By ROBERT LAURIE – Eliminating our rights will not stop the violence

Heroin, beer, homosexuality, The Wizard of Oz, dancing, fireworks, marijuana, Catcher in the Rye, unpasteurized milk, sex before marriage, the teaching of creationism, the teaching of evolution, pornography, The bible, Beatles music, the Koran, cocaine, the Torah, the Talmud, the Kama Sutra, large sodas, pet ownership, flavored cigarettes, polygamy, American flags flying on private property, fugu, homemade bombs, adultery, energy drinks, LSD, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hate speech, absinthe, haggis, kinder eggs, liquor, various fruits and vegetables, rhesus monkeys, the communist manifesto, foie gras, Cuban cigars, counterfeit clothing, video games, prostitutes, gambling, rottweilers, The Last Temptation of Christ, pinball machines, electric guitars, soft cheeses, public protest, violent movies, and, of course, GUNS.

All of these things have, in various parts of the U.S., at various times, been legal before becoming the outlawed subject of state or federal bans.

Without exception, all of them (and many, many, others) have survived their attempted controls, and have always been easy to access, consume, view, or purchase. Even things like drugs and firearms which, at this very instant, exist under the tightest controls they have ever known, are easily attainable without license or prescription.

In previous decades, if liberals were right about anything, it was their constant drumbeat that “bans do not solve the problem, they only force people to find ways to circumvent the law.” This claim was most commonly applied to the drug war, but they would trot it out whenever the feds were coming after one of their favorite issues.

Their argument was always “if you solve the underlying issue, you won’t need the ban.”

Sadly, in the wake of last week’s violent attack at Sandy Hook elementary, leftist statists have abandoned the idea that we’re a free country, opting instead to inform us that we need to do everything in our power to eliminate the rights of law abiding citizens. “It’s the only way,” they claim, “to make sure we’re safe.”

This morning on the Sunday news shows, a host of left-wing talking heads blamed handguns and yammered on about the need to crackdown on firearm ownership; 2^nd Amendment be damned. They abandoned the 1^st Amendment as well, blaming violent video games, movies, and TV shows. Their first instinct, as always, is to search for something to take away, as if there’s one offensive item that will make mass murder a thing of the past.

I heard none of them - not one - lay the blame at the feet of the subhuman monster who carried out these atrocities. None of them talked about the collapse of the American family, nor did they mention their own never-ending “I’m ok, you’re ok” worship of moral relativism. After systematically dismantling the concept of right and wrong, they’re faced with the ugly realization that they’ve created a world where multiple generations have been raised under their precepts – and they don’t like the results.

We have a President who “cries” for murdered children, but supports the abject horror of partial birth abortion. We have a political body which tells us to “pray for children killed in a Newtown school” yet it’s fought for decades to remove prayer from the very school in question. We’ve watched as they construct a nation that refuses to acknowledge the fact that moral absolutes exist, yet they still demand the moral high ground when a psycho goes off the rails. Since they can never admit that liberal goals and hypocrisy are part of the problem, they blame guns and movies.

The mass killing of children, the most precious among us, is the most despicable crime imaginable. However, we can’t let Democrats exploit the abhorrent actions of one man to destroy the freedoms they’ve always sought to eliminate.

Gun control is simply the argument that, when the defenseless are murdered, everyone should be made equally defenseless …except the criminals who would prey on them.

Undoing the 1^st and 2^nd Amendment rights of law abiding citizens won’t stop the destruction; it will only target the method of the attack. We need to be addressing the motives, including mental health, because there will always be another destructive tool.

Until we restore our cultural focus on morality, respect, and ethics – things we’ve been told are too old-fashioned to matter – we’ll never stem the tide of violence.

UPDATE: Before you pounce on me for not going more deeply into the mental health issue, let me just say that yes, that plays a major part too. I'll be getting into it in another column, since this one is mainly focused on the knee-jerk desire to start banning things.

Former NYPD Detective John Baeza says that it’s important to mourn, but we need to take action to see that schools are made safer. And to do it he says we need to repeal legislation making schools gun-free zones so that teachers can properly defend themselves:

Watch: