Now, you may wonder how prisoners got the guns with which to
battle federal troops that had entered the prison to check for weapons and
other contraband and to check on prison conditions. You might even hypothesize
that somehow, the families of prisoners smuggled weapons into the prison over a
period of times and those weapons were used against the troops. Yet,
authorities and politicians in Venezuela would probably tell you otherwise, at
least it is being reported that they are seeing it differently right now. For
now, it is believed that the great majority of the weapons used by prisoners in
the gun battle, that claimed 61 lives and wounded over a hundred others, were
smuggled into the jail by corrupt jailers, see:
In fact, the people of Venezuela are allowed to possess
certain firearms but only under strict conditions and only firearms of a very
limited variety.
"Venezuela:
- Only the state may possess 'weapons of war', including:
cannon, rifles, mortars, machine guns, sub-machine guns, carbines, pistols, and
revolvers, be they automatic or semi-automatic. Civilians are only authorized
to hold .22 rifles and shotguns (repeating and hunting).
- Penalty for Possessing Prohibited Firearm: 5-8 years for
firearms; 6-10 years for 'weapons of war'
- Registration: details of the firearm must be
recorded"
Sources: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/venezuela
and: Parker, Sarah. 2011. ‘Balancing Act: Regulation of Civilian Firearm
Possession.’ Small Arms Survey 2011: States of Security; Chapter 9 (Table 9.2),
p. 273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6 July.
So imagine that. If, in Venezuela, you possessed the weapons
that were almost certainly used in the prison gun battle, you face a 6-10 year
sentence at the least just for having them, let alone the additional sentence
for using them to injure or kill someone. I imagine that since Venezuela also
requires civilians to register firearms that there would also be an additional
penalty for having unregistered firearms. Are you beginning to see how firearms
registration laws and laws banning certain types of weapons are totally
ineffective. All the legal restrictions above did little to nothing to keep
firearms out of what should have been a gun free area, and thus little to
nothing to keep them from the hands of those who would commit crimes with them
even when those people were incarcerated! As a matter of fact, as I noted
above, corrupt government officials were implicated as being the likely
culprits to have smuggled the firearms into the prison and that is based upon
past cases of such having happened.
So, unless you get rid of every gun that there is on the
planet, gun control is not going to work. It probably would not even work then
because it is just too easy to produce firearms in a workshop, even in a
backyard or basement workshop. That is exactly how tens of thousands of
firearms were smuggled into Afghanistan, to supply the Afghans, when the Soviet
Union occupied that country. The guns were manufactured in home shops by people
in Pakistan.
What we need in the USA is not a gun ban or gun
restrictions, what we need is stiffer sentencing when guns or any weapons are
used in the commission of a crime - maybe a mandatory 25 year add on sentence.
This may not prevent the criminal from committing more violent crime once his
sentence has expired and he gets out of jail but will assure that he will not
commit violent crime on the streets for at least the time he is in jail.
We need swift and sure justice that results in the death
penalty for the offender when someone is found guilty of manslaughter or
murder, or of a felony in which violence resulting in injury was used to commit
the crime, resulting in the death penalty. The death penalty may not work as a
deterrent however it works without fail as to preventing recidivism once the
sentence has actually been carried out.
We need to assure that our mental health system
institutionalizes those who are a high potential threat to public safety. We
did that many years ago and the incidence of violent crimes committed by the
mentally ill was lower than currently.
We need to allow our children to properly adjust to
aggression and violence. Thus we need to accept, as we used to, that violence
and aggression are normal, in children and teens, to a certain degree. Instead
of coddling our children and teens and even our young adults, we need allow for
an adjustment period in which they learn how to naturally react to things like
bullying and other highly stressful situations, maybe by way of them fighting
back by using an appropriate level of self-defense. Thus they would gain an
understanding that extremely violent overreactions, like what they see in video
games and on television, are not the proper ways to react to the great majority
of situations although sometimes a situation can be dealt with best by
application of the appropriate level of violence and aggression.
None of that should not be difficult to accomplish; not once
we realize we need to get rid of some things our society has turned to such as:
the Nanny State and the proliferation of nannies instead of educators in our
schools, police state in which the police see themselves as above the law yet
needing to enforce the law as more important than them living up to their oaths
by being the defenders of the Constitution, the soft tyranny that exists and
may soon turn to hard tyranny as opposed to having politicians that realize
they are public servants who are supposed to serve us instead of us serving
them.
It was like that once upon a time, not all that long ago -
within my lifetime. It can be that way again and when it is, just as when I was
a youngster - mass shootings and mass murders of any sort, within this nation, will
be rare occurrences indeed.
All the best,
Glenn B
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