Tammy Baldwin Thinks Middleton Shooting Proves Need For More Gun Control

More and more of the time, we on the pro-gun side of things look at mass shootings and after we process the loss, start to look at just how the anti-gunners will try and spin this to justify more restrictions of our civil liberties. For example, after Las Vegas, bump stocks became the targets. After Parkland, we saw renewed calls for an assault weapon ban. We’re still reeling from the loss of life, but have to also go on the defensive against anti-gunners who want to take away or restrict our rights.

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It’s exhausting, but it’s also consistent. It will happen.

And, right on cue, we have Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin doing just that.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin says the shooting at a Middleton software company shows the need for gun control measures that are “consistent with the Second Amendment.”

Baldwin said at a news conference Thursday that she supports universal background checks and banning rapid-fire “bump stock” devices. The push in Congress to ban bump stocks came after one was used in the Las Vegas shooting last year that was the deadliest in modern U.S. history, killing 58.

Authorities have not indicated that such a device was used in the Middleton shooting.

In other words, we don’t even have all the facts in yet, but Baldwin is trotting out a series of the gun control side’s favorite hits anyway. We don’t know how the killer got his firearm. We don’t know anything other than it was a semi-automatic handgun, the kind that would be minimally impacted by assault weapon bans. The kind that doesn’t have bump stocks.

Baldwin, however, is showing the great anti-gun tendency to lash out at anything to do with firearms simply because someone used a gun in a horrific crime.

Note, however, that there’s no call for studying these events and trying to uncover an actual cause. No, that might not work to advance the narrative that guns are evil.

What we see here is the kind of knee-jerk reactionaryism that Democrats claim to demonize, yet engage in on a regular basis. In this case, Baldwin is calling for gun control, any gun control, to be seen as “doing something.” She’s trying to react to what happened as a way of telling the voters in her district that she cares so hard.

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But the problem is that anyone with half a brain will recognize that there’s no evidence that any of her policy suggestions would do a thing to combat mass shootings like Middleton. Oh, she could add that to the grab bag if she wanted and claim she was looking at more than just Middleton and probably get away with it…if she actually addressed what happened in Middleton.

She isn’t doing that. She’s just throwing out some favorite gun control measures, screaming “Middleton!” like a madwoman, and hoping everyone will be too traumatized to call her on it.

Well, they’re not.

While Middleton was awful, it wasn’t Las Vegas, and it wasn’t Parkland. Baldwin needs to do better than platitudes.

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