America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.
But they know what they hate.
After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.
When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.
The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”
As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).
Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.
That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
