Get ’em up! (And give ’em up!)

I should be more careful about what I don’t wish for.
In a humongous post on Sunday (in which I argued that the man who murdered a Philadelphia police officer was quite possibly a bad person), I took issue with the Inquirer’s editorial contention that it was society’s fault, but expressed relief that they didn’t see the killer’s three stolen guns as an argument for gun control:

I’ll say this for the Inquirer editorial; at least it didn’t try to paint John Lewis into an argument for gun control.

I guess I spoke too fast, for today’s Inquirer editorial does just what I was happy they didn’t do on Sunday.

Get ’em up, lawmakers
The murder of a Philadelphia police officer should be a High Noon moment in the fight against the illegal trafficking in handguns in Pennsylvania.
Gov. Rendell is right to seize on the tragic Halloween shooting of Officer Chuck Cassidy. While city prosecutors pursue Cassidy’s accused killer through the courts, Rendell today plans to demand accountability from Harrisburg lawmakers over lax handgun laws.

This brazen statement blaming “lax handgun laws” completely ignores the fact that all three of the murderer’s guns were illegal stolen guns. Two had been issued to and stolen from law enforcement officers, while the third was stolen in Virginia and illegally transported into Pennsylvania. None of the laws which applied to John Lewis were lax. Rather, it was law enforcement which was lax in failing to arrest him for an armed robbery committed eleven days before the murder of Officer Cassidy.
But none of that matters to the Inquirer. What matters is that they just want more gun control, and any incident will do as an excuse.
Again, I see John Lewis’s shooting of Officer Cassidy as an argument for having a gun and an argument against gun control, and the Inquirer (along with many Philadelphians) see it as an argument for gun control.
You’d almost think defenselessness against evil was a virtue.
Laughable as that sounds, there are now many ways that this society promotes precisely that idea. Schools indoctrinate children with pacifist ideology, citizens are systematically being encouraged to cooperate with criminals, and a recent incident illustrates a growing tendency to actually punish people who dare to show initiative. And in some cases, murderers are portrayed as heroes.
Of course, if Che Guevara and Mumia abu Jamal can be considered heroes, then why should I be surprised that a murderer like John Lewis could be considered an argument for gun control?
I can’t help thinking that had Lewis been shot by Officer Cassidy instead of the other way around, the people who want to take away our guns would consider that a “tragedy.” And had the police officer’s life been saved by the presence of an armed citizen who shot Lewis first, I don’t doubt that the citizen would have been called a “vigilante” — with accompanying calls for gun control.
That’s because if all violence is wrong, then guns are inherently evil!
(Well, except the guns that the government needs to take the guns away from everyone else….)