The Aurora, CO. tragedy and how the rest of us are reacting

On Friday, July 20th at a midnight screening of the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, a very troubled young man walked into the theater armed with a .12 gauge shotgun a .40 caliber Glock handgun and a semi-automatic rifle with a high capacity drum clip.  He threw gas canisters into the theater and then proceeded to open fire on the crowd, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.

When word of this horrific event reached the world, people acted the way people do to such unimaginable things.  Shock, horror, anger, helplessness and then finally sadness.  Such feelings are very familiar to me, as I saw this played out once earlier in my life when my fraternal twin brother was shot with an "unloaded" gun at a friend's house and rushed to the emergency room.  He eventually ended up in intensive care with a collapsed lung and paralyzed from the waist down.  That was now almost 30 years ago.  My brother, Donald.  Born deaf but very alive and vibrant.  Athletic and always active (unlike me) and now unable to walk, run, ride a bike, skate or do anything else the same way ever again.

Our mother and father were grief stricken, as were the parents and family of the boy who shot him.  My mother demanded that my father get rid of the handgun we all knew he had but had no idea where it was.  To this day my mom is very much anti-gun and against people owning those "things" as she calls them.  I get it, I understand and respect her feelings because I shared those same feelings for many years.  All this came back to me very clearly as I watched friends and acquaintances lash out in anger on facebook and twitter about how stupid America is for their handgun laws.  How we have so many accidents per day, how guns should be outlawed and the world would all come together and sing kum-by-yah around some giant campfire.

I'm sorry, I respectfully disagree.  Like I said, I get that reasoning.  I too had it at one time, but that's a natural reaction to the feeling of helplessness that we ALL shared when we heard the news and sat there thinking that there "must be some way to prevent these things from happening".  I wish that were true!  We live in a fallen world.  A world with evil in it, and anyone who knows to put on body armor and plan such a horrible massacre is evil, plain and simple.

The gun didn't shoot my brother of its own volition, and the weapons that Mr. Holmes used didn't spontaneously go off and destroy all those lives.  If my brother had been paralyzed in a car accident, I can guarantee you that I would still be driving 30 minutes one way every day to work and so would everyone else in my family (including my mother).  When Donald was transferred to Lucerne Hospital in Orlando to the Spinal Injury unit, I remember visiting him there and meeting a guy who was paralyzed from the neck down because he was jogging on the beach and tripped on a piece of driftwood!  I wonder if anyone of his loved ones ever considered a ban on jogging or driftwood?

To my friends and acquaintances who are against handguns and feel they should be outlawed.  Ask yourself, all political rhetoric aside, would someone unafraid to break the law really obey the government telling them to hand over all their weapons?  Of course not!  So all the law abiding people who have been trained, taken classes, paid for permits, got background checks and everything else turn theirs in and we sit by helpless while the criminals take advantage of an unarmed society and an understaffed and underpaid police force?

I'm not advocating an old west society where everyone straps on an "iron" and there are shootouts in the streets, but it has been proven time and again that criminals will go where they are least likely to get shot.  They don't mind jail, but robbing a convenience store where the owner has a shotgun behind the counter is not worth the trouble.  You see, it's not the gun but the threat of the gun that keeps crime rates down in places where people are more prone to carry.  Doubt it?  Compare the crime rates between Texas and New York, or Tennessee and California.

The last instructor I had for my carry permit closed his class by saying "I hope to God the only thing you ever have to shoot is a paper target" and you know what, I hope so too.  Please don't let fear and the feeling of helplessness take away the rights of a law abiding citizen who enjoys target shooting with friends and family and who, by simple matter of statistics, keeps the crime rate down in your neck of the woods.

Take care,

David