Another mass shooting, another round of hysterical nonsense from cowardly leftists wanting to deprive Americans of a fundamental and natural God-given right.
The murder of 26 men, women and children by Devin P. Kelley on Nov. 5 was a tragedy. Unfortunately, in today’s America, leftists won’t even wait for the body count before launching into their tired refrain of “commonsense gun laws.”
They need a new script.
Predictably, they will cite the dead children in an effort to elicit an emotional response. Those words ring hollow coming from adherents to a political philosophy that is responsible for the deaths of nearly 60 million babies since the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. That includes 18 million black babies but doesn’t include the estimated 250 million chemically induced abortions during the same time period.
How can someone claim it is OK for a mother to murder her child and in the next breath rail against gun ownership as a threat to children? Abortions are measured by the millions while children gun deaths are measured by the hundreds.
Putting that illogic aside, the left’s response to every single mass shooting is to call for more gun control (funny how leftists are always calling for more “control”). Another non sequitur given that criminals don’t follow the law.
This is evident in the First Baptist shooting. Kelley had his guns illegally. He was barred, by federal and state law, from owning a firearm. Unfortunately, government bureaucrats failed to do their jobs and allowed him to buy a weapon.
Same thing happened in 2015 when white supremacist Dylan Roof, who should not have been legally allowed to own a gun, was able to purchase one because of an administrative error within the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and he killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Clearly, laws do little to deter law breakers. If passing a law was all it took to end an undesirable behavior, there would be no war on drugs.
Of course, we all know that the left’s call for gun control has very little to do with guns and everything to do with control. If the left were serious about ending mass shootings, they would advocate commonsense measures that would actually reduce violence and enhance liberties such as reducing gun restrictions.
The shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, proves, once again, that the best way to end a mass murderer is an armed citizen shooting the killer center mass, preferably more than once. Indeed, nearly every mass murder is ended by someone with a gun.
Another commonality among mass shootings is that most of them take place in gun-free zones. Why that occurs seems self-evident. If one were to open fire at a shooting range, for example, he or she would not be very successful.
Still, logic has not stopped Democratic lawmakers.
Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., on Wednesday announced the reintroduction of a bill to ban so-called assault weapons and bump stocks. Assault weapon is a made-up classification that has nothing to do with the lethality of a weapon, only how scary a gun looks.
The bill would ban the sale and manufacture of 205 different weapons, including the AR-15, which is the modern-day musket and the same weapon used by Stephen Willeford, the former NRA instructor who engaged Kelley and prevented further deaths.
During the presidential election, the Washington Post, which can’t be accused of being pro-gun, published an investigation that demonstrated that none of the recent mass shootings would have been stopped by any gun proposal being advocated by the gun-grabbers.
If we are going to get serious about reducing gun violence, the leftists will first have to get rid of their gun-free paradise fantasy. It is not going to happen. There are 300 million guns in the United States and a gun culture that dates back to colonial days.
The guns are here to stay. There is absolutely no way to eliminate them without a war on the American people.
None.
Besides, the reality is, the United States has a low murder rate, about the middle of the pack worldwide. Many countries with more restrictive gun laws than the United States still have much higher murder and violent crime rates, which proves, as the saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
If saving lives is the agenda, then gun violence should not even be on the radar as it is not even in the top 10 causes of death in the United States. Indeed, about 900,000 babies are legally killed every year while there are only about 8,000 gun murders in a nation of 326 million people.
It’s clear where our priorities should rest.
Thomas J. Lucente Jr. is an attorney and night editor of The Lima News.
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