Emotional Appeals For Gun Control Points To Endgame

In the debate over firearms and the Second Amendment, it’s not unusual to see appeals to emotion. Anti-gunners are particularly known for this kind of effort, and they’ve gained a lot of ground using this one, too. People respond to appeals by folks who have either been shot or lost someone to gun violence.

Advertisement

A recent story popped up in my internet travels that made me remember that these nebulous terms and emotional appeals often points out the anti-gunners endgame.

For Susan Browder, 2012 was a a life-changing year.

In September her daughter, Sarah, was killed by her husband. He shot her twice with a handgun he kept in their Davie County home — once in the shoulder and once through the spine.  He then turned the gun on himself. Though he died instantly, Sarah survived for four more days in a hospital ICU — a period of shock and numbness for her family that they barely remember.

Then, in December, came the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. A 20-year old young man shot and killed 20 children and six staff members before he, too, committed suicide with a gun.

For Browder, whose roles as mother, grandmother and retired teacher defined her life, the two tragedies were devastating. But slowly, as she educated herself about gun violence through her grief, they became inspiring.

“It was an evolution where I realized I had to do something,” Browder said.

Browder says she figures if there was a tougher background check system, her son-in-law might not have been able to get the gun. After all, he apparently had some mental health issues.

Advertisement

However, that’s a load of crap and we all know it.

See, while I do feel sympathy for Browder losing her daughter, there’s nothing in here that suggests that her son-in-law was legally prohibited from buying a gun. “Mental health issues” is a nebulous term that can include anything from schizophrenia and sociopathy all the way to ADHD and other relatively minor disorders.

Yet, because the son-in-law hadn’t been adjudicated as unfit to have a firearm, there’s no background check in the world that would have stopped him from buying a gun and she likely knows it on some level.

Then we have Sandy Hook.

That’s the mass shooting where the killer murdered his own mother and stole her firearm to carry out that particular atrocity. His mother was prohibited in no way from owning firearms. The killer attempted to buy a firearm and was denied, so he killed his mother and stole the gun.

What laws, pray tell, could have stopped him? Clearly, laws against murdering his mother didn’t do much good, nor did the laws against slaughtering innocent children, so what would?

The emotional aspect of this push by people like Browder actually hints at the endgame. See, the only way for her son-in-law to have been unarmed is for no one to have been allowed to have a gun in the first place. The same with the Sandy Hook killer. That’s the only possible way either of these events could have been prevented.

Advertisement

Maybe.

Yet if you ask an anti-gunner if that’s what they want, they’ll say no. However, when you push, you start to see how the only way they’ll stop pushing for more gun restrictions is if no one can have a gun. Either they admit it to themselves or they don’t, but that’s actually where they want us to end up. That’s what they’re pushing for, and that’s clear based on what spurs people like Browder on.

While I can be sympathetic to her regarding her loss, I will die before I give up my guns and so will a lot of other people.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member