We have been told that the security guard inside the door of the Pulse club was armed with a handgun, and that he was among the first to die early on that awful Sunday morning . It mattered not a whit that he was armed, because he was neutralized immediately, providing no deterrent to the shooter, armed with a nefarious hatred, a vicious plan, and an AR-15.
No reasonable weapon in the hands of a guard, not even another assault rifle, would be likely to prevail against the one used by the Pulse shooter. In fact, it borders on the miraculous that, armed with 700 rounds of ammunition as the shooter was, that all 300 celebrants at the Pulse did not die, or at least be seriously wounded, in yesterday’s attack. It was a horrible and unprecedented attack, simple in concept, perfectly executed, and the most deadly in our nation’s history. And it could be repeated anywhere, at ant time., at a church, a school, a Walmart, a shopping mall
In the face of an assault weapon, every one of us is a sitting duck. We are vulnerable everywhere we go, in every public venue. Security guards are powerless in the face of a motivated shooter who is able to deliver a torrent of fire in a confined space. Like the innocent patrons of the Pulse, we are all like fish in a barrel.
We are all vulnerable.
Assault weapons have but one purpose: to kill people. They have no purpose for hunting. no role in self-defense. Assault weapons are a menace to public health.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a bill outlawing most assault weapons in the US. Ten years later, the law expired, unrenewed by a Congress unwilling to face a burgeoning lobbying effort and jeopardize the flow of abundant campaign funds from the gun lobby, now clearly under control of gun manufacturers. In the intervening decade, the assault weapon ban had been unsuccessfully challenged in the courts, unchallenged evenon Second Amendment grounds .
We owe it to our society to remove from it the scourge of assault weapons. Some of our citizens may want them, but our society does not need them. At some point, and I argue that such a time is right now, the safety of our populace far outweighs the wants of a few citizens and the pernicious greed of an unbridled gun industry. Assault weapons have once again been demonstrated to materially degrade our society’s greater good, our innocent citizenry’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.