Friends,
Like you, I am sickened and saddened by the horrific mass murder that happened Sunday night at a concert in Las Vegas. Reading about it, hearing about it, and viewing the video taken by witnesses put a lump in my throat all day yesterday. I don’t know how any of us kept from shedding a tear. May the families of the victims and the survivors fully heal physically and emotionally, but never forget those who were lost.
The majority are letting law enforcement work, helping those around us heal, and waiting for the answers to so many questions about these senseless murders. However, we are also seeing elected officials, former presidential candidates, talk show hosts, “journalists”, “comedians”, and letters to the editor that are using this tragedy as an opportunity to advance their political agenda. I am as sorry to see this response as you are. Their timing is ghoulish, their suggestions are unfounded, and their political motivation is clear. The last thing we want to do in a time of tragedy is talk politics.
“There is no legislation that will strip evil from an immoral man.”
– San Diego County Gun Owners Board Member Warren Mandfredi
I wish SDCGO did not have to respond to these political stunts, but we know that you want us to be a voice of reason against those who leverage tragedy to advance their agenda. Standing in the way of those who want to force their agenda into your life is exactly what we are designed to do. SDCGO will respond and continue to be a resource to media with facts and truth. We will not turn our response into a fundraising request or membership opportunity. We certainly will not view this as an opportunity of any kind. We will maintain the composed dignity and honor you have come to expect from San Diego County Gun Owners.
Thank you all.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Schwartz
Executive Director
San Diego County Gun Owners PAC
Founded in 2015, the San Diego County Gun Owners is a registered political action committee (FPPC ID #1379388) and advocacy organization focused on organizing the gun industry and community and protecting the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to bear arms. While every U.S. state has a Second Amendment PAC, along with several nationwide gun rights PACs, SDCGO is America’s only local, countywide Second Amendment advocacy organization.
Comments 10
I think we can all agree giving the government, and thereby Trump, the precedent to take people’s property and means to defend themselves is not a good thing.
“The last thing we want to do in a time of tragedy is talk politics.”
Maybe someone should tell that to our President every time he uses an attack by an Islamist extremist as an excuse to tout his immigration ban.
Author
Hypocrisy, I do not exactly disagree with you. I do think there is a difference and would be interested in hearing if you agree in the difference I am about to explain.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe an example of the president pushing for changes in immigration policy is the San Bernardino mass murder. In this case, the murderers were immigrants and would have been stopped from entering the country had there been stricter scrutiny placed on them.
Isn’t that an actual solution that would have prevented these murderers?
Monday of this week after a horrible tragedy, Hillary Clinton and the Brady Org used the murder of 59 people as a way to push for stopping a tax on “silencers” and “universal background checks”. Neither of these are a solution or preventative measure. So they aren’t trying to find a way to prevent what happened…like Trump was…they just used a tragedy to push a political agenda already written and wouldn’t have prevented this tragedy.
I believe that is an important difference.
SDCGO,
Where to even start in response:
The main complaint from the “now is not the right time” crowd is that this is a time to allow families to grieve and that there should be respect shown to the victims. In other words, we can talk about it later (Of course, later never happens). My point was that The President never gave the families of other tragedies that same respect.
As for your San Bernardino example, would that that were the only one… The vast majority of the President’s immigration rants have come after attacks by native-born terrorists . And by the way, the San Bernardino attacker was born in Chicago. He was not an immigrant.
As for the “would it have prevented what happened,” certainly a ban on bump fire stocks could have made a huge difference in the number of killed and injured. Likewise, a limit on the size of magazines. I don’t know that a ban on silencers would have helped in this case, but commonsense tells me that if the killers in some of the more close range massacres had silencers, the death tolls would have been worse.
Author
Hypocrisy,
I still think the distinction we pointed out is an important one. Many politicians and the Brady Org are acting downright ghoulish after this horrible, horrible murder. They are taking the opportunity to push for laws that have nothing to do with the crime and using it to raise money and membership. Pretty gross.
To clarify, SDCGO did not say “now is the right time”. We talk about Second Amendment issues all the time.
-Michael
SDCGO,
Your distinction was not only unimportant, it was factually incorrect. Facts matter, or at least they used to.
The vile human being who committed the terrorist attack in San Bernardino WAS NOT AN IMMIGRANT; he was born in Chicago. Therefore, Trump’s Immigration Ban would have had no effect.
And there are two things that we could have/should have done which would have limited the carnage in Las Vegas: Ban bump fire stocks and limit the amount of bullets a gun can fire without needing to be reloaded.
Author
Hypocrisy,
The other murderer in the San Bernardino mass murder was born in Pakistan and immigrated very recently from Saudi Arabia.
Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech murderer, was also an immigrant.
The Tsarnaev brothers were both immigrants too. Speaking of, would limiting magazine capacity helped stop the Tsarnaev brothers? This is just my opinion, but no.
The murderer in Las Vegas shot thousands of rounds. There are no magazines that hold thousands of rounds. Which means he changed magazines a lot. Changing a magazine takes less than 5 seconds. Are we really betting our public safety and people’s life on the inability for a criminal to change magazines? I really hope not.
There is nothing wrong with waiting for facts before coming up with a policy. But emotion seems to be the age we’re in.
The left jumps on guns because it’s an easy sell to a group that doesn’t own them. “If you just take theirs away you’ll all be safe” is the siren song. And it is shameful to propose a solution that involves taking the rights of some (really 2A is all of us but…) for the backing of the many. Especially if it’s not really a solution, as homicide rates are largely flat in banned countries.
Sadly, curbing rights has become a core belief among Democrats. Guns are scary, curb 2A. Speech is hateful or hurtful, curb 1A. Religion is bigoted, curb 1A again. 4A is likely next. 3A is probably safe.
SDCGO,
The other San Bernardino murderer was the wife of a native-born U.S. citizen. Are you seriously suggesting that we shouldn’t allow citizens to marry people born outside the United States? Or seriously suggesting that if you do, you can no longer live in the United States?
SDCGO,
“Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech murderer, was also an immigrant.”
Correct. From South Korea! Are you suggesting we ban immigrants from one of our strongest allies?