William Connell Cawthon Jr.
3 min readSep 4, 2018

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Yeah, talking about gun control sucks.

But you know what sucks even more? Using murdered children to promote measures that wouldn’t have saved them.

That really sucks. Because it means parents like Ms. Ashley have been suckered.

They have fallen for the hype and hysteria; drunk the Kool-Aid; swallowed the sales pitch hook, line and sinker — call it whatever you like. They’re the gullible rubes who have fallen for the pitch of the smooth-talking snake-oil salesmen hawking patent remedies from traveling medicine shows.

And they really don’t like it when they get called out.

They get upset when someone tells them that children are still safer in schools than almost anywhere else, including at home. Children are more likely to be murdered by their own parents than they are to die at the hands of a school shooter. The FBI says an average of 450 children are killed each year by their parents; 27 children were killed in school shootings in the 2017–2018 school year.

They would rather blame the gun than blame all the circumstances that enabled the shooter to commit his crimes. In the past 50 years, exactly one person under the age of 21 has used a legally purchased AR-style rifle in a school shooting. That one is Nikolas Cruz.

Cruz should have been in jail on February 14, 2018 instead of at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. His continuing violent behavior was enabled by a well-meaning Broward County diversion program and a failure by the FBI to follow up on two tips that Cruz might be planning an attack.

But instead of calling for a reexamination of diversion policies or calling for the FBI to get its act together, the suckers demanded that the minimum age to purchase a firearm be raised to 21. So more than 700,000 young adults in Florida got to pay for Cruz’s actions.

And yet, those who oppose the suckers are vilified for pointing out that the suckers have been taken in.

Yes, we’re going to question the worth of legislation to expand background checks that is submitted just days after a person who had passed more than a dozen of them gunned down more than 600 people in Las Vegas.

We’re going to question an Assault Weapons Ban that leaves perhaps 20 million of them in circulation and actually ignores guns that are more lethal. We’re going to be especially outspoken because an earlier ban was unable to produce a significant impact on crime.

We don’t oppose the snake-oil agenda because we love guns more than children; we don’t oppose it because of the Second Amendment: We oppose it because we’re not suckers.

Here’s the bottom line: If the suckers loved their children as much as we do, they would quit being suckers.

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