Editorial columns by John Micek and Kathleen Parker are always good for a laugh or a shake of the head in amazement that folks can really have such a strange though process. Their Thursday, May 11 columns published in the Griffin Daily News surely did fit the bill.

Micek, while defending rioters that burn businesses, destroy private and public property and block highways as expressing their free speech, compared them to people peacefully standing around with guns on straps or in holsters. He is all upset because 20 states are working on punishing rioters. He said us gun owners better watch out, we might be next.

No worries, John. We gun owners are always watching out for the likes of you, who support any criminal activity and make excuses for them but want to take away our guns. That is one reason the NRA has more than five million dues paying members.

Parker, who decries any sport hunting of animals, even if used for food, compared Condoleezza Rice and Sally Yates, saying they were both strong women. That is like comparing a rattlesnake and a border collie saying they are both strong animals.

Rice served our nation well in many jobs and never had even a hint of misconduct. She is an excellent role model for anyone, male or female. Yates was fired as acting Attorney General for refusing to follow a lawful order by the president. Parker defended Yates saying she refused to do her job because she decided the order was unconstitutional.

Under our government, that decision is for the Supreme Court to make, not some career bureaucrat.

I try to think logically. If problem “A” is caused by “B”, and action “C” will produce the desired solution “D” then I do it. Rusty hooks are a problem caused by rain wetting my hooks in the boat locker. Keeping my hooks in waterproof Ziploc bags is the action that prevents rust. It would not be logical to put them in a paper bag.

Getting thrown out of a boat and run over by it, or even left treading water as it idles away, is a problem. Wearing a life jacket with a kill switch is the solution since it stops the engine if you are thrown from the seat. I do not need a law or tournament rule to make me do it. Even though our club tournaments have that life-saving rule, some ignore it.

I tried to find some kind of logic in the Dalton Daily Citizen editorial on the Campus Carry Bill reprinted in the April 12, 2017 Griffin Daily News. They are against allowing 21-year-old law abiding citizens, that have gone through a finger print back ground check, to legally carry guns on college campuses. They say the problem is young people with “raging” hormones that drink and use drugs illegally might cause problems if they have guns.

Those raging hormones or whatever already make them break drug and alcohol laws, and gun laws too. If you are younger than 18, current law says you are not allowed to even own a pistol or have any concealed weapon so the problem is underage students having guns illegally.

Chances are if you can pass a finger print background check you pretty much have you “raging’ hormones under control. So how is not allowing those that are not a problem to carry a legal gun going to affect those that already break laws.

I found it funny that the editorial quoted Governor Deal saying, “From the early days of our nation colleges have been treated as sanctuaries of learning where firearms have not been allowed.” As an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Georgia in 1968, a long time ago but well after the early days of our nation, I kept my 30-30 lever action Marlin and my Remington .22 semiautomatic rifle in my dorm room locker for a year. And both lived by my bed in my fraternity house for a year.

I assure you I had “raging” hormones back then, but even at 18 I never caused a problem with my guns. And even in those latter days of our nation, there were no laws against it. New laws do not keep law-breakers from breaking them. Laws affecting only law-abiding citizens have absolutely no effect on law-breakers.

I found it significant the editorial admitted Georgia is one of only 17 states with a law against guns on campuses. Apparently the other 33 do not have problems, so why are we different? Do Georgia students have more “raging” hormones?

I can find no logic in the Dalton editorial.

What is the purpose of having a law? Is it to punish people for doing something most in a society does not condone? Is it to protect some from others? Is it to prevent people from doing something? Or all those things.

Many of our laws are intended to do those things. But do they work? If not enforced they cannot work. And if enough people ignore them they become irrelevant.

The law says the speed limit on Highway 19/41 Bypass is 55 in most areas. If you obey it, you will be passed by almost every other car on the road. And you are very unlikely to be punished unless you speed far above the legal limit. So that law is irrelevant most of the time. People decide to ignore the law since it is not strictly enforced.

What about gun laws? They often are passed over the objections of many in society. They never protect anyone, because anyone willing to shoot another person is not going to obey any gun law because the punishment is much higher for assault or murder. Only law-abiding citizens are affected by gun laws.

Gun laws are often not enforced, especially for the rich or famous. An article in the Griffin Daily News on March 10 told how some rapper named “Waka Flocka Flame” was found not guilty of having a handgun in his carry-on baq at the Atlanta airport. Although law-enforcement tried to enforce the law, a jury found him not guilty after a four day trial.

What do you think would have happened to you or I if we got caught doing that? Waka’s lawyer told the press what happened, according to the article. So if you can afford a high priced lawyer you can often get away with a crime.

Almost every arrest report in the Griffin Daily News, when listing the charges, include “possession of a gun by a felon,” something that has been against the law for years. But do you ever hear of any criminal actually being punished for that crime? That charge is almost always dropped or pleaded away somehow. Why?

When I hear folks calling for new gun laws I can only wonder why. The ones we have are not enforced in many cases, they only affect the law-abiding, and they do nothing to protect society. Maybe before passing new, useless laws, we should try actually enforcing the ones already on the books.

The Georgia Legislature and governor are considering a bill to allow Georgian’s with a Georgia Weapons License to carry their guns on school campuses. This has created an uproar by the anti-gunners.

If you hear someone ranting that it is stupid to allow teenagers to carry guns, especially on school campuses, you can be sure of two things. One, they do not know what they are talking about, or two, they are intentionally misleading you with lies. Or it may be both.

The law is very specific. To “legally” carry a gun on campus you are required to have a Georgia Weapons license. To get one you must be at least 21 years old and go through a fingerprint background check.

Even if you ignore that most people that want to harm others with guns pay no attention to laws and carry a gun wherever they want, it is silly to worry about an adult that has gone through a carful background check.

In addition, I have to laugh about how terrible it is to allow teenagers to carry guns. It seems the US military is fine with 18 and 19-year old’s carrying actual full automatic assault weapons, not the civilian semiautomatic versions of them.

My daddy always said “Never elect an honest man, holding an office will just make him a crook.” I guess that influenced me a lot. I often think that anyone wanting to run for office should be automatically disqualified. Why would anyone want to hold an elected office where every voter expects something in payment for their vote, and no matter what you do you are going to have about half the people mad at you all the time.

I am a one issue voter. I will never vote for anyone wanting to pass laws to restrict my 2nd Amendment rights. I have owned guns since I was six years old and got my first BB gun. My guns have provided me untold hours of fun shooting targets, have provided me food all my life and have given me the comfort of knowing I can take care of myself.

None of my guns have ever harmed another person, and they never will unless used to protect myself or someone else. So how does restricting my rights make a difference? If laws kept illegal things out of criminals’ hands, we would have no cocaine or heroin on our streets.

The election this year is a problem. Donald Trump has never been a gun rights person until recently. He says he has changed. Hillary Clinton has been anti-gun all her life. So do I vote for Trump and hope he does what he says about guns, or vote for Hillary and hope she does not do what she says she wants to do. To do that I would have to ignore everything else.

Recently Hillary said she wanted the same kinds of laws in the US that were passed in Australia. There, after a mass shooting in 1996, the government confiscated all semiautomatic rifles, pump and semiautomatic shotguns and almost all pistols. They said they would pay you if you turned in your banned gun by a certain time but after that they would just take it.

In 1988 25 percent of households in Australia had a gun, by 2005 only six percent had one. That is what Hillary wants for us.

Has it made a difference? The murder rate there dropped from 1.9 per 100,000 in 1993 to 1.3 in 2007, a tiny drop of six tenths of one percent. And it has not been a steady drop, in 2002 they had the highest number of murders there in 26 years. But in Australia, just like here, the murder rate had been dropping for years before they confiscated guns.

Some gun banners argue that confiscating guns will reduce mass shootings, like it did in Australia. But in this study – http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/Mass_shootings.pdf – the authors found there were so few mass shootings before gun confiscation that no before-and-after study could be done. They did compare New Zealand and Australia, two similar countries with very different gun laws, and found no difference because of the law. So, because of one mass shooting, a country confiscated over 600,000 guns, a high percentage of all guns in the country, and it has had no effect.

If Hillary got her way, the government would confiscate almost all my guns. Four they would take would be the Winchester Model 1893 pump 12 gauge my father inherited from his father and passed on to me, the Ithaca pump goose gun my father-in-law gave to me, the Browning semiautomatic long barreled 12 gauge my daddy shot doves with all his life and the Remington short barreled semiautomatic 12 gauge he shot quail with before passing them on to me. The government taking those guns away from me would really help with crime.

I will never support anyone wanting to follow Australia’s gun ban and confiscation law.

When I was six years old I had my tonsils taken out. As a present for being such a “big boy” during the surgery I got a BB gun, my first gun of many. I was extremely proud of that gun and it was my constant companion for the next two years, carrying it almost everywhere I went. It was a great way to learn gun safety and prove to my parents I could handle a gun responsibly.

During the next two years I got my second gun, a semiautomatic Remington .22. That rifle had a tubular magazine that held 16 high power Long Rifle bullets. The boxes those bullets came in had the warning “Danger, range one mile” printed on them.

I was not allowed to take that gun out of the house unless an adult was with me. Daddy took me out to shoot it fairly often, and I killed my first squirrel with it when, at eight years old, I saw one in the woods across the road from the house after school one day and got Gladys, our housekeeper, to go out with me since nobody else was at home.

My parents accepted that I had learned gun safety at that point and I was allowed to go out with my gun, only if alone or with an adult, for two more years. At ten years old I was finally allowed to go out with my friends. For years we hunted together during season and carried our rifles every where we went, even when no season was open.

No one gave a second look to three 12 year olds walking into town with our rifles, propping them by the door of Mr. John Harry’s store and going in to buy a coke and pack of crackers for a nickel each and a box of bullets for our rifles. A box of 50 Long Rifle bullets was 62 cents, if I remember right.

The summer I turned 18 I graduated from high school, was accepted at the University of Georgia for that fall, registered for the draft and got a job making roof trusses for a pre fab construction company. One day that summer a few weeks before my 18th birthday I went to buy some .22 bullets at Mr. John Harry’s store and he told me he could not sell them to me since I was not 18 yet.

Although I knew automatic guns and sawed off shot guns were illegal, that was my first run in with so called “common sense gun control laws.” It took five years after President Kennedy was killed with a mail order rifle for congress to “do something” and pass a law that banned mail order sales of guns, as well as sale of rifle ammunition to anyone younger than 18.

That gun control law was supported by the NRA, because it was just the start of the long history of “doing something” that always ended up restricting gun owners rights while doing nothing to have any impact on crime. It sounded somewhat reasonable and didn’t restrict gun owners rights much so it was not opposed. The NRA and I have learned the camel in the tent proverb now and oppose such silly laws since we know if you let a camel get his nose in the tent you will soon be sleeping with a camel.

In the 48 years since that law was passed every time someone uses a gun illegally and makes the news the knee jerk reaction is to “do something” that involves restricting gun owners rights. So now I and many other gun owners oppose all such silly “do something” bills.

Right now the big push is to renew a 1994 law banning some guns because of the way they look. The “assault weapons” ban lasted ten years and was allowed to expire in 2004 because facts showed it had absolutely no effect on gun crime. But now gun banners are trying to bring back such a totally ineffective law.

Rifles of all kinds are hardly ever used in crime. And the way they look had no impact on the way they work. For example, the 1994 law banned the sale of a common gun called an AK 47. So the foreign manufacturers of the AK 47 took the working metal parts of the gun, put them on a different looking wooden stock, and sold it as a MAK 90.

I bought one, mostly out of protest for the stupidity of a law banning guns because of fear. It is fun to shoot, bullets are cheap, and even with a 30 round magazine it has never committed mass murder. I also own an AR 15. It sits quietly in my gun cabinet with its 30 round magazine loaded and attached, and has never jumped out to go shoot somebody. It only comes out to go out to the farm and the only thing it has shot is some paper and a couple of deer.

Another big push is to close a myth, the “gun show loophole.” Since it is a federal felony to sell guns without a FFL unless it is your personal firearm, and any FFL seller must run a background check, there is no loophole.

Expect to hear calls and see childish actions like a sit in shutting down the government because you don’t get your way. Just remember any new law will be as effective in lowering gun crime as the law that stopped me from buying .22 bullets, bullets I had been buying for six or seven years, when I was 17 years old.

I read the cute little Joseph Cotton editorial on guns in the April 27 Griffin Daily News with bemusement. In it he tried to convince gun owners that those wanting to ban guns are really patriots, just with different views. He even goes so far as to say the 2nd Amendment must be preserved and he wants us to compromise with gun banners.

All he and the other “patriots” on his side want to do is ban a bunch of guns because they don’t like them. He sees no reason he and his fellow “reasonable” gun banners can’t use the power of the government to ban all guns they can classify as “assault weapons” because of the way they look. That’s like banning big soft drinks because you think others should not have them.

I might be more willing to listen to folks like him if they would just pay attention to facts. According to a Congressional Research Service report less than two percent of all crimes were committed by rifles, of which only a small subcategory could be classified as “assault weapons” by anyone’s definition. In 1994 there were an estimated 1.5 million “assault weapons” in civilian hands based on liberal Slate magazine. In the past seven years sales of semiautomatic rifles what the gun banners usually call “assault weapons” have increased dramatically.

In the first four years of the Obama administration there were an estimated 67 million gun sales. And almost every month for the past three years gun sales have set new records. Yet during that same time gun crime had fallen every year.

So if “assault weapons” are almost never used in crime and overall gun crime has decreased while gun sales, including “assault weapons” have increased dramatically, what sense does it make to ban any guns?

For the gun banners, compromise means do it my way. Their goal is incremental gun bans. Its like the old saying about once the camel gets its nose in the tent it won’t be long before you are sleeping with a camel. Banning guns will not affect crime in any way, so why let the camel in the tent?