USA – -(Ammoland.com)- “I believe the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL are courageous and inspiring for speaking out and demanding action from politicians,” a letter to the editor of Albany’s Times Union from reader Jon Romano advocates. “Everyone nationwide should follow and accept nothing less than meaningful, life-saving policy changes from their representatives. Only then could this generation be the last generation that lives in a nation plagued by gun violence.”
The writer is one Jon Romano, and he lists his address as the Coxsackie Correctional Facility. Romano was a wannabe school shooter, who “brought a pump-action shotgun to Columbia High School in East Greenbush” in 2004 when he was 16 and began firing, hitting one teacher in the leg before the principal tackled and disarmed him.
That’s quite the “commonsense gun safety” advocate, is it not?
Romano was convicted of attempted murder and reckless endangerment, the Times Union notes, and will be up for parole in March 2021. He says he wants “to advocate for gun safety and mental health reform” when he gets out.
He’s hardly the first criminal to call for citizen disarmament in the wake of his own aberrant behavior.
Robyn Anderson testified before the Colorado House Judiciary hearing, Anderson claimed that background checks would serve to inhibit gun purchases–not by criminals, but by people who would pass such checks! She had also acted as a straw purchaser for Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, knowingly buying guns for minors who would not have passed a check. Yet she was credited with “turning the tide” to pass a gun show background check expansion bill affecting those who would.
Mark Manes also now wants nothing to do with firearms, admitting his mom, a long-time Handgun Control, Inc., activist, was “really right all along” when she warned him against having anything to do with guns. Curiously, that change in attitude only came after he was sentenced to a six-year term for his role in providing Harris and Klebold with a TEC-DC9 pistol and two 50-round boxes of ammunition.
Then there’s Barbara Graham, who believed so strongly in gun control, she became active in a group that helped sponsor the Million Morn March’s Washington DC rally, where she “spoke out … and helped memorialize the dead.” But DC’s gun bans didn’t stop Graham from obtaining a .45 caliber handgun, and paralyzing a man she mistakenly thought had killed her son.
Annette Stevens was so against guns she became president of the Springfield, Illinois, chapter of the Million Mom March, where she played a leadership role in advancing that group’s anti-gun agenda. Yet when police executed a search warrant related to recent drive-by shootings, they reportedly found illegal drugs and a handgun–for which she did not have a state-required Firearms Owner Identification card. Press reports said the serial number had been filed off the gun, another violation.
Amy Fisher wrote a newspaper column where she called for more gun control laws.
“Assault weapons were designed for military use,” she declared in support of extending the federal ban, even though none of the weapons affected have select-fire capabilities. “If a law-abiding citizen has such a yearning to possess one of these weapons, then let that person join the Marines.”
Fisher, of course, gained national notoriety in 1992 as “the Long Island Lolita,” after shooting her lover’s defenseless wife in the head.
My “favorite” bit of anti-gun advocacy from all of these, though, came from a high school student who agreed with everything Emma Gonzales, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and their adult handlers and bankrollers say about guns in schools.
“Students who bring guns to school are hardly ever detected,” he wrote in an assignment paper. “This is shocking to most parents and even other students since it is just as easy to bring a loaded handgun to school as it is to bring a calculator.”
“A school is no place for a gun,” he concluded.
The author was Columbine killer Eric Harris, who chose “Guns in Schools” for his report topic. It’s not hard to see why he would favor “gun-free school zones.”
Harris had a chance to test his theoretical preference for disarmed victims in the real world. As CNN reported at the time on his encounter with Columbine’s community resource officer, “[Sheriff’s Deputy Neil] Gardner, seeing Harris working with his gun, leaned over the top of the car and fired four shots … After the exchange of gunfire, Harris ran back into the building.”
And providing inspiration to Broward County “first responders,” Gardner remained outside. Still, he proved a point. Because unlike with his other targets, Harris did not pursue and try to finish off someone capable of returning lethal force. He fled to pursue helpless prey. The lesson here could not be clearer. Rather than being “no place for a gun,” firearms in schools, deployed by moral people who know what they’re doing, can protect the innocent and repel evil. Or at least give the victims a choice and a fighting chance.
Back to this Romano character, who hopes to become a voice-of-experience gun-grabber if he ever makes it back to being trusted without a custodian: Look pal, I’m sorry you messed up your life. I’m sorry you were so twisted and evil you thought murdering people indiscriminately would be an option for dealing with your utter unfitness to live among your fellow human beings.
But the fact is, some things are broken and they can’t be fixed. And no one can say with empirical certainty that Romano can be or has been and that he’s not just saying this because he hopes to game the parole board by scamming their “progressive” sympathies. Sorry, but some things are just so deranged and evil, and the state of the art at dealing with them is so uncertain and primitive, that letting him out of his cage makes as much sense as opening a man-eating tiger’s and telling it to go out and maul no more.
Romano knew going into that school that the chances of anyone returning fire were nil. It’s only due to the grace of God combined with the courage of a principal and the would-be killer’s own cowardly incompetence that he failed to achieve the child death toll he craved. It’s not surprising that he agrees with a citizen disarmament lobby, or more accurately, that they agree with him in terms of preferring defenseless victims.
The bottom line: I don’t care if he’s a former predator, a “reformed” predator or one of the enablers. He wants me and mine disarmed and defenseless?
No.
The longer response to them all is two words.
That goes for this failed school shooter, for Bloomberg, for Democrat gun-grabbing politicians, for Republican Quislings, for oath-breaking political police officials and the jackbooted thugs they send hither, for vacuous Hollywood dilettantes, for anti-gun “progressives” of all stripes, for media propagandists, for the useful idiot manufactured rock star “kids” that play better to the cameras than Demanding Mom cat ladies, to the Pajama Boys and to any other domestic enemy who would dare “advocate” for disarming their countrymen.
We will not disarm. Deal with it.
Or deal with us.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.