PA Bill Number: HB2311

Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.

Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...

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Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024

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Is Vaughn under fire for wanting guns in schools, or telling truth? :: 06/03/2015

The anti-gun far left is freaking over actor Vince Vaughn’s comments appearing yesterday in British GQ, while news accounts seem to be focusing more on his remarks about guns in schools and largely ignoring what he said about the right to bear arms, and one must wonder if it’s because gun prohibitionists don’t care to deal with an inconvenient truth.

As quoted by British GQ, the Daily Mail and this column yesterday, Vaughn put it bluntly: “We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting; it's about the ability of the individual.”

But what did the left-leaning press, including a story in today’s Seattle P-I.com focus on? Perez Hilton.com headlined its story, “Vince Vaughn thinks the solution to school shootings is guns on campus.” The P-I.com’s headline read, “Vince Vaughn supports carrying guns in schools.” At least the Salon story – with the longwinded headline “Vince Vaughn’s baffling guns-in-schools vision: Gun control is “like banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat” – included in its text the bit about why the Constitution specifically protects the right to bear arms.

Vaughn perhaps took a major career risk in supporting gun rights. After this column reported on his comments yesterday, other reports spread his words. Fox News had a segment about gun control during the morning broadcast of “Fox and Friends” which can be viewed here.

Call it an ironic lead-in for today’s effort by the anti-gun Everytown for Gun Safety to get people to wear orange – usurping the color worn by millions of hunters to increase visibility and reduce accidents – in observance of what the lobbying group calls “National Gun Violence Awareness Day.” It seems to be a subliminal attempt to associate recreational hunting with criminal violence.

Today, millions of armed citizens probably will not be wearing fluorescent orange. Instead, they’ll blend in with the crowd as they do every other day; average citizens going about their daily lives, their firearms out of sight and out-of-mind. As noted Monday, an estimated 11-12 million Americans are licensed to carry, including more than 490,000 Washington residents.

As Vaughn stated with blunt eloquence, “It’s not about duck hunting.” The right to bear arms was enshrined by the Founders to assure the security of a free state; that is, to resist tyranny, from abroad or within. Those who insist that is a foolish right wing notion forget the battle of Athens, Tennessee in 1946.

Vaughn’s comments are timely. Over the weekend, The Hill reported about a dozen proposed gun control regulations that will be pushed by the Obama Justice Department and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. These are measures that the administration could not get through Congress, so the game plan now appears to be a dance around Congress – and some argue, the Constitution – to implement Second Amendment erosions before Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.

The gun prohibition lobby and its mainstream press cheerleaders refer to these proposals as “reforms.” The Second Amendment doesn’t need reforming. When it is allowed to work, it has worked pretty well. It’s when government and social engineers have encumbered it with restrictions that things have gone haywire, where law-abiding citizens are disarmed and criminals terrorize the neighborhoods. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention to Baltimore, Chicago or New York.

As for Vaughn’s comments about guns in schools, he’s not saying anything that many school officials haven’t already figured out. Following Sandy Hook, the press pundits and far left excoriated National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre for saying what it is now evident they really all believe; they just don’t want to give him any credit. Armed school security, armed teacher and administrator programs and increased law enforcement presence around schools affirm they all understand that a good guy with a gun actually can stop a bad guy with a gun.

Anti-gunners may not be able to paint Vaughn’s comments into the corner, because a lot his fans will listen to him and the remarks are getting plenty of attention. That just might be more scary to the gun prohibition lobby than a parade of NRA members marching down a street in their neighborhoods.

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