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The campaign to control or banish guns is the ideal ideological issue for the Left and the Democrats to push. Banishing guns suits their worldview and their ideology to a “T”. Like most of their “solutions” that don’t solve the problem at hand, leftists believe that outlawing certain guns will solve the problem of mass murders of innocents. It’s amazing how these people fail to understand how naïve and useless this “solution” is. And the Parkland school tragedy is the latest example.

This horrific calamity is not about gun laws. It’s about school safety. It’s about putting procedures in place to protect our young people from depraved, mentally ill savages. School shooters want a soft target. They don’t want a gunfight, they want a slaughter. So shooters love gun-free zones, like schools; they know they can do their grisly work without bullets coming toward them.

Apparently, anti-gun people block out the inconvenient knowledge that there are all kinds of ways a shooter can get his hands on a weapon without even buying it at a gun shop, like the Parkland killer did. He can steal it in a burglary or car break-in, he can buy it on the black market, he can break into a relative’s locked cabinet, he can beg or borrow or get a buddy to buy it for him. More gun laws won’t stop school shooters or mass murderers. If you plan to murder people, you certainly don’t worry about obeying laws that try to keep guns out of your hands. What prevents gun violence by bad guys is a good guy with a gun; guns protect just as much as they kill.

But what we have here is the Democrats, again crying out for gun confiscation, banning several types of weapons, banning large magazines, and the empty gesture of age limits for gun purchases. None of this is going to solve the problem.  Rather, what the Dems are encouraging and doing with their call for bans is “feel good” stuff, rather than actually “doing good” stuff. Banning rifles won’t get the job done because it won’t get to the root of the problem, which is to prevent insane people from acquiring guns.

The students at Parkland, many of whom lost close friends in their terrible ordeal, deserve their say and deserve to be listened to, (and the Democrats are making sure they are provided with talking points). These students are victims. They are also teenage kids, who are being portrayed and used by the media as “experts”. While they deserve our compassion and our sympathy, and protection by the authorities, let’s remember that most of them do not have the real-life experiences – such as paying taxes and supporting themselves– and the wisdom, to arrive at the complicated solutions needed to deal with mass murderers.

In the days since the Parkland killings, I have received or seen a slew of emails and solicitation letters from Democrats, wanting contributions or organizing protests. Here, the Dems are guilty of the textbook example of exploiting tragedy for political gain, pushing a political agenda. Or, in the words of Dem icon Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste”. One email from an opportunist Dem official even noted that “Voter registration forms were available (at rallies) and the students encouraged to get involved”. Can you get any more politically blatant than that? “Democrats rushed to capitalize on dead teens”, wrote a Wall Street Journal columnist.

The deeper problem the Democrats have is that the party’s progressive wing is calling the shots. The Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-types have hijacked the familiar old Democratic Party, and otherwise sensible Dems are being coerced to jump into the radical slipstream the Far Lefties have created.

It seems we have reached the point in America where conservatives think their way through life and most liberals feel their way through life. But problem-solving requires thinking and logic, not emotion.

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John R. Smith

John R. Smith is chairman of BIZPAC, the Business Political Action Committee of Palm Beach County, and owner of a financial services company. He is a frequent columnist for BizPac Review.

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