Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the debate about gun violence has been raging both in Washington and in Trenton. Many officials have called for stricter gun control laws. But gun rights advocates like Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (R-25) remain steadfastly opposed to new regulation. Carroll, who has advocated for the right to carry concealed weapons, tells NJ Today Managing Editor Mike Schneider that more stringent gun laws would not have prevented the shooting in Connecticut.
“At the end of the day, you look at it and say ‘what could we have done differently that could have prevented Sandy Hook,’ for example. The answer is practically nothing,” said Carroll.
WATCH VIDEO:
Supporters of gun control have argued for a federal ban on assault weapons like the AR-15 that was used by the Sandy Hook shooter. But Carroll brought up another tragedy to combat that argument.
“If he hadn’t had that, he could have done what [the shooter] did at Virginia Tech which is use a pistol,” Carroll said. “If every AR-15 disappeared from the country tomorrow, he can use an M1. I mean there’s just no way around the philosophy.”
Those calling for tougher gun laws argue that no one hunts with an assault rifle. But Carroll said the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment is not about hunting, but about defending oneself against an abusive government.
“I mean, at the end of the day America, was built upon the premise that the people should take care of themselves. That was the whole point of the Second Amendment in the first place. Remember, we didn’t have standing armies. That was the thing the framers feared more than anything else was a standing army. We’re not immune. I mean Hubert Humphrey, hardly a conservative, said we needed gun freedoms to protect us against the eventualities that may seem remote but can happen.”
READ CARROLL’S STATEMENT REGARDING PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S GUN VIOLENCE PACKAGE:
The President’s statement, and the proposals he advances, demonstrate two standard left-wing political principles: “never let a crisis go to waste” and “I’ll have a lot more flexibility after I’m reelected.”
Just like the fraudulent “stimulus” — which represented nothing more than a pent up wish list of liberal spending programs having nothing whatsoever to do with the asserted rationale for passing the bill — the President’s proposals, mostly, represent the same tired litany of hard-left anti-freedom proposals which have nothing whatsoever to do with the events which allegedly motivate their present consideration.
At first blush, not a single one of these proposals addresses what happened in Connecticut; not a single one would have the slightest impact upon crime.
Take the so-called “assault weapons” ban. Like the law just adopted in New York, these laws have absolutely nothing to do with the way a gun functions, but concentrate on their “scary” appearance. A gun with a pistol grip, a folding stock, a flash suppressor or a bayonet lug is no more dangerous than one which lacks those features. And, yet, those are the items the upon which the law focuses. A sillier law — but one which plays well with people who don’t understand the subject — would be hard to imagine.
Conspicuously absent from all of the proposals is any true attention to preventing actual crimes. Nowhere is there any mention of addressing constrictive standards on involuntary mental health commitment, which might have gotten many mass shooters into the kind of facility which could care for their needs. Nowhere is there any mention of facilitating stop and frisk, or similar police actions in high crime areas, which we KNOW work.
Feel-good laws didn’t stop what happened at Sandy Hook; more liberal civil commitment laws might have. Harassing the 99.9999 percent of gun owners who abide by the law doesn’t stop crime; empowering police to stop, search and arrest criminals, then throwing them in jail, will.
Unfortunately, it seems that the Obama administration intends to bring the same level of seriousness to halting violence as it does to reducing the deficit. In both cases, it advances an ideological agenda which has nothing whatsoever to do with actually solving the underlying problem. In both cases, the proposed “solutions” have been repeatedly tried, and always fail.
We are not made safer when we are less free. The solution to the problem of violence is to capture criminals and throw them into jail for a long time, to interdict those bent on violence and to treat those whose obvious mental difficulties call their stability into question. Efforts made along these lines would produce clear results and, hopefully, bipartisan support. Programs which target law abiding folks and commonly held firearms will not.
I watched Mike Snider’s interview with ASM Carroll with growing incredulity. This narrow minded gun nut, parroting the arguments of the worst elements of the NRA is truly a disgrace to his office and to the electors in his district. I hope the footage will be made available to the person who runs against him in the next election so his constituents can see what a disgraceful individual they have representing them. One can summarize the argument of this paranoid Jersey version of Alex Jones as follows:-
Ownership of semi automatics is nothing to do with hunting, it is because our forefathers, who by the way thought in terms of lethality
of small arms in terms of muskets, needed our citizens to be armed to protect themselves against a standing army.
Think about that for a moment. Apart from the paranoia of this individual’s mind that such thinking reveals, it also says we as citizens should be allowed to have AR15s and M1s to protect us against our guys in Fort Dix. If you think for two seconds how stupid is this argument, you can only shake your head in disbelief. Our guys in Fort Dix have tanks and RPGs and all sorts of heavy weaponry. So if you take this crazy argument to its logical conclusion, it means we have to allow our citizens also to buy tanks and other heavy arms. Then the standing army has support from F18s and Apache attack choppers. So let’s let our citizens buy those too. I imagine ASM Carroll would support this too! What arrant nonsense. If this is the thinking of our elected officials, no wonder our state has so many problems! ASM Carroll really needs to get out of office but he also needs to get out of the country a bit more and try to understand how Australia and the UK successfully responded to mass shootings in their back yard. The one consistent difference between the US and those countries is the incredible number of guns in our society. Their gun deaths can be reported using double digits. In the US, we have gun death statistics running into the thousands.
The NRA no longer represents the interests of gun owners and has not done so for years. They are a marketing arm of the small arms manufacturers. Their legacy is 20 dead tiny six year olds mutilated and riddled with bullet holes and we give air time to this kind of paranoid claptrap from an elected official. Shameful!