We are not to blame

One of the things you can count on after a well publicized shooting is for anti-freedom advocates to wave the bloody shirt and cry that it is our freedom to own firearms that is the real cause of shooting rampages. That they will act this way is a given, but is it not too much to ask that people who are supposed to be on our side of the debate to not push this line of insanity as well.

War on Guns has a post about a gun show in Reno, Nevada, which is now being morphed into a “Sporting Goods and Accessory Show”. They are doing this because of the “recent unfortunate incident at Virginia Tech”.
This has me scratching my head and wondering what a gun show has to do with the rampage of an insane lunatic through a group of disarmed students.

But, the media, Hollywood and their ilk always make responsible gun owners the scapegoat for every nutter that goes on a rampage.

Gun owners are in no way responsible for the acts of these mass shooters. We are no more responsible than commuters are for the daily carnage on our roads due to drunk or incompetent drivers.

The ultimate outrage is that the people, who seek to make us defenseless and advocate anti self-defense zones like Virginia Tech and further seek to inculcate a passivity and submission to acts of violence, are the ones throwing these charges at our feet. But, they are the ones that have helped create the culture of passivity that had people meekly waiting for their own execution.

I expect this kind of calumny from the gun banners, but I don’t expect it from people who are supposed to be on our side.

In 1999, after the Columbine killings, the NRA cancelled the public portion of their annual meeting in Denver. I have often wondered why we as gun owners and members of the NRA had to cancel our meeting due to the actions of the Columbine killers. I understand the PR aspects of this decision by the NRA.
They decided that the negative PR was not worth going ahead with the meeting. But the anti-freedom advocates didn’t praise the NRA for its decision. They attacked the NRA for continuing with the non-public part of its annual meeting even though those meetings were planned years in advance and were required by its rules.
Denise and I enjoy attending the annual meetings and we arrange our schedule months in advance to accommodate the meeting. If we had been active in the NRA in 1999, we would have had to cancel our reservations and rearrange our vacation plans because the event was cancelled and the NRA was de facto accepting the blame for a tragedy they did not cause.

In fact, I thought about deleting the above paragraph because I was thinking that I probably would have felt bad attending a gun convention shortly after a mass shooting. But I realized that I was falling into the line of thinking that is quite common today. That guns and gun owners are responsible for every crime and tragedy involving guns. If you think about it, this is insane. Guns are merely tools. They are no different than any other tool, and people who responsibly use a tool bear no blame when others misuse that same tool. Would a car show be cancelled because someone just committed mass murder with an SUV?

We as gun owners and gun rights advocates do ourselves no favors by accepting the blame that the gun control crowd throws at us. We are not responsible for these tragedies and I suspect if our solutions were put in place, many of these tragedies would be averted. So Boomtown and Gatling Guns in Reno should hold the gun show as scheduled, call it a gun show and not accept the blame for a tragedy for which theybear no responsibility.

Update: A commenter on the above post at War on Guns states that Gatling Guns had nothing to do with this situation. If Boomtown is solely responsible, I have to ask why it was OK to hold a gun show before the Virginia Tech. Tragedy but not after. The implication is that gun owners and buyers are somehow responsible. This meme cannot stand.