by Sandy » Sat Jun 20, 2015 10:12 am
It's highly unlikely that even if permission had been given, among those gathered in the church for a Wednesday night prayer meeting, there would have been anyone packing. Even if there had been, these kinds of killings are calculated, the shooters are usually suicidal, and they plan to do maximum damage in a minimum amount of time. Even if someone else had a gun, by the time they could reach for it and use it, most of the damage would already be done. Those laws are designed to help convenience store employees have some protection if they see someone acting suspicious, they don't prevent someone who is bent on destruction, and has carefully calculated how they will go about it. In about half of the 25 or so mass shootings we've had in the past couple of decades, there were people in the immediate vicinity carrying concealed weapons, in several cases there were openly armed people, and they couldn't react in time to prevent the shooter from doing all the damage they wanted.
On the other hand, in spite of all of the rhetoric and paid propaganda of gun control advocates, the restrictions that the President has proposed, which are far, far, far from what the critics accuse him of wanting, would have been instrumental in preventing this particular shooting. Perhaps Roof was determined enough to have obtained a weapon anyway, but his arrest record, under the President's proposal, and his association with racist extremists, would have prevented him from owning one legally. If, in the case of the shooters in Newtown and Tucson, those who owned the guns and were careless about allowing access to them would have been prosecuted, it might have sent a strong enough message to other gun owners to be more careful with security of their own weapons.
As far as the criticism of the President for "using" the tragedy to "push" his agenda on gun control, that's nothing more than hypocrisy on the part of the critics. He's the President, and I not only applaud him for taking every opportunity to address what I believe is our greatest social problem, and to set straight the responsibility that must absolutely be in place if our constitutional right to bear arms is to be carried out as the founding fathers intended, and not the commercial, profiteering, chaos that we have now. Until there's open condemnation from Republicans regarding the way Bush and Cheney used 9-11, and rode their pre-planned, calculated invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, nor with Al Qaida, on the backs of the victims of that tragedy, then no Republican should be engaging in criticism of the President for doing this.