Soap Box

As a long time gun owner and advocate of the Second Amendment I will be the first to acknowledge that guns are dangerous and have to be treated with extreme caution and kept in places where children can't get their hands on them.

I will be the first to admit that unscrupulous dealers should be put out of business and in many cases sent to prison for selling guns to those who don't qualify.

I believe that crimes committed with guns should carry heavy penalties and that repeat offenders should be taken off the street permanently.

I believe in gun registration, background checks in the purchase of handguns and that known felons should be denied the right to own them at all.

Now having said that, let me say this.

I have owned guns for over 65 years, have never killed, wounded or even pointed a loaded gun at another human being and I am in the overwhelming majority of gun owners in this country.

There is a move afoot to disarm America and it has less to do with public safety than control. I submit to you that the powers that be know that know the vast majority of gun owners in this country would never use them for overt or offensive purposes. But they also know that an armed public is not as easy to dominate as an unarmed one.

I submit to you that if every legal gun owner in America turned in every gun they owned crime would not only not diminish, it would increase exponentially, no home and no person in America would be safe, because the real reason for our epidemic crime problem would still be on the street and free to plunder anything short of a military base or a police station.

The United Kingdom does not allow private ownership of handguns and you have to jump through hoops to even own a shotgun, but there are six stabbing murders a week there, not to mention the still significant number of shootings with the banished handguns every year.

Last week an 88-year-old World War II veteran was beaten to death with a flashlight in a parking lot in Spokane, Washington.

Do you think that the punks who killed Chris Lane just for kicks would have been deterred from murder simply because they didn't have a gun.

What about the three young thugs who jumped the kid on a school bus in Florida, do you think they might have beat him to death if they'd had him in a private place? I do.

Do you believe that when killing another human being to pass muster for membership in a street gang the absence of a gun would deter it?

Do you believe that an animal coldhearted enough to shoot a baby in a stroller in the face would not use a brick or a stick to achieve their goal?

So let's clean up the rogue dealers, let's take the scumbags off the street who sell guns out of the trunk of a car on the street corner, let's register, do background checks and everything else, within reason, society can do to make the streets safer, which in essence, means enforcing the voluminous laws already on the books.

And then let's get down to the meat of the problem.

Taking the criminals off the street. It can be done, but not with an attorney general who decides who he'll prosecute by the color of their skin, not with a police force whose hands are so tied by political correctness it makes it next to impossible to effectively enforce the law, and not with a southern border that nobody even knows what comes across it.

Are there not racketeering laws that would apply to street gangs, are there not economic sanctions that would apply to countries who don't even try to stem the flow of drugs to our shores. Are there not mandatory prison terms for those who commit crimes with guns?

Do the murder capitols of America not already have the toughest gun laws in the country?

Gun prohibition would work just about as well as alcohol prohibition did, creating a whole new generation of Al Capones and Lucky Lucianos who would become rich selling black market firearms.

Bad people couldn't care less about laws, they only respond to action and it's high time we took the velvet glove off and gave them some.

What so you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels​