Shannon Watts And Her Amazing Ability To Pretend Reality Doesn't Exist

Shannon Watts is all kinds of special. We all know that. Not only is she thin-skinned–she blocked me on Twitter ages ago–but she seems to think reality can be manipulated by wishing hard enough.

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Actually, yeah, it kind of does have to be this way. We live in a violent world, and people like Watts have to spend so much time blaming the tool that they have never bothered to try and discuss the potential causes of violence in general. If we could deal with that, we wouldn’t have to worry about firearms.

I’ve said before, and I still believe, that you could give a law-abiding man a rocket launcher and he’d never hurt a fly with it, except maybe through negligence. However, a violent man will still hurt people, even if all he can get is a rock. Now, we’re not about to see rock control any time soon, except perhaps in London, but you get my point.

The law-abiding are never a problem, it’s the violent criminals that we can all agree are the issue.

For people like Watts, if you make it illegal for the law-abiding to be armed then the criminals will somehow magically give up their guns as well.

That training that’s being lamented is training that should have happened sooner. In my childhood, I remember the complaints about guns in schools. Back then, it had more to do with gangs than school shooters, but how many of those skills might have come in handy in a case like that?

Meanwhile, teachers are being taught to try and disarm an active shooter with a stapler, all while resisting the idea of their fellow teachers being able to carry a firearm in school. Well, I’m going to play teacher for a moment and educate for a moment. A gun is a better tool for stopping an attack than a choke hold or a stapler.

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True story.

But, again, Watts doesn’t live in the real world. Correction: She doesn’t think she lives in the real world.

The problem is, she does, and that’s why she and her ideas will never lead to the safety they imagine. All that will happen is that the good people will be disarmed and the criminals will still commit their crimes. While it might inconvenience school shooters, we don’t know that for a fact. What we do know is that school shootings only account for a tiny fraction of the violent crime in this nation.

It’s just scary crime. It’s high-profile crime. It’s a good time to get a soundbite out there about the supposed evils of guns.

But gun control won’t suddenly make our society safer. It won’t make people less likely to murder, rob, or rape. It won’t stop anything remotely like the violence we see out of so many of our cities.

Not that Shannon cares about that anyway. All she cares about is making you and me more susceptible to the machinations of criminals.

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