According to his website, Craig Phillips is a Hollywood script doctor. According to his Twitter page, Mr. Phillips is a “wannabe screenwriter.” What’s wrong with this picture? (So to speak.) It’s the same problem bedeviling many if not most gun control advocates (a group to which Mr. Phillips belongs): they speak authoritatively from a position of profound indeed willful ignorance. Saying that, in a previous Tweet, Phillips writes . . .
I admit some bias. When I was 9, next door neighbor kid accidentally shot his younger bro playing with gun. I was home when it happened.
See how that works? Emotion trumps intellect. Rational analysis simply doesn’t get a look in. Hence the obscene outburst above, which connects carefully selected dots without addressing the facts of the matter. For those we turn to reuters.com:
Police were called to Forum Roller World in Grand Prairie, about 20 miles west of Dallas, at 7:10 p.m. following reports of a shooting, Grand Prairie Police Department spokesman John Brimmer said.
The incident began when an unidentified man drew a gun during an argument at a birthday party at the rink. He opened fire, shooting five people dead and wounding four others, and then shot himself, Brimmer said.
“This was a domestic situation that went south in a hurry.” Brimmer told Reuters. “The shooting lasted only seconds.”
Five police officers were on the scene within a minute, Brimmer said. The wounded were taken to a local hospital for treatment, although their condition was not immediately known.
A private family group had rented the entire skate rink for the evening to celebrate a child’s birthday, Brimmer said. All the dead and wounded were teenagers and adults attending the gathering.
The police department has made crisis counselors available to treat victims and others who witnessed the shooting.
“There are going to be a lot of hurting families,” Brimmer said.
“Thankfully we don’t have things like this happen with any kind of regularity. We are a community of give or take 160,000 people and it’s a great city and for something like this to happen is just horrible.”
It’s an anomaly. In other words, gun companies and legislators (with their “lax” gun laws) could not have predicted or prevented this tragedy. Unless they could . . .
Establishing how a mentally unhinged person gains access to a firearm may help society prevent future attacks. May. Lest we forget, the local sheriff’s office and the ATF ignored a heads-up on Jared Lee Loughner and guns long before he unleashed his heinous killing spree.
It’s also true that murders can come from “out of nowhere.” As Frank Readick Jr. once reminded Americans, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” The idea that you can stop an evil man from getting a hold of a gun in a world filled with guns is ludicrous.
And so people like emotion-drive crusaders like Craig Phillips seize on the only possible answer: remove guns from the world. A pointless not to say Sisyphusian task, to be sure. In fact, it’s such a patently stupid idea that the vast majority of its adherents recognize the futility of suggesting it to sane people. But not all of them. Mr. Phillips Tweets:
I am so sick of gun violence. There are responsible gun owners who hate it, too. But a world without guns entirely, wouldn’t that be nice?
For me, this is by far the most galling aspect of calls for gun control. My father was tortured and his parents murdered in “a world without guns entirely.” In gun-free labor and concentration camps.
Those who lobby for a gun-free existence singularly fail to appreciate the unfathomably horrific consequences whenever a society realizes their ideal. Equally, they are completely oblivious to the good that guns do, for both individuals and society.
There’s a reason why the right to keep and bear arms was the Second Amendment to the United State Constitution. Mr. Phillips freedom to Tweet depends on it. But he will never, ever connect those dots.
Phillips’ pig-ignorant irony would be delicious, if not for the damage that his failure to eat from the tree of knowledge inflicts on our gun rights. Or would do were we not vigilant, and steadfast in our faith in, and defense of, the right to armed self-defense.