Dear Elder Morrison,
In your recent interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, you are quoted as asking “What sensible reason could there ever be for having guns in schools?”
I can give one very important one. To protect our children.
About eight years ago, Israel was experiencing a dilemma much like we are facing here in the U.S. today. Terrorist attacks on school children were taking hundreds of live each year and completely disrupting their school system. They, too, realized that they must take action to protect their children.
Unlike the American public, the Israelis had not been brain washed into believing that an inanimate object had the power and ability to act on its own without the will and choice of a human being. They decided that the real way to protect their children was to give those responsible for their schools the tools to honestly do something other than whine and pretend that they were doing something constructive. Israel trained and armed the teachers and administrators.
In the last eight years, there have been only four deaths of Israeli school children from attack while engaged in school activity. Those four deaths came on a field trip to Jordan where, at the request of the Jordanian government, they left their weapons home as they traveled to a “Mecca of peace.” Shortly after arriving, they were attacked by terrorists and four children lost their lives because the adults with them were powerless to protect them.
All it takes to realize that disarming any people, or group of people, accomplishes is to make them a sitting target for those of evil intent. This has held true throughout the world and through all recorded history. Every time a people has been deprived of the means of self defense, they have been enslaved and slaughtered. Not just a few times, but EVERY TIME! I can find over thirty (30) such times in the last century alone.
If by some chance you have an honest interest in understanding the truth about the gun control issues, I can provide you with large amounts of documentary evidence that banning guns has not and will not provide ANY level of safety for our children. In fact, almost all of the refereed research shows that banning guns only increases the death and violence.
As one easy example, take a look at Washington D.C., where guns are banned completely. Washington D.C. has the highest rate of murder by firearms in the nation. Conversely, the State of Vermont, where there are NO restrictions on the carrying of weapons by law abiding citizens, has one of the lowest in the country and is the ONLY state where there has not been a copycat threat since the tragedy in Littleton, Colorado.
Now, lest you misunderstand my position, I support swift and severe punishment of those who would misuse a weapon, ANY weapon, not just a gun. This include such things a knives, baseball bats, rocks, automobiles and turnips. Yes, automobiles. There was an incident in California just a few weeks ago where a despondent man intent on killing several people in order to bring attention to his emotional troubles used a Cadillac to kill four children and injure several others in a schoolyard. I’m certain that you have heard no outcry to ban cars. In fact, the story was buried on page 10 of the Los Angeles Times and completely ignored by most of the wire services. In 1994 there was a case of a person being killed in England by a turnip thrown from a passing vehicle. It makes no difference what the weapon is, it is a person that commits the crime and it is the person that should be punished.
Instead of reacting to the emotional outcry echoed and amplified by those who would enslave people and destroy freedom, study, think, and pray about what is needed to restore civility and order.