The NRA has released a statement on the Sandy Hook murders: you can read it here. Naturally, at the NRA press conference, Code Pink preferred disruption to discourse – the videos are below.
The NRA believes the best way to protect school children from murderous individuals with guns is to arm those in charge of the children. I think it’s hard to fault the logic of that position although, having grown up in the UK where the most lethal weapons I encountered in the classroom were a rack of proudly displayed canes sized to fit every behind, the necessity of gun slinging teachers in my child’s classroom is yet another example of cultural decay that I would find hard to come to terms with.
Perhaps if the canes had remained and been strenuously administered to Adam Lanza in his formative years, there would be no need to arm teachers and 28 more people would be alive in Sandy Hook school today.
In the interests not of solving the problem, but bowing to an impulse to be seen to do something, Dalton McGuinty has decided to spend $10 million for front door locks, entry buzzer systems and security cameras for every elementary school in Ontario. Someone in his cabinet should tell him that Adam Lanza shot his way through the front door of Sandy Hook.
If anyone thinks that the firearm murder rate in a country is determined solely by the percentage of its citizens who own guns – it isn’t so. From the National Post:
In 2007, the U.S. had the highest gun ownership rate in the world – an average of 88 per 100 people. But the U.S. does not have the worst firearm murder rate – that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the U.S. is well down the list with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people.
