One in 300 Million

By Neil W. McCabe - Editor, Guns & Patriots

The Dec. 13 mass shooting at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., is an unspeakable tragedy. The victims, most of them first graders, were behind locked doors and beginning the school day with no idea of what was to follow.

In our age, there is only one other tragedy that comes close to what happened in Newtown­and sadly, other places too, the mass casualty airliner crash. There too, too many completely innocent individuals are lost to us at once.

In the mainstream media, there is a big difference in how these two occurrences are treated. In the case of the airliner disaster, whether caused by weather or by terrorists, we are told over and over again that the actual percentage of deaths by flying passengers is very small­so small that it would be foolish not to fly over such concerns.

But, what are we told after a mass shooting at a school?

In sharp contrast, we are told that because one individual out of 300 million went on a rampage, the rest of the 300 million Americans must forgo a right acknowledged in the Bill of Rights as existing before the founding of our current Republic.

While we are looking at percentages, Larry Pratt, the president of Gun Owners of America, points out: "What a lethal, false security are the Gun Free Zone laws. All of our mass murders in the last 20 years have occurred in 'Gun Free Zones."

I am not convinced that because a school in the Nutmeg State did not have an armed guard­or teacher, groundskeeper or cafeteria worker, we need to ignore the Bill of Rights.