We also have the right to protect ourselves with gun ownership. It’s as fundamental as choosing our type of religious worship or allowing the press to be critical of our government.
What is foolish and unnecessary is the media criticism that immediately ties a well-publicized crime to the gun rather than to the criminal.
There are a number of steps that can be taken that will benefit all Americans, including the millions of law-abiding gun owners as well as those people who believe wrongly that guns are the source of our crime problems.
We have to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental health issues. The fact that people with mental health problems can obtain guns is not right. We all agree about that and we have to stop it, but there are some big hurdles.
Let’s deal with reality: Our mental health system is broken, and it needs to be fixed. Politicians have ignored this issue because it is such a complex problem, and it might cost some big money.
But the fact is we need to fix this problem now.
Many of the mass murders that have taken place in this country over the last several years have one glaring fact in common: There were red flags that were ignored, and warning signs about the future “murderers” that were ignored. Parents and close friends, even Facebook friends, chose not to say anything or to look the other way. Denial is not responsible behavior.
Most people with mental health problems aren’t violent; they just need help. We have to invest the money and resources to expand treatment programs that can provide that help. But there are people who are violent. They are a danger to the community and they are a danger to themselves.
There are people who should be institutionalized and not living on the streets. Judges say they are entitled to their rights, which of course is true. They are entitled up to the point when they become dangerous to others and themselves. Then the situation changes. Then we have to protect the rights of young children going innocently to school or families out for a relaxing evening at a movie.
Why is this important to law-abiding gun owners? Because you are the citizens the antigun movement and the media blame when a deranged madman uses a gun to commit a horrific act. When one of these tragedies occurs, you can be sure two things are going to follow. First, opponents of gun rights will immediately exploit the situation to push their antigun agenda, and second, none of their proposed restrictions would have prevented the tragedy from taking place.
We need real solutions to solve real problems. We don’t need advocates of useless gun restrictions taking advantage of emotional situations to push their agenda.
So how can we protect and extend the rights of law-abiding gun owners? We accomplish that by educating all Americans about the facts. For example, there has been a long and expensive campaign to find different ways to ban guns or gun hardware. In effect, just get rid of guns. That’s the answer gun control advocates give.
This tactic is a road to nowhere.
Opponents of gun rights often use a lot of scary descriptive phrases when proposing legislative action against various types of weapons. Ban “assault weapons” they say, or “military-style weapons,” or “high-capacity magazines.”
Those all do sound a little ominous, until you understand what they are actually talking about are common, popular semiautomatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned and used by tens of millions of Americans.
I worry when our social-policy makers, looking for a “cause,” pick on guns. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the government simply has no business and, in fact, no right to dictate to gun owners what types of firearms law-abiding Americans are allowed to own. Gun owners should be allowed to purchase the best type of weapon for their needs, whether it’s for self-protection, sport shooting, or any other purpose.
There has been a lot of speculation about background checks, as if researching the background of everyone attempting to legally purchase a gun will somehow keep guns out of the hands of criminals. The national background-check system has been in place since 1998. Every time a gun is purchased from a federally licensed gun dealer, which is how the overwhelming majority of all gun purchases take place, they have to go through a federal background check.
Unfortunately, as expected, bringing more government regulation into the situation has accomplished very little. The main “benefit” has been to make it difficult for a law-abiding American to buy a gun. As study after study has proven, few criminals are stupid enough to try to pass a background check or have their names in any kind of system.
So they get their guns the same way bad guys have always gotten their guns—by stealing them or by buying them from an unlicensed source or getting them from family and friends.
This system is another example of federal regulation that has turned into a complete failure. When the system was put in place, gun owners were promised it would be instant, accurate, and fair. That isn’t what has happened at all.
One final caveat. We need to allow our military members to carry firearms on bases and at recruiting centers. As we have seen, our current policies leave our military members—and their families—defenseless on their own bases. They can be sitting ducks for one crazy person with a machine gun.
In the end, we must understand and appreciate why the right to keep and bear arms is so essential for law-abiding citizens. And we must recognize that the red tape proposed to infringe upon that right is a tremendous waste and possible danger to us all. My sons Donald and Eric are members of the NRA—and so am I—and proud of it!
12
OUR INFRASTRUCTURE IS CRUMBLING
THERE ARE SOME THINGS so obvious that even Joe Biden can see them.
Take, for example, the state of our country’s infrastructure. Vice President Biden once said, “If I blindfolded someone and took him at two o’clock in the morning into the airport in Hong Kong and said, ‘Where do you think you are?’ they’d say, ‘This must be America. It’s a modern airport.’ But if I blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you’d think, ‘I must be in some third-world country.’ ”
The good news is that London Bridge isn’t falling down. But that bridge, which is now located in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, may be the only bridge in America that isn’t in danger of falling down.
Our airports, bridges, water tunnels, power grids, rail systems—our nation’s entire infrastructure—is crumbling, and we aren’t doing anything about it. Former secretary of transportation Ray LaHood knows all about this and got it right when he said, “If we are going to have safe transportation systems in America, you have to invest in them. We haven’t done that.”
He described our way of dealing with this problem as the “limp along, go along” system. “There’s no vision. No leadership in Washington to fix it, and they are trying to put Band-Aids and duct tape and other things on these fixes and they simply do not work.”
This country’s infrastructure is falling apart. According to engineers, one out of every nine bridges in this country is structurally deficient, approximately a quarter of them are already functionally obsolete, and almost a third of them have exceeded their design lives.
Some of these bridges have already collapsed. Barry LePatner, who wrote a book about this topic, said the following: “Since 1989 we’ve had more than 600 bridge failures in this country and… a large number of bridges in every state are really a danger to the traveling public.”