Army Bob: Blaming weapon, not person, defies logic

by Robert M. Traxler

The truth is no defense.

Guns do not kill people, people kill people, logic? Yes, yes, it is, state it and you are a heartless so-and-so who wants to see dead children in the streets.

OK, attacking the person who states the obvious because it is the obvious and an irrefutable truth, is a way to chill free speech and shut down discussion. The NRA has blood on its hands, an illogical thing to say, but logic has no place in this debate. The NRA having blood on its hands is as logical as saying Planned Parenthood has even more blood on its hands.

The left side of the Second Amendment argument see nothing illogical in calling the NRA a blood-soaked association and the right has no problem with referring to the Planned Parenthood folks as mass murders on a scale greater than the German National Socialists or the Russian Soviet Socialists.

Military style weapons must be banned, but what is a “military style weapon,” is anyone’s guess. Good folks mostly on the left have read or heard military style weapons should not be in the hands of civilians, they agree so they parrot it. So, what is a military style weapon?  It is whatever people want it to be, as the truth is always whatever people want it to be.

All types of firearms were used by armies, even air rifles. “The (sic: 15 round semi-automatic) Girandoni air rifle was in service with the Austrian army from 1780 to around 1815.  Many references to the Girandoni air rifles mention lethal combat ranges of 125 to 150 yards and some extend that range considerably” Wikipedia. Semi auto in 1780, yes true. A few American Army personnel carried them; Cpt. Merriweather Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark expedition was one.

The question is why now, why do we have more mass murders in the news in schools and on the streets like we find in Chicago? Semi-automatic weapons have been in civilian use since the 1700s/1800s. Again, why now? Blaming the murderer is logical, but blaming the tool used is more politically correct, as if a firearm had free will and is self-actuating. After a mass shooting (other than of poor African Americans in Chicago that gets limited reporting), most of the coverage is about the weapon.

To blame an inanimate object for violence is politically correct and the holy grail of many, but it again defies logic. When we start looking at murderers and why they did the crime, we just may start to decrease murders in schools. The scary part of this problem is denied guns, what weapon will mass murders use, if not stopped?

Fire: the largest school massacre in America ever was arson. On Dec. 1, 1958, a fire broke out at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago; 92 children and three nuns died. Weapons such as trucks, autos,  common household chemicals that mixed make war gases, explosives (used in the attack that murdered the largest number of children in a school in Michigan, 38 and six adults in a school in Bath Township, Michigan), edged weapons; we must figure out the why and not concentrate on the tool, but will we? Probably not.

A favorite myth is that military 5.56, M855 or M855A1 bullets are more lethal than civilian bullets. A full metal jacketed military round is not as lethal as a partially jacketed, dum-dum, lead or hollow point bullet currently found in civilian use; both hollow point, lead and semi-jacketed are prohibited from military use by international law (The Hague Convention in the Netherlands in 1899) because of the horrible gaping wounds they produce.

The folks who wish to go extra-constitutional have read or heard that the M855 is horribly and especially lethal, more than any other bullet; they want to believe it, so they do. The full jacketed military bullet will not expand in the body to the same extent as a hollow point bullet, nor “tumble” to any greater extent than any other full metal jacketed round of a similar velocity. There are over a dozen and most are larger, with much greater kinetic energy and more lethal than the 5.56, M855/A1.

The truth be damned, facts be damned, the truth is what folks want it to be. Anyone who states the facts is a heartless so- and-so; blaming the tool and not the person using the tool makes no sense, but it is a politically correct thing to do.