Miasmatic Review

Cop blames the gun.

Shadoglare wants to get my blood boiling early this week. He sent me a link to a local story about a rash of shootings at a local housing project, including the first homicide in Rockford for the year. The Chief of Police Chet Epperson is quoted in the article saying:

Epperson believes the latest rash of violence can be attributed, in part, to the ease with which ex-felons can get their hands on guns. Two Blackhawk Courts shooting victims had been released from prison as recently as last month.

“This is unacceptable,” Epperson said of the string of shootings. “Handguns are really the culprit of the degradation of this community.”

What????? Ease in which ex-felons can get their hands on guns? The last time I bought a firearm in Illinois I had to jump through hoops and wait three days. In that time they did a back ground check and everything to make sure I wasn’t a felon. Wait, I bought my firearm legally, that’s right. The way Chet here is talking about must be illegal. That means that if Chet and his boys were doing their jobs then the felons would have a hard time getting firearms. So if there is an easy way to get them, it’s obviously his fault since he’s the “top cop”.

As for handguns being the culprit of the degradation of this community, I’m curious to how he jumped to that conclusion. If all three cases involved baseball bats, golf clubs or kitchen knives would he blame those? Probably not, but because he can’t stem the flow of illegal firearms, then he has to blame the firearm not the individuals using them. Sure it’s easy to blame an inanimate object, it won’t argue back. But lets put the blame were it really belongs: The individuals that pulled the trigger. I don’t know what their up bringing was, and I really don’t want to stereotype anyone, so I’m not going to. But both my mother and father who were involved in my life and taught me right from wrong raised me. I’ve never shot anyone with malice. I’ve never used a firearm to solve a dispute between me and another person. And as much as I joke about, “I’m going to shoot…”, I don’t follow through with it by actually shooting anyone.

It’s the type of ignorance that Chet here uses that causes so much fear and mistrust of legal firearms and their owners.