A PARENT AGREES WITH THE NRA PROPOSAL

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

• OPINION
• Updated December 28, 2012, 6:38 p.m. ET

  A Reluctant Vote in Favor of Armed School Guards

Only one of the proposed responses to the Sandy Hook attack promises to have an immediate, positive effect.

By ROBERT BERNAT

 I am not a member of the National Rifle Association, nor am I a member or contributor to any Second Amendment rights group. I am, however, a parent of young children who attend a grammar school not unlike Sandy Hook Elementary in an affluent community not dissimilar to Newtown, Conn. Like the entire nation, I grieve for those who lost their lives at the hands of Adam Lanza in a truly senseless and barbaric act.


Most Americans agree that dramatic steps must be taken to prevent the recurrence of a horrible event like that of Dec. 14, 2012. Just what steps should be taken is a matter of disagreement. After considerable thought I have sadly concluded that Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, is correct when he advocates for armed security in the country's more than 100,000 schools.


The solution is only a partial one, but placing armed, highly trained personnel on school premises will move the country more swiftly toward its goal of safer schools than the complex steps being offered up by legislators and commentators alike on Sunday-morning talk shows.



In fact, many of the attractive solutions bandied about stand little chance of ameliorating the problem of gun violence directed at school children or are only long-term measures that cannot yield immediate results. For example, it is not viable, nor is it likely constitutional, to undertake the suggestion of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.), which is simply to outlaw all guns. Americans reportedly own more than 300 million guns, of which tens of millions are semiautomatic assault weapons. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back.


A blanket ban on the commercial sale of assault-type rifles and large-capacity magazines would also impart a false and dangerous sense of security to parents. Had such a law been in place and inhibited Adam Lanza's access to a Bushmaster AR-15 and high-capacity magazines, the results of his rampage would have likely been identical. He could have blown open the front door of the school with the shotgun that he left in his car trunk, and once inside the classrooms he could have reloaded his Glock and Sig Sauer pistols at lightning speed with fresh low-capacity magazines.


It is widely agreed, in the wake of Sandy Hook, that the country's mental-health system needs radical reworking. It was reported that there are at least 70,000 violent, mentally ill individuals walking America's streets at any given time. Several observers have noted that the perpetrators of mass slayings at educational institutions tend to be white males, age 17-24, socially isolated, introverted individuals who dwell significantly in the videogame world.


Perhaps there is a constitutional and medically rigorous method to screen for and profile psychologically such inherently dangerous individuals and thereby intercept them before the carnage. Perhaps not. The country should commit the resources both legally and medically to find out, but this is a long-term proposition fraught with privacy-law concerns. It will not in any event yield the immediate security so desperately needed.


The killers' immersion in videogames has brought to the fore a welcome discussion of what role popular culture plays in desensitizing young males to violence. The casual carnage in movies and videogames may well affect some susceptible young men so profoundly that they are indifferent to the reality and finality of pointing a real weapon at a human being and then pulling the trigger. But this is a societal issue wrapped in the First Amendment and, again, no prompt solutions will emerge from discussions of the matter.


After the terrible killings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, almost every school in America put in place emergency plans intended to prevent a similar attack. The grammar school with which I'm most familiar has a lockdown plan similar to the one instituted at Sandy Hook Elementary, including a buzzer system to gain entry after vetting by the school secretary through a window, deadbolt locks on classroom doors, and evacuation drills for students and faculty.


What happened at Sandy Hook was not the failure to plan; it was the failure of the plan. The teachers and administrative staff executed their school district's plan heroically in trying to save lives, some at the loss of their own. Police departments changed their policies after Columbine and now rush to the source of an incident inside a school building at great risk to themselves. But a major flaw in such plans persists to this day—namely that it takes just a few unguarded minutes for a catastrophe to unfold.


I have no desire to turn my children's school into an armed camp. But I firmly believe that had there been armed, trained security personnel anywhere near the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary on the morning of Dec. 14, Adam Lanza either never would have approached the school or his attack would have had a radically different outcome.


One-third of the nation's elementary, middle and high schools reportedly already have armed security on campus. In 2000, President Clinton marked the one-year anniversary of Columbine by proposing a significant expansion of the government's existing "COPS in Schools" program. Now that the National Rifle Association's Mr. LaPierre has made a similar proposal, he is being ridiculed. Why?
 


Dr. Bernat is a physician and attorney in Highland Park, Ill.

A version of this article appeared December 29, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Reluctant Vote in Favor of Armed School Guards.

DAVID GREGORY BEING INVESTIGATED BY DC POLICE

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December 28, 2012 5:30 P.M.
Laws Are for Little People

And not for David Gregory.

By Mark Steyn
NATIONAL REVIEW


A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.
To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?
Anything involving guns is even less amenable to “obviousness.” A few years ago, Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat — eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?
Three days after scofflaw Gregory committed his crime, a bail hearing was held in Massachusetts for Andrew Despres, 20, who’s charged with trespassing and possession of ammunition without a firearms license. Mr. Despres was recently expelled from Fitchburg State University and was returning to campus to pick up his stuff. Hence the trespassing charge. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a “military-style ammunition belt.” Hence, the firearms charge.
His mom told WBZ that her son purchased the belt for $20 from a punk website and had worn it to class every day for two years as a “fashion statement.” He had no gun with which to fire the bullets. Nevertheless, Fitchburg police proudly displayed the $20 punk-website ammo belt as if they’d just raided the Fitchburg mafia’s armory, and an obliging judge ordered Mr. Despres held on $50,000 bail. Why should there be one law for Meet the Press and another for Meet Andrew Despres? Because David Gregory throws better cocktail parties?
The argument for letting him walk rests on his membership of a protected class — the media. Notwithstanding that (per Gallup) 54 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the NRA while only 40 percent have any trust in the media, the latter regard themselves as part of the ruling class. Which makes the rest of you the ruled. Laws are for the little people — and little people need lots of little laws, ensnaring them at every turn.

This is all modern life is. Ernest Hemingway had a six-toed cat. The cat begat. (Eat your heart out, Doctor Seuss.) So descendants of his six-toed cat still live at the Hemingway home in Key West. Tourists visit the property. Thus, the Department of Agriculture is insisting that the six-toed cats are an “animal exhibit” like the tigers at the zoo, and therefore come under federal regulation requiring each to be housed in an individual compound with “elevated resting surfaces,” “electric wire,” and a night watchman. Should David Gregory be treated more leniently than a domestic cat just because when Obama tickles his tummy he licks the president’s hand and purrs contentedly?

There are two possible resolutions: Gregory can call in a favor from some Obama consigliere who’ll lean on the cops to disappear the whole thing. If he does that, he’ll be contributing to the remorseless assault on a bedrock principle of free societies — equality before the law. Laws either apply to all of us or none of us. If they apply only to some, they’re not laws but caprices — and all tyranny is capricious.
Or he can embrace the role in which fate has cast him. Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive. Eleven-year-old girls fined for rescuing woodpeckers, serving Marines put on the no-fly list, and fifth-generation family cats being ordered into separate compounds with “electric wire” fencing can all testify to how near that point America is. But nothing “raises awareness” like a celebrity spokesman. Step forward, David Gregory! Dare the prosecutor to go for the death penalty — and let’s make your ammo the non-shot heard round the world!


— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

THE MAIN STREET MEDIA HAVE A LOCK ON HYPOCRISY

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NBC's Gregory Mocks NRA Security Guard Idea But Sends Own Kids to Guarded School

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by Warner Todd Huston 24 Dec 2012, 4:54 AM PDT 88 post a comment

On NBC's Meet The Press over the weekend, David Gregory was quite confrontational with the Vice President of the National Rifle Association over the organization's idea of putting armed security guards in every school in America. But even as Gregory mocked the NRA for the idea, he seems to see nothing wrong with sending his own kids to a school that has armed security guards each school day.

Introducing the NRA's security guard proposal, Gregory confronted NRA VP Wayne LaPierre saying, "You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?"
Gregory also claimed that security guards don't work. "But you would concede that, as good as an idea as you think this is, it may not work. Because there have been cases where armed guards have not prevented this kind of massacre, this kind of carnage. I want you would concede that point, wouldn't you?," the NBC anchor said.
Armed security doesn't work? Well, then the question must be asked of Gregory why he sends his own kids to a school with just that sort of protection?
As it happens, Gregory sends his kids to D.C.-based Sidwell Friends, the same expensive, high-end school the President sends his own children to. Every day that school features armed security details. In fact, the security department is quite large for such a small school as Daniel Halper points out.

According to a scan of the school's online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are police officers, who are presumably armed.

Halper also reminds readers that because the President's children go to the school, there is also an armed Secret Service detail at the school.
Gregory isn’t the only one putting himself in this hypocritical box, though. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was reportedly "outraged" at the NRA's security guard plan. But Emanuel also sends his kids to a school that has armed guards plying the hallways every school day. (Not to mention his fully armed personal security detail that shadows him everywhere he goes.)
So, why are armed guards good for the President, Mayor Emanuel, and NBC’s David Gregory, but not the rest of us?

THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS THE TARGET OF THE GUN-CONTROL HYSTERICS

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December 28, 2012 SHARE Taking aim on the easy target By Wes Pruden “What we must have is a national debate about guns.”  So goes the media cliché of the moment. Everybody on the left is saying it, but nobody there means a word of it. All these wayward worthies really want is an opportunity to put piety on parade (and take your guns). Everybody agrees that there’s too much violence in the culture. There’s even wide agreement on three major instruments of the violence – guns, the mentally ill, and the entertainment media. Gun owners, usually defined by liberals as “gun nuts,” are most tempting to blame in the wake of shootings like those at a high school and then at a movie theater in Colorado and lately at an elementary school in Connecticut. Not so easy to blame is Hollywood, purveyor of wholesale violence, usually rendered as a romantic pursuit of justice. People like movies, even bad movies, and Hollywood’s chief customers are the young, the restless and the easily impressed. The shooters are nearly always found walking around in this market, looking for trouble. The mentally ill, or at least mentally disturbed, are the hardest to identify, and the shooters are almost invariably the young men who ought to be safely locked away in a loony bin where they could do no harm to themselves or others. It’s just not fashionable in the salons of the left to say so. The First, Second and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech, gun ownership and freedom from illegal search and seizure, remain formidable obstacles to the government, which by nature seeks to restrict and control the freedoms of everybody. Who can say which of these guarantees is most important? Therein lies the dilemma of a free society where everybody wants to talk, just not to each other. After the tragedy in Connecticut, President Obama quickly named the inevitable task force, theoretically to listen and then to report what it heard. He put Joe Biden in charge, which may be a clue to how much he thinks the panel’s own conclusions will be worth. It won’t matter, anyway, since we already know what he thinks about guns and what he would like to do about them. We know what his constituency thinks, too. “To be fair to Obama,” writes John Cassidy in New Yorker magazine, “nobody should underestimate the hatred, ignorance, baloney, mendacity and borderline lunacy that would confront him if he were to . . . take on the gun lobby.” So why talk to “the other side?” Mr. Cassidy is only a little more hysterical than average. So good luck with that “national debate.” Good luck, too, in Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who has pumped more trash and gore into the bloodstream than almost anyone else, in a fit of pretension called a “filmmaker summit” in the wake of public outrage after the Columbine shootings. “I think as filmmakers,” he said, “we should sit down – the Marty Scorseses, the Quentin Tarantinos and hopefully all of us deal in violence in movies – and discuss our role in that.” Not that violence in movies has anything to do with inspiring impressionable young men copying the violence in real life. “If we don’t get gun-control laws in this country we are full of beans. To have the National Rifle Association rule the United States is pathetic.” Alas, this is the level of Hollywood’s understanding of how America works. How to control the crazies, certified and uncertified, is difficult. We’re paying the price now for dismantling public psychiatric hospitals 50 years ago, which made civil libertarians feel good about themselves but which is judged now to have been a public catastrophe. Thousands of unstable men and women were set loose on the streets with a bottle of pills and told to swallow them on schedule. The three largest mental-health hospitals remaining, write E. Fuller Torrey and Doris A. Fuller in the Wall Street Journal, are the psychiatric wings at Riker’s Island in New York, the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Jail. The feds, who can’t run public housing, public health care and education, observes the Wall Street Journal, can’t be trusted to identify and deal with crazy people, either, but several of the states have established effective outpatient programs. Quentin Tarrantino. Photo by Georges Biard The First Amendment protects Hollywood’s gore machine. The first amendment guarantees even irresponsible speech but does not require it, a distinction often lost on those who abuse it. Getting crazy people off the street would be difficult. The Second Amendment protects the right of the law-abiding to own a gun. That’s the target of the gun-control hysterics. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

JOHN KERRY WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR THE US AS SECRETARY OF STATE

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• THE AMERICAS
• December 23, 2012, 6:07 p.m. ET

John Kerry's Record in Latin America

It isn't that he opposes U.S. intervention. It's that somehow he often ends up backing the bad guys.

• By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

With Susan Rice withdrawing her name for U.S. secretary of state, President Obama last week nominated Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry for the job. Don't expect applause from beleaguered democrats south of the border.
Mr. Kerry's record of promoting American values abroad is dismal. It isn't that he opposes U.S. intervention—far from it. The trouble is that he has a habit of intervening on behalf of bad guys. A left-wing world view and an earnest conviction that it is his destiny to impose it on others may make him a perfect fit in the Obama cabinet. But it won't be good for poor countries or for U.S. interests.

Enlarge Image

AFP/Getty Images

US Senator John Kerry D-MA (R) watches as US President Barack Obama announces Kerry as his choice for the next secretary of state on December 21, 2012 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC

Latin America knows all too well the dangerous combination of Mr. Kerry's arrogance and, to be polite, let's say, naiveté. In 1985, in the midst of the Cold War, he led a congressional delegation to Nicaragua, where he met with Sandinista comandante Daniel Ortega. The Sandinista reputation as a human-rights violator was already well-established, and the Soviets were stalking Central America. Nevertheless, Mr. Kerry came back from Managua advocating an end to U.S. support for the resistance known as the "Contras." The House took his advice and voted down a $14 million aid package to them. The next day Mr. Ortega flew to Moscow to get $200 million in support from the Kremlin.



Searching for the truth requires humility, which may explain why Mr. Kerry was so dangerously uninformed. Years later, the writer Paul Berman exposed the realities of Sandinista oppression with "In Search of Ben Linder's Killers" (The New Yorker, Sept. 23, 1996). Mr. Berman went into the Nicaraguan highlands to learn how the Sandinista sympathizer from Oregon had died. In the process he also learned about the peasant rebellion against the Sandinistas.

On Friday, President Obama nominated Sen. John Kerry to become the next U.S. secretary of state. WSJ's Mary Anastasia O'Grady and James Freeman discuss Kerry's past dealings in foreign affairs relative to Latin America. Photo: Associated Press.

Highland peasants had joined Marxist intellectuals calling themselves Sandinistas to overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza, only to find themselves slaves of a new master in the 1980s. "Women from the poorest families balanced canastas filled with fruit or grains on their heads and went to market, exactly as they always had and the Sandinista police raided the buses and arrested the women as speculators." Locals "felt that they were losing control over their products, their freedom of action and their land." The pushback wasn't only from large landowners. "The smaller the patch, the more fiercely they clung to it."



Sandinista-backer Fidel Castro sent Cubans to help. "Almost instantly" Mr. Berman wrote, "a blazing hatred for the Cubans—known as Russians to the people who despised them—swept through the northern and eastern countryside." The peasants "came to a horrifying conclusion: that the Sandinista National Liberation Front was a political movement that was devoted to contempt of God and theft of land; a movement that called itself Nicaraguan but was actively trying to turn the country over to foreigners; a movement that claimed to be for the peasants and the poor but was actually their most implacable enemy."



Linder was killed, Mr. Berman was told by a highland local whose unit was involved, by the Contras because he was thought to be a Cuban.



It is still not clear whether Mr. Kerry realizes he was flacking for jackboots. Let's assume that he was merely a sucker who fell for Soviet and Cuban propaganda. Does a similar knowledge deficiency explain why, when he ran for president in 2004, he told a Boston audience that the Colombian guerrillas, famous for killing and maiming civilians, "have legitimate complaints"?



That same year, Sandinista comandante Tomás Borge and Argentina's Peronist Cristina Kirchner both endorsed presidential candidate Kerry. More strange friends.



In June 2009, Mr. Kerry again went to bat for the dark side, this time in Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Hugo Chávez, had been unconstitutionally trying to extend his time in office. The Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest him. All the other branches of government, the Catholic Church, Honduras's human-rights ombudsman and Mr. Zelaya's own party backed the court's decision.



Mr. Chávez, Fidel Castro and the Obama administration became furious, called it a "coup d'état" and moved to isolate the tiny country. When Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) planned a fact-finding trip to Tegucigalpa, Mr. Kerry's office tried to stop him by blocking funding. When the Law Library of Congress concluded that the Honduran high court had acted legally, Mr. Kerry wrote to the head of the library demanding that the opinion be retracted and "corrected." In the spring of 2010, a Kerry staffer traveled to Honduras to pressure officials there to adopt the Obama administration's "coup" narrative.



It is also worth recalling that Mr. Kerry's running mate in 2004, John Edwards, promised to force the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the Kerry-Edwards ticket won the White House.



There's a pattern here and it features Mr. Kerry continually on the wrong side of history. Asking Americans to believe that he will be any different as secretary of state is asking them to suspend disbelief.
 


Write to O'Grady@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared December 24, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: John Kerry's Record in Latin America.

NBC'S DAVID GREGORY REVEALS MORE THAN A LITTLE HYCPOCRISY

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NBC's Gregory Mocks NRA Security Guard Idea But Sends Own Kids to Guarded School

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by Warner Todd Huston 24 Dec 2012, 4:54 AM PDT

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/12/23/NBC-s-Gregory-Mocks-NRA-Security-Guard-Idea-But-Sends-Own-Kids-to-Guarded-School 

 

On NBC's Meet The Press over the weekend, David Gregory was quite confrontational with the Vice President of the National Rifle Association over the organization's idea of putting armed security guards in every school in America. But even as Gregory mocked the NRA for the idea, he seems to see nothing wrong with sending his own kids to a school that has armed security guards each school day.

Introducing the NRA's security guard proposal, Gregory confronted NRA VP Wayne LaPierre saying, "You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?"



Gregory also claimed that security guards don't work. "But you would concede that, as good as an idea as you think this is, it may not work. Because there have been cases where armed guards have not prevented this kind of massacre, this kind of carnage. I want you would concede that point, wouldn't you?," the NBC anchor said.



Armed security doesn't work? Well, then the question must be asked of Gregory why he sends his own kids to a school with just that sort of protection?



As it happens, Gregory sends his kids to D.C.-based Sidwell Friends, the same expensive, high-end school the President sends his own children to. Every day that school features armed security details. In fact, the security department is quite large for such a small school as Daniel Halper points out.

According to a scan of the school's online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are police officers, who are presumably armed.

Halper also reminds readers that because the President's children go to the school, there is also an armed Secret Service detail at the school.



Gregory isn’t the only one putting himself in this hypocritical box, though. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was reportedly "outraged" at the NRA's security guard plan. But Emanuel also sends his kids to a school that has armed guards plying the hallways every school day. (Not to mention his fully armed personal security detail that shadows him everywhere he goes.)



So, why are armed guards good for the President, Mayor Emanuel, and NBC’s David Gregory, but not the rest of us?

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (DHS) IS GETTING PREPARED TO WAGE WAR ON AMERICAN CITIZENS

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If Obama is Opposed to Guns, Why Did his Administration Just Purchase 1.6Bil Rounds of Ammo?

Mike Adams
Natural News
December 20, 2012

“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.” – Adolf Hitler, 1922.

In the aftermath of the recent Sandy Hook shooting, Obama and his cohorts are screaming about how they all despise guns and ammo. Guns are the problem in America today, we’ve been told from every corner of the media, and so the only solution is to get rid of all the guns.
But not exactly. There’s one organization in America that’s loading up on masses of assault rifles and enough ammunition to run a 10-year shooting war. That organization is, of course, the U.S. federal government and its Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has purchased a total of 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition to be used domestically, inside the United States.


It begs the question: Why does the Department of Homeland Security — named after Hitler’s “Office of Fatherland Security” — need 1.6 billion rounds of ammo?


Obama’s government stockpiles weapons of mass destruction


The DHS began all this in April of this year, with the purchase of 450 million rounds of hollow point .40 caliber ammunition. This is significant for two reasons:

1) DHS does not fight wars with foreign nations. It’s entire theater of operations is on U.S. soil, dealing solely with the American people.

2) Hollow point ammunition is banned by the Geneva convention and is not used by the U.S. military. This ammunition can only be used domestically, in the United States, against U.S. targets or people.
Along with these 450 million rounds of ammunition, DHS also purchased $400,000 worth of radiation protection pills and thousands of bullet-proof roadside checkpoint booths. Is it expecting a radiological event? (Or perhaps planning one?)


These 450 million rounds of ammo, Natural News calculated, is enough to wage a 7-year war with the American people.

Obama’s government stockpiling millions of rounds of ammo to arm the DHS and TSA

You can see the original federal purchase document requesting all this ammunition at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/files/DHS_ammo_buy.pdf
The numbers in the document, by the way, are in thousands.
In it, you’ll discover that the U.S. government has also purchased all the following ammunition in addition to the 450 million rounds of .40 hollow point “anti-personnel” ammo:
• Over one million rounds of hollow-point .223 rifle ammo
• Over half a million rounds of non-hollow-point .223 rifle ammo
• 220,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun #7 ammo (target ammo)
• Over 200,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun #00 buckshot ammo (tactical anti-personnel ammo)
• 66,000 rounds of 12 gauge shotgun slugs (tactical anti-personnel, anti-vehicle rounds)
• Over two million rounds of hollow-point .357 Sig JPH (hollow-point) pistol ammo (anti-personnel)
• Over four million rounds of .40 S&W JPH (hollow-point) pistol ammo (anti-personnel)
• Over 60,000 rounds of .308 match grade anti-personnel sniper rounds (BTHP)
• Plus, hundreds of thousands of additional rounds of .38 special, .45 auto, 9mm, 7.62×39 (AK rifle) ammo, and others.


DHS then buys another 750 million rounds of anti-personnel ammunition


A few months after buying the 450+ million rounds of ammo to be stockpiled by Obama’s government in the United States, the DHS then went on to purchase another 750 million rounds of ammunition.

Additional contracts were added after that, bringing the grand total of government ammo purchases in 2012 to 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. That’s over five bullets for every American man, woman and child. It also includes long-range sniper rounds.


By comparison, a citizen is considered to be a stockpiling “terrorist” prepper if they own just 1,000 rounds of ammo. The government, however, can purchase billions and the mainstream media doesn’t even question it.


Where is all this ammunition going? It’s being stockpiled by the federal government, awaiting some future event during which it will apparently be “activated.” Why else would you stockpile something if you don’t anticipate needing to use it someday?


During all this, Obama and his cohorts in Washington are loudly insisting that American citizens have no right to purchase firearms or ammunition, and that new laws will soon be enacted to make sure you cannot do what the government does: stockpile weapons and ammo.


Obama has armed security personnel for self defense, but YOU can’t have self defense


The United States of America was founded on the idea that an armed citizenry is the only thing that can be trusted to keep government honest, but that idea has now been turned upside down. The new message today is that an armed government is the only thing that can be trusted, and that individual citizens are all potential terrorists and mass murderers.


While Obama, Feinstein, Bloomberg and others are calling for citizens to give up their self defense tools, those very same people all have armed bodyguards to provide for their own self defense. Obama in particular has an entire group of men — the U.S. Secret Service — who are most definitely armed to the teeth and wielding full-auto weapons.


Will Obama now call for his own Secret Service men to give up their guns and ammunition? Will Bloomberg give up his armed police escorts and security personnel? Will the White House be completely disarmed and have a “Gun Free Zone” sign placed outside the White House lawn?
Of course not. What Obama, Bloomberg, Schumer, Feinstein and all these tyrants practice is a cynical double standard. They want YOU to give up all your guns and rights, but THEY refuse to do so. It’s okay for them to be armed, but not you. You can’t be trusted because you’re just a hard-working American taxpayer / slave. Only the government elite can be trusted with guns, you see, because government is so incredibly honest, ethical and trustworthy. And anyone who questions that is obviously a terrorist.


That’s the new insanity in Washington D.C. and apparently across the mainstream media where twits like Piers Morgan smear our TV screens with imbecilic profanity as they rant and rave about American citizens giving up all their guns while the government stockpiles masses of assault rifles and billions of rounds of ammunition.


Piers Morgan, in case you haven’t figure it out, is precisely the kind of traitorous tory America’s founding fathers would have hanged from a tree in 1776. That this frothing talking moron, a British subject, even sets foot in America today and calls for the mass disarmament of the American people is tantamount to an act of deliberate sabotage of the very nation that already defeated the British in one war. Morgan is an enemy of America and a traitor to humanity.


The picture is now becoming clear


The government plan for the use of all these guns and ammunition is now becoming clear. It is a plan to engineer a civil war. Here’s how it works:

Step 1) Obama stockpiles billions of rounds of ammunition, assault rifles, bullet-proof checkpoint booths and sniper rounds for the government while training up a whole new army of psychopathic sex predators known as the TSA.

Step 2) Mass shootings of children are either staged or encouraged to make sure they happen with rising frequency. (Aurora, Sandy Hook, etc.). Schools are advertised as “Gun Free Zone” to make sure mass shooters doped up on psychiatric drugs and hypnotic video games know exactly where to go to achieve the highest body count, unopposed by any firearms.

Step 3) When the shootings take place, the media jumps on board the emotional bandwagon and parades dead children in front of the public to the point of emotional extortion. The public then leaps to the delusion that gun confiscation will be great for everyone!

Step 4) The government then stages a radiological false flag event in a major U.S. city while framing a group of patriots, veterans or “preppers” as patsies.

Step 5) This event, which kills 1+ million people, then provides the pretext to declare martial law, suspend the entire Bill of Rights and roll out TSA checkpoints nationwide. TSA agents, who have already proven themselves to be the most masochistic, sick-minded individuals working in government today, are then handed .40 caliber pistols and rifles (yes, they make rifles that shoot .40 pistol ammo) to start waging a shooting war against the American people.

Step 6) Now it’s all-out civil war: Americans shoot each other up, causing huge casualties on both sides. Much of the weapons and ammo stockpiled by American preppers and patriots is used up in this conflict, and that’s exactly the point.

Step 7) Once the civil war has torn America apart, the United Nations lands UN “peacekeeping” troops to take command and occupy America. This will be accompanied by strict “gun control” mandates and constant surveillance of the American people with facial recognition cameras, audio-recording street lamps in the cities, and airborne drones watching from the sky.


Obama is given another Nobel peace prize — mission accomplished! — for enabling the UN takeover of America. The globalists celebrate.


Why we need the Second Amendment for our own survival


Events like Sandy Hook, you see, are all part of the scripted escalation of violence in America, culminating in the government’s declaration of war against citizens. This is precisely why we need the Second Amendment:

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms,” said Thomas Jefferson, “…is to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

The only way America has a chance to halt the violence, defend the Constitution and restore the Republic is to stay armed and stay vigilant. Because let’s be clear: the Obama administration is a criminal operation. The signing of the NDAA, all by itself, should have been clear grounds for not just impeachment, but prosecution for treason.


We are dealing with an out-of-control gang of tyrants in the White House, in DHS and TSA. There are some good men and women inside the FBI, the Pentagon and even the CIA, believe it or not. Those men and women are just as frustrated with what’s happening inside the White House as we all are, and they are ready and willing to defend America against criminal traitors like Eric Holder, for example. Once this all starts to unfold, you will see the federal government having a difficult time keeping all its own people in line. There will be internal fracturing in the federal chain of command, and there may even be break-out groups that seek to overthrow the traitors and restore basic liberties in America.


Six undeniable facts


How all this actually plays out in anyone’s guess, but there are several points I can assure you are very real:

Fact #1) The government is arming to the teeth, stockpiling more than five rounds of ammunition for every American man, woman and child.

Fact #2) The American people are also arming to the teeth, buying up millions of firearms and billions of rounds of ammunition at a record pace.

Fact #3) The Obama criminals have become arrogant and stupid, thinking they can pull off anything. They will over-estimate their power and soon overstep their bounds in trying to crush the remaining liberties of the American people. There will be a huge reactionary counter-effort.

Fact #4) There are good people still within the government and especially the military who are loyal to the Constitution and despise the communist-influenced gang that now occupies the White House.

Fact #5) The government can and will stage false flag attacks to blame its enemies and centralize power. This is true throughout human history.

Fact #6) Something much larger than Sandy Hook is in the planning stages, I believe. Look for a radiological attack of some sort, such as a dirty bomb being set off in a major U.S. city by a rogue group working under Obama. This will be used to terrorize Americans and blame patriots, unleashing an all-out war against individual liberty in America.

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This article was posted: Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 12:14 pm

Tags: domestic news, gun rights, police state

FATHER OF TWO DEFENDS HIS FAMILY AGAINST A HOME INVASION

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http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/home-invasion-suspect-killed-in-gunfight-at-dekalb/nTZnJ/

KERRY AND HAGEL WOULD MEAN A MILITARILY WEAKER AMERICA

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• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• December 21, 2012, 6:48 p.m. ET

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Flock of Doves

With Kerry at State, Hagel at Defense would be dangerous.

President Obama began to unveil his second-term national security team on Friday, choosing John Kerry as the next Secretary of State. The Massachusetts Senator shares the President's view of diminished American power and influence, which should only compound skepticism about the mooted selection of Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon.


Mr. Obama has found his mirror-image in Mr. Kerry, who for 30 years has been one of the Democratic Party's leading doves. The Senator's antiwar activism after Vietnam is well known and may have cost him the Presidency in 2004. But that shouldn't bar him from State, where his job will be diplomacy at the behest of the President.

Enlarge Image

AFP/Getty Images

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and President Obama on Friday

The bigger question is how much fortitude Mr. Kerry will show in pursuing U.S. interests. His instincts have typically been to oppose the use of American force abroad and to engage adversaries as if they share our own peaceful goals. Like Joe Biden, he resisted Ronald Reagan's policies that ended the Cold War, opposed the Gulf War in 1990, supported the Iraq war but then changed his mind, and opposed the 2007 surge that salvaged Iraq.


In his remarks Friday, Mr. Obama said Mr. Kerry's "entire life has prepared him for this role," which is true, if not always reassuring. He has traveled widely and knows many world leaders personally. In the 1990s, he helped open diplomatic relations with Hanoi and more recently has worked difficult portfolios in Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.


But the case of Syria reveals the limitations of his worldview. In 2008 when anti-Bush antipathy was at its height, he called for "engagement" with dictator Bashar Assad. A year later he and his wife dined out in Damascus with the Assads. In April 2010, he called Syria "an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region." He has since changed his mind and denounced Mr. Assad, but he'll have to be tougher-minded to succeed at State.

 

Which brings us to Mr. Hagel, whom the White House has leaked as a possible Defense Secretary. The idea seems to be that the former GOP Senator from Nebraska would bring a bipartisan note to foreign policy, but that logic usually applies when the choice shares the other party's views. Though he fought admirably in Vietnam (and has two Purple Hearts), Mr. Hagel's security views have more closely resembled a George McGovern strain of Republicanism.

In the Senate, Mr. Hagel steered more to foreign policy than defense issues, and on those he steered left. "Politically, who among us is going to stand up and defend Iran or Libya?" he told the Senate in June 2001. He proceeded to defend both, calling sanctions against the Tehran and Gadhafi regimes "an absolute charade," "ill-considered" and "breaching the spirit of multilateralism so necessary to achieve success."


The biggest question for the next Defense chief may be what to do about Iran, but Mr. Hagel has never worried much about its nuclear ambitions. In a 2008 speech, he said the U.S. needs to offer Iran "some kind of security guarantee" to get its help in striking an Israel-Palestinian peace deal. His ideas for "some easy to do breakthroughs" with Tehran included opening a diplomatic post or restoring commercial flights—without preconditions. He opposed sanctions on Tehran in 2004, 2007 and 2008.


These views might be acceptable in a Secretary of State, but they are troubling at the Pentagon in an Administration that lacks hawkish voices in general. In the first term, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus provided a counterweight to Mr. Obama's natural instincts to avoid U.S. leadership. Mr. Hagel is to the left of Mr. Kerry.


In the months after 9/11, he warned of "a dangerous arrogance and a sort of 'Pax Americana' vision, which holds that we are more powerful, richer, and smarter than the rest of the world."


His neo-isolationism became more urgent in the last decade, noting that the U.S. could do little good in Egypt or the Middle East in general. "I think we've got to be very wise and careful on this and continue to work with the multilateral institutions in the lead in Syria," he told Foreign Policy in May. He wanted the U.S. to engage Mr. Assad in 2008, but not to intervene to stop the Syrian dictator from killing his own people.


On military issues, the former Senator has been a notable critic of missile defenses and he wanted to halt their development as long as Russia is opposed. This is no small matter because Vladimir Putin wants to use arms-control talks to curtail U.S. missile defenses in the next four years.


Mr. Hagel supported the decision to oust Saddam Hussein but later became a critic and in 2007 he opposed the troop surge that saved the U.S. from defeat. Mr. Hagel called the surge proposal "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out." The surge stopped the sectarian bloodletting and enabled the U.S. drawdown.


By far the biggest risk is the role Mr. Hagel might play on military spending. Gutting the Pentagon has been a liberal goal since the 1960s, and Mr. Obama will have a new opening given the budget crisis. Mr. Gates and current Pentagon chief Leon Panetta have followed the President's orders but have resisted when the White House wanted to go too far. Mr. Gates made a special point of warning Americans not to repeat our frequent mistake of winding down the military when wars end. We regret it as new threats emerge.


Now is an especially dangerous moment, after a decade of wearing out ships and planes built as part of the Reagan buildup. A legitimate fear is that Mr. Obama wants Mr. Hagel, with his military record and GOP pedigree, to provide the political cover to shrink the Pentagon so he can finance ObamaCare and other entitlements.


Mr. Obama can do better than Mr. Hagel—for example, by choosing former Defense Under Secretary Michele Flournoy, or perhaps Colin Powell. If he does nominate Mr. Hagel, the Senate will have to prevent the Administration's senior security ranks from being dominated by a flock of doves who think the world is better off with a militarily weaker America.

A version of this article appeared December 22, 2012, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Flock of Doves.

LIBERALS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE AMERICA GIVE UP ITS GUNS

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COMMENTARY MAGAZINE

Demonizing NRA Won’t Transform America

by Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 12.20.2012 - 6:55 PM
   


Turn on virtually any talk show heard or viewed in the mainstream media this past week and it’s clear that most of the chattering classes are convinced that the Newtown massacre marks a turning point in the history of American culture. According to this narrative, the country’s understandable shock and horror over the slaughter of innocents at the Sandy Hook Elementary School is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in that it has fundamentally altered the political correlation of forces that has prevented gun control. More to the point, they believe this sea change is so profound that it will effectively silence advocates of gun rights so as to render them incapable of stopping whatever it is that Vice President Biden’s task force comes up with.


The principal target of this effort is, of course, the National Rifle Association that sensibly stayed silent for several days after Newtown and has only just started to make its voice heard. Most liberals are assuming that the low profile the group has had since then is just the start of a new era in which its influence will be curtailed. The assumption is that anger about Newtown is so great and the impulse to try to do something to prevent another mass shooting is so widely supported that the NRA will no longer dictate to Congress. But, as the Pew poll cited earlier by Alana shows, support for gun rights may yet survive Newtown.


More than any other lobby or cause, the NRA is the boogeyman of the American liberal imagination. To listen to liberals talking about it is to hear a portrait of an organization that treats errant members of Congress the way heretics and Jews were handled by the Spanish Inquisition. More than that, many liberals speak as if it is primarily a profit-making entity funded by gun manufacturers that has imposed a bizarre reign of terror on an unwilling populace.


Yet even though the NRA is assuming a much lower profile these days, the idea that it and its 4 million members will simply go away or be drowned out by the chorus of outrage over the murder of 1st graders is based more on liberal ideology than hardheaded political analysis.


It is true that the chances of a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban that expired several years ago has just gone from nonexistent to quite possible. Indeed, it is more than likely that Biden will propose something that will have far wider scope than the previous bill since the rifle used by the murderer in Newtown was legal even under Connecticut’s assault weapons law.


It is entirely possible that Americans are ready for a ban on military-style weapons, especially those that fire large amounts of ammunition in a short time. Many are also ready for a stronger background check system for gun purchasers.


That these ideas are things that the NRA has previously successfully opposed is, as I have written before, evidence that the group regards any regulation, no matter how reasonable, as merely the thin edge of the wedge of a larger agenda whose goal is the effective repeal of the Second Amendment. In this sense they are like pro-abortion groups that fight furiously against even the most reasonable restrictions on the procedure such as parental consent because they also not unreasonably believe that such bills are merely a prelude to an attempt to repeal Roe v. Wade.


The effect of Newtown will be to point out to the NRA those areas where they have overreached. But the expectation that supporters of gun control can do more than that is highly unrealistic.
After all even Joe Manchin, the senator who has become the poster child for NRA members who have had second thoughts about the issue in the aftermath of Newtown, has yet to say what gun control measure he will actually support in any of his seemingly innumerable press interviews.


What liberals who think Newtown means that gun rights can be rolled back will re-learn in the coming weeks is that the NRA’s influence is not so much a matter of money as it is of votes. For all of its bad press, the NRA is the living illustration of democracy, not influence peddling. Its voice has carried weight in Congress because it speaks for 4 million members who share its concerns about the threat to gun rights. That concern is currently overshadowed by anger about Newtown and the widespread though largely mistaken conviction that there is a way to legislate such tragedies out of existence. But it won’t take long for the liberal war on guns to wake up the NRA and its members and far more numerous sympathizers.


As Pete wrote earlier today, the demonization of gun supporters by media figures such as Piers Morgan illustrates the politics of a moment of outrage, not the sort of fundamental shift in American culture that would be required for liberals to do more than enact measures on the margins of the issue, such as assault weapons. Indeed, the comparisons to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 should prove instructive to those who think the NRA is on its last legs. Though both those events did transform American politics in the short term, in the long run the effects were minimal.


Try as they might, those seeking to capitalize on Newtown can’t make America a country that no longer thinks that gun rights are the guarantee of democracy. That is a belief that is not shared by any other modern democracy, even a country like Israel, where gun ownership is widespread. But like other stubborn elements of American exceptionalism, it is not the sort of thing that will be erased even by an event as horrific as Newtown.



Topics: gun control, National Rifle Association, Newtown, Second Amendment

HERE IS THE OFFICIAL NRA RESPONSE TO THE NEWTOWN, CONNECTICUT SCHOOL TRAGEDY

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This is the full NRA text.

Wayne Lapierre, CEO & Ex. V.P:

Out of respect for those grieving families, and until the facts are known, the NRA has refrained from comment. While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent.

Now, we must speak … for the safety of our nation's children. Because for all the noise and anger directed at us over the past week, no one — nobody — has addressed the most important, pressing and immediate question we face: How do we protect our children right now, starting today, in a way that we know works?

The only way to answer that question is to face up to the truth.

Politicians pass laws for Gun-Free School Zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them.

And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.

How have our nation's priorities gotten so far out of order? Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums — are all protected by armed security.

We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.

Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment?

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark?

A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

And the fact is, that wouldn't even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. Meanwhile, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40 percent — to the lowest levels in a decade.

So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.

And here's another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.

Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?

Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like "American Psycho" and "Natural Born Killers" that are aired like propaganda loops on "Splatterdays" and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it "entertainment."

But is that what it really is? Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.

A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18.

And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.

The media call semi-automatic firearms "machine guns" — they claim these civilian semi-automatic firearms are used by the military, and they tell us that the .223 round is one of the most powerful rifle calibers ... when all of these claims are factually untrue. They don't know what they're talking about!

Worse, they perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban — or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people — will protect us where 20,000 others have failed!

As brave, heroic and self-sacrificing as those teachers were in those classrooms, and as prompt, professional and well-trained as those police were when they responded, they were unable — through no fault of their own — to stop it.

As parents, we do everything we can to keep our children safe. It is now time for us to assume responsibility for their safety at school.

The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away ... or a minute away?

Now, I can imagine the shocking headlines you'll print tomorrow morning: "More guns," you'll claim, "are the NRA's answer to everything!" Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the word "gun" automatically become a bad word?

A gun in the hands of a Secret Service agent protecting the President isn't a bad word. A gun in the hands of a soldier protecting the United States isn't a bad word. And when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough

to protect you.

So why is the idea of a gun good when it's used to protect our President or our country or our police, but bad when it's used to protect our children in their schools?

They're our kids. They're our responsibility. And it's not just our duty to protect them — it's our right to protect them.

You know, five years ago, after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?

Will you at least admit it's possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?

Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you're willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no national, one-size-fits-all solution to protecting our children. But do know this President zeroed out school emergency planning grants in last year's budget, and scrapped "Secure Our Schools" policing grants in next year's budget.

With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business — and no authority — denying us the right, the ability, or the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.

Now, the National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired military; security professionals; certified firefighters and rescue personnel; and an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every school. We can deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America's schools safer — relying on the brave men and women of America’s police force.

The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security.

Right now, today, every school in the United States should plan meetings with parents, school administrators, teachers and local authorities — and draw upon every resource available — to erect a cordon of protection around our kids right now. Every school will have a different solution based on its own unique situation.

Every school in America needs to immediately identify, dedicate and deploy the resources necessary to put these security forces in place right now. And the National Rifle Association, as America's preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years, is ready, willing and uniquely qualified to help.

Our training programs are the most advanced in the world. That expertise must be brought to bear to protect our schools and our children now. We did it for the nation's defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we'll do it for our schools today.

The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.

Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson will lead this effort as National Director of the National School Shield Program, with a budget provided by the NRA of whatever scope the task requires. His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere, to get this program up and running from the first day forward.

If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy.

Under Asa’s leadership, our team of security experts will make this the best program in the world for protecting our children at school, and we will make that program available to every school in America free of charge.

That's a plan of action that can, and will, make a real, positive and indisputable difference in the safety of our children —starting right now.

There'll be time for talk and debate later. This is the time, this is the day for decisive action.

We can't wait for the next unspeakable crime to happen before we act. We can't lose precious time debating legislation that won’t work. We mustn't allow politics or personal prejudice to divide us.

We must act now.

For the sake of the safety of every child in America, I call on every parent, every teacher, every school administrator and every law enforcement officer in this country to join us in the National School Shield Program and protect our children with the only line of positive defense that's tested and proven to work.

And now, to tell you more about the program, I'd like to introduce the head of that effort — a former U.S. congressman, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas and former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Honorable Asa Hutchinson.

ASA HUTCHINSON:

Thank you, Wayne. One of the first responsibilities I learned at Homeland Security was the importance of protecting our nation’s critical infrastructure, and there is nothing more critical to our nation’s well being than our children’s safety. They are this country’s future and her most

precious resource.

We all understand that our children should be safe in school, but it is also essential that the parents have confidence in that safety. As a result of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, that confidence has been shattered. Assurance of school safety must be restored with a sense of urgency.

That is why I am grateful that the NRA has asked me to lead a team of security experts to assist our schools, parents and communities. I took this assignment on one condition: That my team of experts will be independent and will be guided solely by what are the best security solutions for the safety of our children while at school.

Even though we are just starting this process, I envision this initiative will have two key elements: First, it would be based on a model security plan — a comprehensive strategy for school security based on the latest, most up-to-date technical information from the foremost experts in their fields.

This model security plan will serve as a template — a set of best practices, principles and guidelines that every school in America can tweak, if needed, and tailor to their own set of circumstances.

Every school and community is different, but this model security plan will allow every school to choose among its various components to develop a school safety strategy that fits their own unique situation, whether it's a large urban school, a small rural school or anything in between.

Armed, trained, qualified school security personnel will be one element of that plan, but by no means the only element. If a school decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want or need armed security personnel, that of course is a decision to be made by parents at the local level.

The second point I want to make is that this will be a program that doesn't depend on massive funding from local authorities or the federal government. Instead, it'll make use of local volunteers serving in their own communities.

In my home state of Arkansas, my son was a volunteer with a local group called "Watchdog Dads," who volunteer their time at schools to patrol playgrounds and provide a measure of added security.

Whether they're retired police, retired military or rescue personnel, I think there are people in every community in this country, who would be happy to serve, if only someone asked them and gave them the training and certification to do so.

The National Rifle Association is the natural, obvious choice to sponsor this program. Their gun safety, marksmanship and hunter education programs have set the standard for well over a century. Over the past 25 years, their Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program has taught over 26 million kids that real guns aren't toys and, today, child gun accidents are at the lowest levels ever recorded.

School safety is a complex issue with no simple, single solution.

But I believe trained, qualified, armed security is one key component among many that can provide the first line of deterrence as well as the last line of defense. And I welcome the opportunity to serve in this vital, potentially lifesaving effort.

Thank you very much.

SOURCE: NRA