Commentary
By Frances Rice
Delta Air Lines posted the below
outrageous message on Twitter that is a slap in the face of the five million NRA members.
To express my objection to this partisan
political action by Atlanta-based Delta Airlines, I sent the below email to Delta’s CEO with a
cc to other top executives.
I urge our supporters to send their own messages to
Delta Air Lines.
Here is the email contact information:
Mr. Edward Bastian
Chief Executive
Officer
Delta Air Lines
Email Addresses:
___________________
Dear Mr. Bastian:
In light of your decision regarding
the NRA, please be advised that I am one of the NRA's five million members.
I
am also a retired Army lieutenant colonel with 20 years of service and have a
concealed carry permit.
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and now live
in Sarasota, Florida.
When taking trips that required air travel, I would
always make an effort to fly Delta, but I will no longer do so since your
company has decided to side with the political partisans who seek to abrogate
my Second Amendment right to be armed and prepared to protect myself, a black
woman, and my family.
Below is an article that reflects my
opinion on gun control laws.
Sincerely,
Frances Presley Rice, Lieutenant
Colonel (USA, Retired)
_________________
OPINION: We Don’t Need Stronger Gun Laws. We Need
Stronger Communities.
Here we go again. Another school
massacre and another overreaction by liberals who want to play politics with
the Second Amendment.
On Valentine’s Day, 17 students and
faculty members were murdered by a former classmate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School in Parkland, Fla., a small community west of Boca Raton.
As tragic as the murders were,
sometimes I am confused by the way people react to tragedies. In the aftermath
of a mass shooting, many people want the government to immediately pass new gun
control laws. The hard truth is that there is absolutely nothing the government
can do to protect you from tragedies like the horrific massacre in Parkland.
Tragedy, by definition is, “an event
causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident,
crime, or natural catastrophe.”
Sometimes good people are beset by
tragedies, randomly and without warning.
If you ban guns, do you really think
violent tragedies will go away? One need look no further than Japan to find the
answer.
In Japan, it is illegal to possess,
carry, sell or buy guns. So, it is extremely rare, if ever, for a shooting
death to occur in Japan.
For example, in 2014, Japan had six
gun related deaths compared to 33,599 in the U.S.
In 2016, however, nineteen people
were killed and 26 injured in a stabbing massacre in Tokyo, which was Japan’s deadliest mass
killing since World War II. In 2008, a man ran over a group of
people with his truck and then stabbed 18, killing seven in Tokyo’s Akihabara
gaming district. In 2001, eight children were killed when a former employee, a
janitor, entered an elementary school in Osaka and stabbed them to death.
So, the point is that even if guns
were outlawed in the U.S., a person determined to commit an act of violence
will always find a weapon of choice to unleash their diabolical schemes.
Irresponsible mainstream media
outlets take advantage of these crises, broadcasting the anguish and misery of
distraught family members just to boost their own ratings. As they say, “if it
bleeds, it leads.”
Let’s game out one of the liberal
arguments that outlawing guns is the solution to these mass shootings, that
seem to happen with more frequency.
So, Japan has outlawed guns. Now,
killers in that country use knives and cars to inflict massive carnage upon
their fellow citizens.
If the U.S. outlawed guns and
preemptively banned, let’s say, ice picks and utility knives, then individuals
that are committed to killing other people will simply use whatever else they
can get their hands on. Cars and trucks might become the weapons of choice;
should we ban them, too? If we go down that road, where will it end?
What liberals refuse to address is
the lack of values and morality in our society. Religion instills in a society
a sense of right and wrong and demands some type of structure in our lives, but
liberals have run prayer out of our nation’s schools; and any mentions or
references to God in the public square are questioned, mocked or maligned
outright.
Regardless of one’s religious
beliefs, can anyone legitimately argue that the Ten Commandments are not good
standards for any society to live by? Thou shalt not murder, lie, covet, etc.
In American society today, many
people have bought into the notion that man, not God, is the measure of all
things. There are no rules. No restraints.
American society has cast the
traditional nuclear family by the wayside. For liberals, normal is whatever you
feel like doing at any given moment.
Liberal Hollywood elites, the most
vociferous advocates for gun control, refuse to take responsibility for the violence
and lack of morals that are constant themes in their movies and TV shows; most
of them won’t even acknowledge the negative effects that their industry has on
the minds of young people.
The result is generations of
children who become desensitized to violence and mayhem, who then lash out in
real life, without ever considering the repercussions of their actions.
These kids don’t wake up one day and
decide to go on murderous rampages at their schools, simply because someone
picked on them during lunch or they experienced a bad breakup. We have all gone
through that as teenagers and young adults and we got through it without
killing and maiming dozens of our classmates.
What is different now? Today, it’s
very hard to get teenagers and young adults to think critically about the world
they live in. No one wants to accept personal responsibility for anything that
happens in their lives; everyone gets a trophy; everything bad that happens to
them is always someone else’s fault.
The state of Florida and the F.B.I.
are going to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out why this kid killed
students and faculty members at that school in Parkland. In reality, there are
no simple solutions to most problems that we wrestle with as a society.
Unfortunately, sometimes bad things
happen to good people and banning guns won’t change that.
