Last Wednesday’s mass shooting in California, which left 14 dead victims, was the worst attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. In the hours that followed that shooting the Republican Presidential candidates had tweeted things such as “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families……”, “Please keep the victims in your prayers,” and “Our prayers are with the victims…..” The Democrat Presidential candidates tweeted “I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now,” “Mass shootings are becoming an almost-everyday occurrence in this country. This sickening and senseless gun violence must stop,” and “Horrifying news out of #SanBernardino. Enough is enough: it's time to stand up to the @NRA and enact meaningful gun safety laws.” The next day the New York Daily News decorated their entire front page with the pictures of four Republican Presidential Candidates, their quoted tweets, and a huge headline that read, “God Isn’t Fixing This” and “As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could surely end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.” There is so much wrong with this it’s hard for me to decide which route to take in this column. I’ll start with: A headline such as this says a lot about mainstream media. It says a lot about the owners/managers/CEO of that newspaper. It says a lot about America because the Christians have been run over so much in the past that this is considered an okay thing to say in today’s society. God has been stripped out of our schools, out of our government meetings, out of our courthouses, out of our towns and out of our daily lives. America is what it is today because God is being run out of our great country. Don’t the victims and their families deserve our prayers? Is this newspaper mocking this? I guess they are offering a slap on the back and a “better luck next time” instead. Just like all the tweets and quotes about gun control. No quotes/tweets about prayers; instead it was “let’s take guns away.” I’m guessing they think that those two terrorists would have decided against that shooting if there had been stronger gun laws in force. I mean, there’s a law against murder but they didn’t seem to care about that, but apparently they would have cared more about gun laws!?!?!?!! Really? Bad people/thugs/gang members/terrorists do not care about laws. They will find guns whether we want them to, or not. Taking guns away from good law abiding citizens does nothing but leave us unarmed and an open target! Everyone is entitled to their opinion – I get that! But let me ask a question: Do you think gun control will be just as successful as drug control has been? America made drugs against the law and made drinking and driving against the law. Yet, somehow there are millions of people still doing drugs and millions of people drinking and driving every day. Some say that stricter gun control laws would prevent shooting sprees. Somehow I don’t think criminals really care about following the laws. A criminal is going to get drugs, guns, break into houses, rape and murder regardless of what the laws say he can or cannot do. (Please refer back to God being stripped from our daily lives to explain this!) There’s the old sayings…… “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” “So if guns kill people, I guess pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.” “Disarming innocent people does not protect innocent people.” But my all-time favorite is “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.” Until then…. see you around the town.
By: Emerald Greene Parsons