an even better fix.

But Woods reasons that because he knew some of the students at VT who got killed that for some reason banning guns will help. He uses the same poor reasoning as I’ve heard before attempting to relate gun control to banning peanuts.

I think if this was peanuts or pistachios causing all these deaths, then we’d be all over it. But there is no amendment about peanuts or pistachios in the Bill of Rights. People on both sides just simply won’t compromise.

As I have said many times before in this debate, we recalled peanuts because they were tainted. If a gun was found to be made with a fault in it we would do the same. But the real problem with peanuts that made people sick was salmonella not peanuts. A poorly run place of business allowed for the growth of a bacteria that made people sick. We didn’t ban peanuts because of poor business practices.

And what does compromise do? If there ever existed factual evidence that allowing law abiding citizens to own a gun caused them to murder, then something should be done. This just isn’t the truth. It solves nothing and helps no one. Agreeing to a compromise only seeks to resolve an argument. Once that happens all focus is taken away from the real problem that existed in the first place.

People refuse to accept the fact that the United States of America did not grant you and me the right to defend and protect ourselves. If you read the Constitution, and this was clearly pointed out and explained in the District of Columbia v. Heller case by Justice Scalia, the Second Amendment infers that our right to self defense existed before the U.S. Constitution was written. The Amendment only restated the obvious. It was not granted.

But TIME keeps questioning why we aren’t working harder to ban guns and why is it that people are insisting on easing the restrictions that already exist. The answer is simple. Currently people must be feeling more in need of self defense. It’s also very clear that when you disarm lawful citizens, crime goes up. People are learning over again what made this country great – independence, which comes from liberty, freedom of oppression brought on by those bent on taking away our freedoms. They have discovered that all these laws and restrictions aren’t working. They’ve learned that the police show up after the crime. They’ve been witness to the state, during time of natural disasters, systematically going about confiscating their guns. They’ve had enough.

Anti gun groups have been allowed to go unchecked and unrestrained for too long. Now people are speaking out against those who insist on stealing our God-given rights from us. Surely if TIME was interested in getting to the bottom of that they could.

Again I ask. Why isn’t TIME asking what’s being done about dealing with the mental illness that causes people to kill others? Mentally ill people who want to kill can creatively find numerous ways and select readily available weapons to get the job done. It does nobody any good to select from all those weapons guns and blame senseless killings on them while infringing on our right to keep and bear arms.

Isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t it time to do the right thing and put our efforts into the real root of the problem instead of thinking that if we can attack a symptom, somehow the rest will magically disappear?

If we made it harder to buy peanuts, would salmonella go away?

Tom Remington