Missouri state senator wants to 'shame' gun owning parents

Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D-University City), supposedly in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School atrocity and other mass shootings, introduced a bill she claims will make "our communities safe for Missouri families":

Sen. Chappelle-Nadal said while the nation grieves for loss of so many innocent lives lost to gun violence in Newtown, Aurora, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Atlanta and other communities, random acts of gun violence in the St. Louis area have become a disturbing fact of life.

Uh-oh--when urban Democrats start talking about guns and safety, that tends to mean nothing good about their intentions toward Americans' right to own life and liberty preserving firepower. In this case, though, we are apparently not to worry, as she has told KSDK St. Louis that she has no such intentions:

"I am not trying to take away the gun rights of any parents or any other citizens I believe in the second amendment," says State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal.

Well, that's a relief. She continues:

She says she wants the violence in schools to stop and this is just one different idea that no one has brought up.

Tough to argue with that--her idea is "different," alright, and it is likely true that no one has previously come up with this idea--although that is hardly necessarily an endorsement. The first part of SB 124 is not the new and different component. It is a fairly standard (in anti-gun circles) "child access prevention" law--you know, the kind that would prevent kids from defending their lives and families. The kind that instead leads to two children being brutally stabbed to death with a pitchfork, because their older sister was denied access to the means to save them.

It's the next part where Sen. Chappelle-Nadal's "creativity" shines through.

This act requires a parent or guardian to notify a school district, or the governing body of a private or charter school, that he or she owns a firearm within 30 days of enrolling the child in school or becoming the owner of a firearm.

See--if this law had been in place in Newtown, Connecticut, the Sandy Hook massacre would . . . have been utterly unaffected, even if it had been obeyed, because the gun owner was not the parent of any student at Sandy Hook. More fundamentally, of course, is the question of even if the school does know which students live in homes with guns, how does that change anything?

Are those kids to be subjected to closer scrutiny--metal detectors, airport-style "naked x-rays," etc.? Of course not. This is all about "shaming" gun owners, as the Journal News did in New York, leading already to at least one stalking victim being found by her stalker, and at least one burglary. Acutally, Gawker outdid the Journal News--publishing a list of legal gun owners, and calling them "a**holes."

Making gun ownership "shameful" has long been a goal of gun prohibitionists. In 1995, when Attorney General Eric Holder was U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he announced a campaign to "brainwash" Americans into thinking that owning guns is "not cool." A year before that, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, as Director of the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, advocated treating guns like cigarettes, until they become "dirty, deadly, and banned."

There is, of course, nothing remotely "shameful" about availing oneself of the "palladium of liberty," and one could in fact argue that to refuse to take responsibility for one's own defense is what is actually contemptible.

Gun owning parents of school children in Missouri must tell Senator Chappelle-Nadal that we will not be scapegoated for the deranged evil of others, or for the utterly predictably tragic consequences of the state mandated defenselessness inherent to "gun free zones." Telling her will only take a minute.

See also:

• Kids 'n guns
• 'Protecting' children . . . from the ability to defend themselves
• H.R. 2202: bribing gun owners into defenselessness at home
• Boy shooting gator shows value of teaching kids about guns
• Boy repels burglars from home with shotgun
• 'Gunwalker': The culmination of AG Holder's anti-gun 'brainwashing' scheme