By Tom Reynolds

Quite often, the simplest solution to a problem is the best solution.

In Chapter 11 of former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s book, “With All Due Respect”, she describes the conditions in South Sudan, a country that has been torn apart by civil war. By the fall of 2017, two million people had been displaced and two million more had fled the country. It is the site of one of the United Nations’ largest and most expensive (and ineffective) peacekeeping missions.

Thousands of civilians sought refuge near UN peacekeeping bases and the UN set up “protection of civilian sites” outside their gates. These tent cities are ringed by barbed wire and exist in horrible conditions under the unreliable protection of UN peacekeeping troops.

Violence against women is rampant. UN peacekeeping forces are infamous for raping and abusing women under their care and these are the “good guys”. In these camps, women must venture outside the security of the barbed wire to collect firewood for cooking. Once outside the compound, they are frequently attacked and raped.

Ambassador Haley had no direct answer to these problems other than continuing to argue for them within and without the U.N. Noble but ineffective.

I have a simple and direct answer: teach these women to shoot and then arm them with handguns. I’ll bet the women won’t hesitate to use them to protect themselves and their children. Potential rapists will think twice (or several more times) before attacking the women.

Of course, a proposal such as this will bring howls from the left and all sorts of theories about how badly it would turn out. Realistically, some down-side things would happen, but would it be worse than the status quo? Absolutely not. And being self-reliant and protecting themselves would have a major, positive psychological impact on women for which there is little positive happening in their lives. Remember, guns have done more to make women safe that all the feminist movement in the world.

My suggestion for this sort of direct solution to a violence problem is equally lost on New York’s governor who won’t allow teachers in New York schools to be armed for fear that the students would be caught in a crossfire. He would prefer that a shooter be allowed to fire at will without any opposition. It doesn’t take a genius, which Cuomo definitely isn’t, to realize that many more student s would be killed by an unopposed shooter than would be injured in crossfire.

The best real-life answer to Cuomo and the anti-gun left is the recent shooting in a Texas church. In a room packed with parishioners, a gunman opened fire and the incident was over in six seconds! Six seconds! An armed parishioner took out the shooter and several others had drawn their weapons but did not fire, either because they did not have a clear shot or the incident was over before they could shoot. If a police officer had been sitting outside in a patrol car, he could barely have gotten out of the car door before the incident was over.

An armed populace is a safer populace and gun free zones only protect the criminal.