In the wake of yet another horrific shooting the leftist media is bombarding us with the same talking points and largely disingenuous pleas for 'sensible' gun control. And by sensible they mean meaningless platitudes that serve little purpose other than to inflame passions and divide us.
Every time there is one of these mass shooting events the cries go up - "Finally, it's time to do something!" And every time nothing happens. Why is that?
When Obama first came into office the democrats held the majority in both houses - and not a single piece of gun control legislation was passed. Obama did make a hair brained executive order attempt at using the social security administration to seize guns from the elderly who were using proxies to purchase firearms. That radical right wing group the ACLU fought Obama on this maneuver, Trump last year repealed the order and now leftists are pushing the lie that Trump wants mentally ill people to have guns.
And still the screeching continues after the tragedy last Wednesday in Florida. Rather than address the problem directly, gun control groups simply shout to the heavens "Gun control!" and then dare anyone to say anything negative about it. If someone does dare to question the narrative, they are simply told that 'The vast majority of Americans support gun control!" Well that is true, but the vast majority of Americans support spending cuts in our government and yet would never allow social security or medicare to be touched. As with government spending, the nitty gritty of gun control is - what specifically can we do to tackle the problem of mass shooting events?
The left has no answer for this beyond "We need to be like Europe because they banned guns and now they don't shoot each other." Newsflash, liberals, we are not Europe and never will be. We have a unique perspective on firearms, in that we won our liberty with them and we now own more guns by far than any other country in the world. There is a firearm for every man, woman and child in this country. Half of these guns have been manufactured and acquired in the last 25 years. During this time period crime has dropped in half. Not to say there is a direct correlation, that would be unscientific - but this is just truth in numbers. Numbers that plainly present the truth that our guns aren't going anywhere.
I would posit that there was no gun control legislation under Obama and there is no specific call to action to this day from the left because this is a deliberate choice. If liberals come out with specifics, they will be subjected to scrutiny, most likely by the majority of Americans. It is much easier, and feels much better, to launch cowardly personal attacks on gun owners and 2nd amendment supporters.
To actually get down to brass tax on certain types of gun control, such as making it much harder for the mentally ill to get their hands on guns, a proposal that the NRA is in favor of - is a daunting challenge for gun control enthusiasts because it would definitively shelve their emotionally driven lifelong dream of somehow magically taking guns out of the hands of private citizens.
And make no mistake, this is ultimately what most liberals want - the eventual confiscation of privately owned firearms. Many of the more savvy gun control folks will deny this if asked, but it is the only logical conclusion if you actually listen to their arguments and wildly broad proposals to 'be more like Europe'.
As we all know, mass confiscations will never happen in the US. And yet gun control proponents are content to let mass shootings go on so they can feed their fantasy of a gun-free utopia. They don't want to forward the debate, because the inevitable outcome will be the surrender of the state to the will of the people.
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I had the chance on my private political Facebook page to engage with a good guy who is woefully uneducated in firearms and yet stubbornly insists he is just as qualified as me to weigh in on guns and the 2nd amendment. I would say that this absolutely could be possible - that someone who has never touched a gun in their life could educate themselves to the point where they know more than I do about the subject - it is possible. But in this case it just isn't true, he is very ignorant about guns and displayed this in plain fashion with a recent response to my thread on the Florida shooting.
"Certain guns (like the AR-15) shouldn't be available for legal purchase. Period. The average person doesn't need one and I don't care if they want one. Too bad. Get over it."
At first blush, if you are firearm ignorant this statement seems straightforward, but to someone who deals with guns in their life, it belies a tremendous ignorance. I hammered out a response and then thought better, this is an inflammatory subject and I didn't need to inflame him any more. But I really dug what I wrote, so Imma share it here.
Oh, there was also this gem that he wrote -
"I'm also not hearing "second amendment" it was written when modern weaponry was unimaginable..."
This is patently false, and I know this because I'm an avid studier of history and often specifically firearms and weaponry in history. My rebuttal...
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Appreciate the lengthy response _______, and your willingness to engage.
I disagree with you about the AR, if you are going to remove it from the market you are doing so based only on what it looks like - not it's lethality or effectiveness in mass killing.
There are literally hundreds of rifles that are more powerful and fire just as rapidly and would be just as effective and maybe more effective to perpetrate a mass shooting.
Furthermore, over 90% of gun himicides in the US are committed by handguns - CDC stats show that in 2012 only 322 people were killed with rifles, the remaining 10,000 plus were killed with handguns.
So this is why I get frustrated with non-gun people, it's because of statements like 'the AR15 shouldn't be available for purchase, period." This is on it's face absurd. Why should it be removed when there are a ton of rifles that don't have a military look but do the same thing? It's not logical, it's emotional and it's borne out of a lack of knowledge which comes from a lack of direct experience with firearms.
I also part ways with you on your views on the 2nd amendment. Perhaps the most fallacious argument people use against it is that the founders could've never imagined modern weaponry. This is simply not true - but people who don't use guns or have any interest in them wouldn't know this.
They wouldn't know that the Belton flintlock, which was invented for the revolutionary war, could fire 20 shots in under 5 seconds. They wouldn't know about the Girandoni air rifle, another product of the revolutionary war that had a high capacity magazine. This particular rapid fire firearm was famously delivered personally by Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark for their expedition.
Then there's the Puckle gun, an early gatlin style gun that was actually made half a century before the revolutionary war and was seen in the field under the charge of both the colonists and the British at various times.
But perhaps the most well known rapid fire weapons of the 16th century (which had actually been invented 200 years prior) were the "Pepperbox" revolvers - mass produced by a variety of manufacturers. Lethal pistols that were all capable of firing half a dozen or more rounds in the space of a few seconds.
So the idea that the founding fathers could never have imagined rapid fire weaponry is demonstrably false. Furthermore, not only were they aware of these kinds of guns, many founding fathers were avid fans of military grade hardware being in the hands of private citizens.
One of the best examples of this enthusiasm is in the form of a letter of marque from president James Madison who authorized a merchant to equip his ship with cannons to fend off would be pirates. This wasn't just a firearm in the hands of a private citizen, this was full on artillery!
To be fair, even without my historical knowledge, I've never bought into the argument that the 2nd amendment was crafted to carve out a narrow right to own a single shot musket just because on it's face this doesn't make sense. The 1st amendment wasn't made to only protect quill and parchment or cumbersome printing press, it was made to be timeless and extend protection to all forms of speech, regardless of the technology delivering it. Developing technology was all around the founding fathers over their lifetimes - and they were not only aware of it, many of them like Ben Franklin, were enthusiastic about it.
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No this didn't all come off the top of my head, all credit to Stephen Crowder's youtube channel, which is where I learned about all the rapid fire weapons of the 1700s. But the reason I learned it is that I am involved with guns and take an active interest in everything about them.
