Sam Osborne

A few people have such a religious-like fixation on guns as all powerful and inerrant instruments of do-and-undo violence that they would even press them into the hands of a blind person, blame places that for safety are to be gun free for guns that get into where they should not be, and with just as distorted sense of reason they might just as well contend that a person crying out for treatment for neglected mental health should just as well get some guns and go and randomly cut down 13 people.

It is totally insane to think that guns in the hands of many people makes it safe and secure for all. Those who are foolish enough to fantasize of people living in such chaos and lack of good order ignore or are too uninformed by history to know that the worst days in our parents’ America was much more orderly and secure and only in recent times has it been made less so by the profiteering NRA that has come along and propagandized to make of our nation an armed camp. The bad things that are happening with guns is happening because of those that perpetrate the growth of a gun culture of predictable violence.

The totally ridiculous position is that we can arm schools and everything else and get everything bristling with guns, have violence be the way of daily life and make the ones we love and care so much about safer.

Such is idiotic—this was a military installation that was intended to be as secure as people of an armed profession could make it. And just recently in Iowa a peace officer was cut down in Rockwell by a person who just had to have and do what he wanted with a gun. Any one so deluded to think that a proliferation of guns is an answer to better law and order in our land is too irrational to be anywhere near a gun.

Sam Osborne, former editorial writer and Opinion Page Editor, Iowa City Press-Citizen; former college professor and Business Department chair, Ellsworth Community College; and currently out to pasture drinking too much coffee.  His commentary, The Obstructed View,  appears on this blog occasionally.