VanLuik: What about the rights of shooting victims?

Nut case. Who's not to say that the shooter wasn't a victim also. Remember two sides to the coin.

She says: "...the Supreme Court is the last arbiter defining what is “our common good”, whether we individually agree with the Justices or not." -- wrong. The People are the ultimate keepers of the Constitution. If we disagree with the SCOTUS on an issue, we can amend the Constitution to explicitly overturn their ruling. The SCOTUS' function regarding the Constitution is assessing whether the laws written by the legislature and signed by the President are in keeping with the constraints of the Constitution. SCOTUS is not the final word, nor does it even follow its own previous decisions--it has reversed itself on multiple topics over the years.

She says: "Surprise: most gun control advocates are not demanding that firearms be taken away or withheld from responsible citizens. They ask instead for the ban of devices that turn firearms into weapons of war and for the protection that our government should afford all its citizens." -- this is just plain dishonest or at best naive since gun control inevitably leads to confiscation and infringement of the right to remaining firearms to the point that the 2A is effectively meaningless (California anyone?). It also demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the 2A and the role of government in the "protection" of citizens.

She says: "...What is not correct is for a very small number of gun owners to oppose any initiatives that may keep firearms out of the hands of people who have been identified as unstable and/or likely to commit violence. We should not unwittingly be enablers of shooters. Are the individual’s perceived rights more important than the common good? What about the rights of those who are the victims of gun violence?..." ---initiatives that have proven ineffective time and again at preventing bad people from doing bad things, while proving effective at trampling the rights of everyone else are definitely something to be opposed. We should not unwittingly be enablers of shooters? I agree. Get rid of the killing fields known as "gun free zones" and stop pretending that the signs do anything to protect anyone--so-called "gun free zones" have proven to be the single biggest enabler of mass shootings, because the innocent people following the rules are all unarmed and unable to effectively defend against the person intent on causing harm. Would-be mass shooters have been stopped time and again by armed citizens providing an immediate response to counter their threat. What about the rights of those who are victims? They have the same rights to self-defense as anyone else--did they exercise their rights?