I have always been pro-Second Amendment. By that I mean that responsible and stable adults should be allowed to own firearms. Two stories out of Arizona this week goes against the “responsible and stable” part.
First was this shooting rampage:
An Arizona man who on Wednesday reportedly killed four people, including a 47-year-old grandmother and a 15-month-old infant, and then took his own life was also a former Republican Party official, a former white supremacist neo-Nazi and the founder of a border patrol vigilante group that advocated using violence on immigrants.
On Thursday morning, police in Gilbert, Arizona confirmed that J.T. (Jason Todd) Ready had committed suicide after killing his girlfriend, 47-year-old Lisa Mederos, along with her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend and her granddaughter, according to The Arizona Republic.
Then the next day a murder by a high profile gun rights advocate:
The former editor of Guns & Ammo magazine was accused of murdering a friend with a gun and ammo in Golden Valley, Arizona on Wednesday.
Mohave County sheriff’s charged 53-year-old Richard Erick Venola with second-degree murder for the killing 39-year-old James Patrick O’Neill, who was found dead at the scene.
Sheriff department spokeswoman Trish Carter told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Venola shot O’Neill in the chest with a “high-caliber” rifle and at least three weapons were removed from the scene. O’Neill was visiting the former Guns & Ammo editor’s house at the time.
Both of these stories have some factors that really stick out at me. First is the location. Both happened in Arizona, a state known to have the most lenient gun laws in the country. That really makes you wonder if Arizona is on a good Second Amendment track.
But an even more interesting factor is who they are. Both are very strong advocates of gun rights. Gun rights is what built these two and that is what destroyed both of them.
Constantly we hear pro-gun rights advocates preaching that it’s not guns that kill people, but rather people that kill people. This is very true. But now we have two very well known members of their movement involved in murders, only hours apart.
These people are also the same type that try and say Obama will take your guns. Here’s the problem. If our gun involved violence continues to grow then the government will have no option but to intervene. Yes we used to have the days of the wild, wild west, but we got rid of those. It lead to way too many people dying without ever facing a court room. As a society matures they put in place laws to help keep that society safe and intact, and that is what our nation did.
If we see stronger gun control laws then the NRA and others will have no option but to thank their own members, like Ready and Venola, for the changes. They have shown us that not everyone deserves to bear arms in our nation. That’s why you see the right ignoring these stories so much; they go against everything they try to say. We can’t let these stories be silenced. We need to use them to come to sensible changes that not only insure our right to bear arms, but also our right to live. Hopefully we can do that.