Professor: Waco Shows Need For More Gun Control

Drawn like ants to honey, liberals have wasted no time swarming the Waco biker gang shootout with their tired arguments for more gun control. University of Texas professor John Traphagan is one of those liberals, and he wrote a Dallas Morning News op-ed piece after the shooting asking for Americans to give up their gun rights in exchange for a safe and secure country.

Citing both the Waco shootout that left nine dead and the Colorado movie theater shooting from 2012, Traphagan said, “Americans seem to see these regular incidents as normal. It’s a powerful and sad testament to how anesthetized we have become to this ongoing violence.” He says it is amazing that people are still pushing for looser gun regulations in the wake of these tragedies.

First of all, this gives you a glimpse into the bizarre alternate universe where these liberals dwell. In what world did Americans view the Aurora shooting as “normal?” James Holmes is all but a household name today, and his trial – closed to cameras – has garnered plenty of media attention. And the Waco shooting was sensational enough to knock the Amtrak crash out of the top news spot. Americans do not see these incidents as normal, but they may be forgiven for seeing through these attempts to use them for propaganda purposes.

In a way, though, incidents like these are normal, as sad as that might be. Humans are a violent species, and we have been that way since the beginning of time. Long before guns were invented, people were killing each other in vast numbers. The truth is that the world is safer today, proportionally, than at almost any other time in recorded history. Liberals, always feeding off American fear, want you to think the country is so dangerous that you might get shot checking your mail.

“Americans do not seem to be able to handle gun ownership in a way that permits maintenance of a civil society,” Traphagan claims, and he has just the answer for that. According to him, it’s time to enact laws aimed at “significantly curtailing or eliminating access to and the ability to purchase guns.” Of course, one can guess that he prefers the elimination strategy to the curtailing strategy. He also proposes that the government should create confiscation programs to get illegal guns off the streets, which proves that he has a lot more faith in the U.S. government than most.

The truth is that the majority of gun deaths are attributable to gang violence and suicide. Suicide is not a concern for the federal government and gun control legislation is not going to do anything about gangs. If the government wants to improve national security from the inside out, they should focus on getting rid of organized crime syndicates, obliterating inner city gangs, and finding better ways to pinpoint psychopaths like Holmes. They need to drop the PC charade and start profiling criminals using every tool at their disposal, and that includes seeing radical Islam for the problem that it is.

We don’t have to trade freedom for security if we do things right. Gun violence is a symptom, not a disease. To see that, though, liberals like John Traphagan would have to denounce most of their beliefs.