Why Gun Rights Are More Important Than School Shootings

Every time some rug sniffer gets offed in the latest school shooting, anti-gun activists come out of the woodwork to denounce the proliferation of guns in the United States as if taking away people's guns would mean less shootings and keeping crazy people from buying guns means less of them would go crazy shooting people. Their complaints are as predictable as the Sun's rotation around the Earth.

Their formula is always the same: Kid gets shot = Guns must be banished from the face of the earth. One plus one equals four.

But do school shootings really matter in the grand scheme of things? Does the death of a few kids trump our right to own a gun and defend our families from intruders, the occasional hooded black kid who wanders into our neighborhood, and those pesky prairie dogs that seem to be digging holes all over the place? I say they do not.

The fact is, the death of a few children is no different than the death of soldiers during war. The soldiers are fighting to protect our rights and the 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms, is one of our rights.

Just like soldiers are sent off the war, to die, so are children in the line of fire when it comes to our second amendment right to own guns. Don't get me wrong, a child dying for no good reason at the hands of some crazy person shooting up a school is a tragedy. Unfortunately, the importance of the death pales by comparison to the importance of our rights.

If screaming killed people and some maniac went to a school and started screaming bad words and kids died, would people then argue that there should be no more free speech? Of course not. Likewise, we should not be arguing about taking away guns from people when an insane person shoots kids at a school. What we should be arguing about is finding ways to lock up insane people and making sure we know where they all are.

Whether it's a gun or a knife or a hammer, an insane person determined to injure people is always going to find a way. An insane person with a hammer can do a lot of damage. An insane person with a knife can stab a lot of people. Let's not let the insanity of the insane determine our gun control policies. That's insane.

Whether it be by gun or knife or rock, violence is a fact of life. Many more people die in car accidents than through gun violence, but you don't see anybody talking about banning cars. It's certainly a fact that if nobody drove a car, there would be a lot less vehicle accidents and deaths involving driven cars. Kids are killed in car accidents every day in far greater numbers than any school shooting. Still, nobody talks about banning cars or even raising the driving age. If we simply changed the driving age from 16 to 21, very few 16 to 20-year-olds would die in car accidents unless their parents were just terrible drivers.

Even more kids lives are affected by McDonald's. How many kids eat at McDonald's, get fat, and then live a worthless, overweight life only to die of a heart attack at fifty? Do we talk about banning fast food? Of course not. Better to eat fast food than nothing at all.

As you can see by the above chart, there were many school shootings following Newtown, the tragic shooting where Adam Lanza killed 26 school children. While it's likely you've heard of the shootings in Newtown, you probably haven't heard of any of these others. That's because unless many people lose their lives, the media doesn't care very much about reporting them. And why doesn't the media care to report them? Because the American people aren't really that concerned about random shootings where multiple people aren't killed. In fact, the American people understand that when people own guns, people shoot guns.

The point here is that there have been about five school shootings a month since Newtown. Most of them go unreported unless there's something unusual about them. Americans understand that in a land where gun ownership is a constitutional right, school shootings will happen. Everyone knows where Sandy Hook is located, but almost nobody knows where Hazard, Kentucky is.

So what does the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States really say? Here you go:

• "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

What does it mean? It means that nothing shall infringe on a U.S. citizen's right to own a gun. And this means any gun, be it a pea shooter or a machine gun. You never know when you're going to be attacked by an angry gang in your home, so owning a machine gun can come in handy when you need to blow away some gang members. It also says that we need well regulated militias to make sure we're free, so if you're freedom-loving, you should join a militia.

Remember what Joe the Plumber (aka Samuel Werzelbacher) said to the parents of dead children following the mass shooting at the University of California, Santa Barbara in May 2014: "your dead kids don't trump my constitutional rights". And does anybody really doubt the credibility and intelligence of Joe the Plumber? Of course not. He's the voice of the average American.

So that's the question, isn't it?

If the question is posed in relation to gun control, the answer is a resounding no. They simply don't matter. You could stack the bodies of all the dead children from all the school shootings up in front of Congress and not a thing about gun control would change. Congress understands that when it comes to gun control, dead bodies simply don't matter. The NRA understands that when it comes to gun control, dead bodies are just a tool for gun control advocates to use to further their agenda of making schools safer. Ultimately, both Congress and the NRA understand that our rights are more important than any safe school.

So who do school shootings matter to? I guess if you're the parent of a dead child and your life has been ruined, they matter. But who cares about them?

I don't often provide disclaimers with my satire. People who don't get satire are what's destroying America. They must be stopped! However, I'm going to make an exception here because I've found that no matter how obvious I think a joke might be (or how many hints I toss in), there are an increasingly alarming number of stupid people on this planet who wouldn't know sarcasm if it came up and slapped them in the face, which is technically impossible because sarcasm isn't like a person who can slap. Anyway, if you've come to the end of this article and are now actually thinking that I'm incredibly insensitive, you'd be wrong. I'm only mildly insensitive.