During a day in which a horrific school shooting occurred at Chardon High School in Ohio—leaving three students dead and two injured—pro-gun activist John K. Haslach of Dunellen, New Jersey left the following comment on the National Gun Victims Action Council (NGAC) Facebook page:
A dead child is a small price to pay to protect our 2nd A rights to stop unjust laws and keep out forgeign invaders!
Haslach wasn't the only pro-gun activist on the attack following the shooting. Hank Fackovec of Woburn, Massachusetts left the following comment on the Facebook wall of Students for Gun Free Schools (SGFS):
People and organizations like SFGFS are responsible for these injured and dead children - If there was an armed teacher - the horror could have been prevented or minimized. Shame on you.
SGFS is an organization that was created to honor Reema Samaha, one of the victims of the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech. "In order to keep her memory alive and try to prevent future tragedies, our mission opposes efforts to allow guns in our schools," SGFS states. The organization's founders include Omar and Randa Samaha, Reema's siblings; Lily Habtu, who was shot in the face and arm at Virginia Tech; and Colin Goddard, who was shot four times during the massacre. The notion that they are responsible for what happened at Chardon High School is beyond the pale. It is equally horrific to suggest that the answer to school shootings is to arm K-12 teachers and instruct them to gun down troubled teens rather than giving them the support and counseling they truly need.
Linda Gaither of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship in Ithaca, New York also became a target of pro-gun activists when she urged Starbucks to reconsider its policy allowing loaded guns in its stores following the Ohio tragedy. Pro-gun activist Devon Siefried of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania lashed into her, writing:
Dance in that blood, Linda. Dance in the blood. You're disgusting.
This horrifying "dance in the blood" rhetoric is, sadly, common among pro-gun activists. Frequently, it is directed at individuals who have lost their loved ones to gun violence. Yesterday, Andrew Johnston (AKA “Weer’d Beard”), who has been mentioned at this blog before, attacked Joan Peterson in a blog entitled, "Blood Dancing 101." Joan lost her sister Barbara in 1992 to gun homicide. In the blog, Johnston claims that Joan and others who advocate for stronger gun laws to prevent tragedies...
...talk about dead victims with zero concern for their situation. This is called “Blood Dancing” and they SHOULD be ashamed of it, but they are not. Are they insane? Yes, yes they are!
Finally, Joan received the following comment from a pro-gun activist Dan Roberts (AKA "Son of the Revolution") at her blog "Common Gunsense." Roberts was responding to a blog Joan posted reagarding the shooting at Chardon High School, in which she wrote, "We can pass more gun laws and we should. Making parents responsible for children getting their hands on guns would help. 28 states have some form of Child Access Prevention laws. Laws requiring mandatory reporting of lost and stolen guns may stop gun owners from being careless with their guns. Safely storing guns should be of utmost importance to keep guns away from the hands of children and teens as well as theft. Guns in the hands of children must first pass through the hands of an adult." Roberts saw this as an opportunity to boast about his six-year-old daughter's proficiency with a bow and gun.
He left a hyperlink that goes to his blog "That Every Man Be Armed" and a piece he wrote entitled, "The Next Top Shot." There he says of his daughter, "I started drilling her on gun safety when she was three. She then moved to trigger time on my lap with my 10/22 by age four, by five she could correctly name all the parts and almost completely reassemble my Ruger .45 by herself and she got her own pink Cricket Bolt Action .22 for her sixth birthday."
Meanwhile, the United States continues to lose more than 3,000 children and teens annually to gun violence.
Wow! But so typical. No number of innocent deaths will quell their fetish for guns or paranoia about gun rights. What's one more dead child, in their eyes, compared to their love of guns?
ReplyDeleteInnocent people die everyday, it's just the way of things.. We can't decide how we go. Though I do have to say that I am Pro-Gun but people who write stuff like this give us all a bad name.
ReplyDeleteThere should be a way to prevent stuff like this from happening, if the people that work at school are paid by the goverment (which is where some of our taxes go to) then school buildings should be treated like government buildings and be allowed to have metal detectors at every exit/entrance.
And don't give me this crap about metal piercings and belts that have this stuff on it and all this tid-bit junk that could never amount to the value of a life... don't wear it then.
The problem is that this "RKBA" crowd has no shame. Seriously, if they can make idiotic comments such as:
ReplyDeleteA dead child is a small price to pay to protect our 2nd A rights to stop unjust laws and keep out forgeign invaders!
We can get into the laughability of the proposition that private gun ownership has stopped the US from foreign invasion since this lot forgets that the US has been attacked, but it is more logisitical considerations relating to foreign campaigns than US private gun ownership which preclude any invasion.
After all, would a power that could place nuclear submarines in a position where they could attack US cities within seconds with WMD really care about people with firearms?