I am afraid; I have beautiful children and I am afraid for their safety.  I am afraid the US President and the vocal minority are making rules without regard to the facts. 

In one of his blog articles, California Constitutional Law Professor Robert Sheridan, wrote: ““The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself” The statement about fear is by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected president in 1932 as the nation was diving to the bottom of the economic barrel, with millions of heads of family, men, then, thrown out of work.  Soup kitchens and apple-sellers became the symbols of the Great Depression.  In his Inaugural Address in 1933, FDR addressed the low morale and spirit of depression, as well as the economic fact of depression, coming out with the ringing statement that captions this item.”  He continued, “Fear drives our law, as well as our economy.  Dealing with it takes a special skill. . . . What do civilians do when frightened?  They have their legislators pass feel-good legislation designed to outlaw the boogie-man that’s frightening them.”  And he referenced a frightening case: Korematsu.

Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship.  In that case the Supreme Court sided with the government, ruling that the exclusion order was constitutional and that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Fred Korematsu’s individual rights and the rights of Americans of Japanese descent.  However, its fairly accepted as fact that the government attorneys suppressed evidence by keeping from the Court a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence indicating there was no evidence that Japanese Americans were acting as spies or sending signals to enemy submarines.  So the Order, and the case that upheld it, where based upon fear and inaccurate information.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday January 18, 2013, John R. Lott, Jr., wrote “If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple-victim public shootings, it’s time that we acknowledge a common feature of these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms.  Had some citizens been armed, they might have been able to stop the killings before the police got to the scene. In the Newtown attack, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the school after the first calls for help.”  Lott is a former Chief Economist of the United States Sentencing Commission, has been a professor at a vairiety of excellent universities and law schools and has written several books on gun and crime correlation.

I don’t want my President, my legislatures, my Governor, my state legislators or anyone else to make laws or Executive Orders based on an irrational fear of guns.  I want them to make laws and Executive Orders on real hard facts and protect my precious children from emotionally disturbed people with guns. 

After reading close to one hundred recent articles regarding guns and death I realize there is a lot of misinformation and opinion but only a little bit of accurate reporting or publication of true facts.  One fact that is clear, gun free zones exacerbate the problem not alleviate it. 

I am afraid the “solutions” being pushed through are ineffective at best and will likely have a contrary effect.  So I support the elimination of “gun fee zones” and the promotion of conceal carry.  I have read enough to realize, gun free zones don’t work; outlawed guns don’t work; more police does not work.  The only thing that works is the uncertainty by one about to commit a criminal act of knowing how many ordinary people around him or her at any given minute might be armed and ready to defend the defenseless. 

To be accurate, I support legally licensed or permitted people to be able to carry concealed legal weapons pretty much anywhere they deem qustionably safe (with a few practical exceptions such as bars); but especially and specifically they should be able to carry on school grounds, in schools, in churches, in malls, in movie theaters, in restaurants, in grocery stores, in public parks, and every other public place.    Let us not cave into fear; we need to do something that will actually help.  If even one life is saved it is worth it.