Gun control is a serious topic for national discussion, even though the NRA has led the fight, cogently and carefully, to maintain an American citizen's right to bear arms. Point of fact, so has the United States Supreme Court (District of Columbia v. Heller) established that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right to bear arms, with the declining crime rate in D.C. to validate the policy).
Twice in 2012, national, media-focused tragedy struck. Not once but twice, a crazed gunman filed into a public area and shot at unwitting bystanders.
Aurora, Colorado was a disastrous display of mental illness unchecked, in which the assailant had passed every conceivable metric whet her there would have been any cause for alarm. An unassuming adult until he barged into a movie theater and shredded an audience with automatic firepower, this man purchased firepower without raising an concerns. The proper response to neutralizing such threats was, is, and remains "a good guy with a gun." As an international example, Israel's "El Al" airline permits one armed security guard on the plane at all times, and not once has an Israeli airplane been hijacked. The Israelis have higher rates of gun ownership than the United States, yet they suffer fewer gun deaths.
In Connecticut, the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre (with twenty children slaughtered and six adults killed) was also tragic. It was preventable, but not with more gun control. The school was a sitting target, since Connecticut law made that and all other public schools "Gun free zones". Take away the certainty of an easy hit, and potential marauders will recalculate before they calibrate.
Maryland, a one-party state for too long, has also entered the gun control debate. Because of "progressive" President Barack Obama's attempt to stifle gun ownership and work down the Second Amendment by executive fiat, Maryland Democrats have assumed that they can press their own gun control measures as well. While Democratic lawmakers targeted gun ownership, Marylanders took to the streets to protest and protect their right to bear arms.
Now the Republicans of Maryland, for too long a disrespected minority, are rising up to combat the "Michael Bloomberg" nanny-state liberalism which is bedevilling Maryland once again.
The background story: a little boy, Joshua Welch, was suspended from school in Maryland's Anne Arundel County because of his "Pop-Tart pistol," in which he nibbled the breakfast bit to look like a hand-gun, then said "Bang! Bang!" School suspensions are a serious, legal matter, but the cause of this referral is as unserious as telling people that they have to buy health insurance, or else pay a fine (not a tax); or that 43 million people on foodstamps represents progress; or that a "black" President sympathizes with black people because he promotes policies which force blacks to endure double digit unemployment, twice the national average, with black youth struggling under 50% unemployment.
Of course, the irrational rationale that "guns kill people, therefore ban the toy versions, or the edible ones" is not a new idea, but the basic idea for pressing these outrageous anti-"firearm" measures in public schools. Pre-schools on university campuses have pressed for preventing little boys from playing "Cops and Robbers" or "Spiderman" because the "violence" and fake "gun play" will one day turn them into violent men. One locale in Southern California even considering banning toy guns from city limits. Rational debate was not up for debate, since its vacuous absence among leading civic activists has been in place for a long time.
From California to Maryland, one-party Democratic Nanny-state liberalism has exposed the ninny-state mindset of "Big Government" regressive-progressives. Congratulations to State Senator J. B. Jennings, for presenting “The Reasonable School Discipline Act of 2013″. Schools are failing to educate our kids in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they are teaching Americans about the overreaching rhetoric and rationalism. Such legislative measures, like US Senator Rand Paul's thirteen hour filibuster, give the Republicans the due respect and attention that they deserve from the media while calling attention to the outrageous and unimaginable incompetent decisions of supermajority Democratic governments.
Keep your guns, and hold on to your pop-tarts, Maryland GOP. President Obama may very well shoot himself and his party in the foot with his perverse progressivism. By picking a fight over firearms, he shot off on an issue which has everyone shooting mad in this country, and now they are aiming to take down the Democratic hypermajority hyperventilation dominating statehouse, like in Annapolis, Maryland.