In the wake of the shooting death of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the gun control lobby is once again leaning into its "police violence is gun violence" stance that it largely dropped during the Biden administration.
Brady head Kris Brown, for instance, recently bleated on X that the "fed govt is using guns against the people, calling it patriotism, and promising itself impunity & absolution," while a recent Everytown for Gun Safety post on Bluesky declared "gun violence is gun violence, no matter who pulls the trigger," adding that the group stands "with every community that has endured senseless violence at the hands of federal agents."
All of which begs the question: if police violence is gun violence, then why does virtually every anti-gun bill drafted and pushed by the gun control lobby exempt police from its prohibitions?
HB 217, for example, which was recently introduced in Virginia, would prohibit the sale, manfacture, and transfer of all "assault firearms" in the state, as well as magazines capable of holding ten rounds of ammunition. The provisions, though, "shall not apply... to a law-enforcement agency in the Commonwealth for use by that agency or its employees."
The gun control lobby swears that AR-15s are "battlefield weapons of war" that have no place in a civil society. If they truly believe that, then why do they want police to have access to them?
The day before Kris Brown posted about the federal government using guns against its people, she retweeted Virginia Del. Dan Helmer's post boasting about HB 217. Helmer himself has said that "weapons similar to those I used fighting for our country overseas have no place in our schools, in our churches, and on our streets," but neither he nor Brown have any objection to police using these guns.
A recent piece by NRA-ILA highlighted some of the reaction of the anti-gun groups to Renee Good's death, and while much of the commentary is on point I completely disagree with their conclusion.
Of course, any time an agent of the government uses deadly force against a member of the public, that action is rightly scrutinized. Brown is correct that all the details of these incidents are not yet known; they are still being investigated, as they should be. Without concerns about the potential for runaway government, we wouldn’t have the Second Amendment, itself.
But to state with a “certainty” that they prove or illustrate that guns in any hands are antithetical to public safety is to give away the game that firearm prohibitionists are really playing. That game is ultimately to promote the idea that no safeguards can allow Americans to coexist with guns and to leverage every firearm involved injury and fatality, no matter what the circumstances, in the effort to ban guns as widely as possible.
A similar narrative was promoted by firearm prohibition organization Giffords, who labeled the asserted DGU in Minneapolis by an immigration agent who was in the path of a resisting subject’s accelerating vehicle a form of “gun violence” that “must” be rejected.
To the firearm prohibitionist, rejecting “gun violence” means rejecting all guns and their users, whoever’s side they are on and for whatever reason they have guns.
That's simply not true. Gun control groups like Giffords, Brady, and Everytown may reject "gun violence" perpetrated by police, but they're not rejecting guns in the hands of law enforcement at all. They're explicitly allowing law enforcement to get a pass on gun and magazine bans, "gun-free zones", waiting periods, gun storage mandates, and every other restriction they want to place on lawful gun owners.
If the gun control lobby really did reject all guns and their users, I would at least give them a point for consistency. Instead, these groups are advocating for the police and military to be the only ones with access to commonly owned arms. They can't be unaware of the contradiction, so the fact that every bill they introduce this year at the state and federal level will give police a pass is an intentional decision on the part of anti-gun activists. No matter how often they repeat slogans like "police violence is gun violence," Brown and others of her ilk are just fine with the police having access to "military-style assault weapons"... and to deploy those weapons while enforcing the gun control laws drafted by the likes of Brady and Everytown for Gun Safety.
