If even a few armed citizens had been in that Orlando night club?

To The Daily Sun,

As the mainstream media (and others) cover almost continuously the recent tragic Islamic Jihadist shooting in Orlando, and as the political left once again calls for more gun controls, there are numerous factual errors, misstatements, and complete failures to explain to the American public the whole truth.

For example, there has been almost continued reference to the shooter's use of an AR-15 rifle. Which is just plain false. As it turns out, the rifle was actually a Sig Sauer MCX carbine, a modular, multi-caliber (able to swap to different calibers) rifle system that sometimes utilizes magazines common to more than 60 different firearms, but otherwise has no major parts that interface with AR-15's in any way, shape or form. This of course will make no difference at all to the anti-gun politimedia, who don't particularly care about factual accuracy and who likely wouldn't be able to tell an AR-15 from a toaster oven if their lives depended on it.

There has been a common thread in all of the recent shootings, starting with Columbine and proceeding to Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, and now Orlando. They all took place in "gun-free" zones.

Yes, even on domestic U.S. military bases ordinary soldiers must lock up their weapons, which is how the terrorist was able to kill and injure so many at Fort Hood.

By creating so-called gun-free zones in our schools, and in the case of Orlando, bars, law-abiding concealed weapon carrying citizens are prohibited from arming themselves for self-protection in any of these areas. The result of so-called gun free zones is that government has actually created free-fire zones for criminals and terrorists to maim and kill at will without fear of anyone exercising their rights of self-defense.

The police cannot be everywhere all the time and one or two police officers at the scene in Orlando were not able to stop a determined terrorist.

But imagine what might have happened in each of these tragedies if only several law-abiding concealed weapon carrying citizens were there and armed. Some people might have still have been injured or killed, but the threat to many more lives could have been eliminated.

In Virginia Tech, one of the faculty members who died shielding his students from the gunman was a former member of the Israel defense forces and was presumably well trained in the use of weapons. But he was prohibited from being armed. Does anyone doubt that had he been armed he could have stopped the threat before more lives were taken?

No current gun control proposals by the left, if enacted, would have prevented any of the various attacks. The only real sensible gun control is for law abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights to self-defense and use both of their hands to hold their weapons.

Norman J. Silber

Gilford