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CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, July 23, 2012

by William Hamilton, Ph.D.

When the Joker comes: Who you gonna call?

The tragic shootings during a midnight showing of the new Batman movie have already produced two totally predictable attempts by those who want to grab guns away from law-abiding Americans. First, we saw an attempt by Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos of ABC-TV News to suggest the shooter belongs to the Colorado Tea Party. No wonder a recent Gallup Poll shows Americans’ confidence in TV news has fallen from 35-percent in 1994 to just 21-percent in 2012.

Surely, Ross and Stephanopoulos understand the phenomenon of “first news,” and that their subsequent retraction will only come to the notice of less than ten-percent of those who were taken in by their false report.

But what if we discover that James Eagen Holmes, the self-styled Joker, is a registered Democrat? How quick will ABC-TV be to report that? Oops. Did I just do a Brian Ross-George Stephanopoulos and plant the suggestion that the suspect is a Democrat? Sorry about that.

The second phenomenon will be howls from the gun grabbing groups who think the Batman movie massacre is about guns and that passing more laws restricting the ownership and/or possession of guns will cause anyone and everyone with criminal and/or evil thoughts to never, ever touch a gun again. Wonder if they ever learned the truth about the Tooth Fairy?

Watch for the gun-grabbers to try to create more “safe zones” within which deranged shooters can carry out their evil deeds without interruption. The gun-grabbers will try to create more venues such as: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Ft. Hood, or that island in Norway, and more movie theaters with posted “no-gun” policies, where the innocent are without the protection of law-abiding citizens bearing arms.

Recently, in a Florida Internet cafe, the patrons were quietly pecking away at the keyboards when a man armed with a revolver and another man brandishing a baseball bat attempted to rob them. Samuel Williams, a 71-year-old retiree with a concealed-carry permit and a semi-automatic pistol, drove the dangerous duo out of the Internet cafe with gunfire. The wounded robbers fled to a hospital. They are charged with attempted armed robbery. Other than the evil-doers, no one was injured.

Watch for the Democrat-controlled Senate to support the ratification of the proposed U.N. Arms Trade Treaty which can be interpreted to include civilian rifles, shotguns, handguns, and ammunition. Treaties triumph the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Conceivably, the U.N. could declare the right of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms null and void. Then, only members of law enforcement and the military could possess firearms. We saw how well that worked out in Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Fortunately, most of us won’t be attacked by evil lunatics like the self-styled Joker. Unfortunately, there are way too many “ordinary” criminals who are willing to rob, rape, and kill. Here is where a gun or even the illusion of a gun can play a positive role. Put a pro-2d Amendment sticker on your house. Ordinary street criminals are rational enough to know to go somewhere else.

Will a pro-2d Amendment sticker protect our loved ones against a deranged, Joker-type killer? No. That’s when you need to call on Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.

©2012. William Hamilton.

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Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com

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