Op-Ed Claims Every Gun Is An Assault Weapon

Anti-gunners have a nasty tendency to grab hold of whatever they can to try and take away people’s rights. Following Parkland, the focus was on modern sporting rifles. It wasn’t the first time, either, of course. It was just what happens after a shooting.

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Following the Santa Fe High School shooter and the Capital Gazette shooter both using shotguns, though, it seems that anti-gunners are trying to use that to open the door on broader restrictions.

Each of these widely-publicized shootings was horrific — as is every other act of gun violence. Of the roughly 100 people fatally shot in the United States every day, you can count on one hand those who were slain by a military-grade weapon. Yet, advocates ostensibly working to end gun-related deaths routinely build their campaigns around select firearms, rather than focusing on the lethality of all guns.

Such myopic thinking has resulted in morbid consequences. Lest we forget, the massacre in Littleton, Colo. took place during the federal government’s so-called “assault weapon ban.” Those laws, however, were written in such a convoluted way that, without much effort, you could still legally purchase a gun that was both rapid-firing and didn’t need to be reloaded every few seconds. In many instances, you could even buy what amounted to a carbon copy of a prohibited model. All you needed to do was wait for the manufacturer to not-so-surreptitiously tweak a couple of design characteristics (a task easily accomplished without altering any of its firepower), change the name and model number, and, presto, place your order.

If that isn’t enough to make you question the wisdom of this strategy, look no further than the affirmation inherent in the blood-stained walls of the Capital Gazette newsroom: You don’t need a high-capacity firearm to execute a mass shooting.

Within days of the shooting, Everytown for Gun Safety and its subsidiary, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, were not only providing guidance to the MSD students, but were soon doing much of the heavy lifting for their March 24th rally in Washington, D.C. Given that the genesis of these marque entities was the real-life nightmare at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn., one might reasonably expect that they would be leading the charge to end civilian gun ownership in America entirely. After all, what difference would it make to an anguished parent which type of gun was used to take the life of their precious child?

There is, of course, only one answer to that gut-wrenching question. Yet, EverytownMoms Demand Action, and the students of MSD have chosen to trumpet the mythical panacea of banning high-capacity firearms, instead of confronting what is readily apparent: A gun — any gun — used to kill or injure someone is, for all intents and purposes, an assault weapon.

Make no mistake: Implementing universal background checks; improving the quality of (and removing the barriers to) mental health care; and eliminating access to weapons made for the battlefield would likely save some lives. But as long as we continue to condone personal firearms of any shape or size, we’ll remain trapped in a brutal, heart-breaking version of “Groundhog Day.”

And we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

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In other words, the problem with gun control in this author’s mind isn’t that they’re trying to take away our rights, it’s that they’re not trying to take away all of our gun rights.

Want to tell me again how no one wants to take away my guns? Hmmm?

The truth is, people like this exist. They exist in all those groups the author laments as not doing enough. They recognize that you’re never going to take all the guns away in one fell swoop. Doing so would spur way too much resistance, and not just with rhetoric. I mean, people would get shot.

Instead, they see incremental efforts as being far superior if you want to take away people’s guns. They’re not wrong, either. It’s why so many of us will resist even the tiniest gun control effort on moral principle. We know the endgame.

However, people like this are out there, and they’re using these two shootings–shootings that didn’t use a supposed weapon of war that has never actually been to war or even used by a military force–to justify controlling even more guns. It’s like they’ve never even heard of District of Columbia v. Heller

Then again, reading probably isn’t her strong suit.

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