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Carolyn McCarthy entered politics after her husband was murdered and her son injured in the mass shooting aboard the Long Island Rail Road by Colin Ferguson. Ferguson killed six and injured nineteen. After the tragedy, McCarthy became one of the nation’s leading anti-gun advocates. Naturally, she leapt on the Arizona shooting as an easy excuse to further her anti-gun agenda. She did the same thing after the Virginia Tech Massacre, even though she could not correctly identify exactly what it was she was trying to ban. Now she’s got another chance to push legislation that is squarely against our right to bear arms, protected in the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
One of the fiercest gun-control advocates in Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), pounced on the shooting massacre in Tucson Sunday, promising to introduce legislation as soon as Monday targeting the high-capacity ammunition the gunman used.
McCarthy ran for Congress after her husband was gunned down and her son seriously injured in a shooting in 1993 on a Long Island commuter train.
“My staff is working on looking at the different legislation fixes that we might be able to do and we might be able to introduce as early as tomorrow,” McCarthy told POLITICO in a Sunday afternoon phone interview.
Gun control activists cried it was time to reform weapons laws in the United States, almost immediately after a gunman killed six and injured 14 more, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Arizona on Saturday.
I don’t doubt that gun control activists like McCarthy have good intentions. Knowing a loved one was a victim of gun violence will undoubtedly make you want to take action. However, the saying “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” exists for a reason, and taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does nothing but ensure that they are defenseless when confronted by a criminal who undoubtedly will not care about gun control laws.
The idea that guns cause crimes is ludicrous. The only thing that causes crimes are the people that commit them. A well-armed populace is a well-protected populace, and even the FBI found that a rise in gun sales meant a decrease in violent crimes. Consider, for example, that gun sales surged after Obama was elected. In 2009, after the surge in gun sales, violent crime dropped in every category: armed robbery, assault, vehicle theft, and even murder, which dropped an astounding 10%. You can see the exact opposite in countries like Great Britain, where handguns are banned — and violent crimes are the norm. In 2008, they doubled down on their idiocy and sought to ban knives because the rate of stabbing deaths had grown so alarming. It’s absolutely ludicrous, because even if guns and knives didn’t exist, people out to spill the blood of innocent people would still find a way to do so – and probably wouldn’t mind circumventing weapons laws to do so either.
What we can see, however, is that law-abiding citizens who do have guns can prevent crimes by being in a position to defend themselves. Imagine how different mass shooting sprees, too, could end up if even one of the victims had been armed. From the shooting that killed Carolyn McCarthy’s husband, to the Virginia Tech massacre, to the recent recent school board shooting, to this weekend’s shooting in Arizona — one armed citizen could have stopped the crazed gunman in each situation.
Unfortunately, when you have an unarmed populace, you have innocent people who have no recourse other than to cower and pray for mercy from a murderer until police arrive. This isn’t an indictment of police, of course, but it’s good to keep in mind the saying, when seconds count, police are just minutes away. Whatever the situation — someone breaks into your home, tries to steal your car, or starts shooting up the mall while you’re there with your family — being armed and able to defend yourself is an asset, not a liability. Gun control does nothing except make law-abiding citizens sitting ducks before criminals who will still arm themselves and be emboldened knowing that their victims can’t fight back.
Aside from this common sense line of thinking, there’s one other thing that needs to be remembered before Rep. McCarthy is allowed to push anti-gun legislation in the wake of this tragedy. It’s unconstitutional. We have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and people like Carolyn McCarthy are exploiting the Arizona shooting in order to infringe on that constitutional right. If Rep. McCarthy has a problem with our constitutional right to bear arms, then perhaps she shouldn’t be serving as a member of Congress. Maybe she could consider moving to Britain, where they share her distaste for guns. Would she feel safer there, I wonder? If she does not like guns, then she does not have to own one. That doesn’t give her the right, however, to keep others from owning guns.
Judging from the legislation these two lawmakers are pushing, reading the Constitution in the House didn’t mean much — at least not to Reps. Baker and McCarthy. Each are looking to infringe upon our constitutionally protected rights. They should be ashamed of themselves, using the deaths of six Americans to further their own political agendas.
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Follow Cassy on Twitter and read more of her work at CassyFiano.com and Hard Corps Wife.
