It’s probably foolish to hope that lawmakers will know about every topic that comes up before them in the form of legislation. The best we can realistically hope for, though, is that they’ll seek out good, unbiased information and use that to make an informed decision. To be fair, sometimes those decisions aren’t going to be what we want to see, but we don’t always get what we want.
However, I do think we have not just a right, but an obligation to point out when lawmakers are clearly drinking the bong water, and there’s no case that illustrates that more clearly than Delegate Mark Levine’s answer recently on assault weapons.
Here, let’s watch.
Probably the most impressive thing here is how he’s wrong on pretty much everything.
The focus by Levine and his buddies on assault weapons, which he claims are the preferred weapon of mass shooters, ignores important data. For example, the data that shows 62 percent of mass shooters use handguns while only 25 percent use so-called “assault weapons.”
And that’s only a small portion of Levine’s outright stupidity on the topic of guns and mass shootings.
The problem, of course, is that Levine is part of the cohort trying to pass laws to restrict gun rights for people in Virginia, and he’s this absolutely clueless on the topic at hand. If he wasn’t someone with power and trying to infringe on those rights, his whole diatribe would be hilarious in just how wrong it is.
For some, the answer is to educate people like Levine. Hell, it was my answer for a long time as well.
The problem is, Levine has plenty of people willing to educate him. Some 22,000 of them showed up a week ago today more than willing to help him understand how he’s mistaken about firearms.
Yet he still can spread this kind of BS in utter sincerity.
You see, the problem isn’t just that Levine doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it’s that so much of what he thinks he knows just isn’t true. Any attempt to educate him, to show him he’s wrong, will invariably lead to heads slamming against walls.
After all, how do you educate someone who simply refuses to be educated?
Levine isn’t alone in his cluelessness. It’s fairly common among the anti-gun left, from what I’ve seen. Michael Bloomberg apparently still thinks semi-automatics are full-auto are the same thing, for example.
So what’s to be done?
That answer is simple. Stop trying to educate those who refuse to be educated.
Instead, we need to focus our attention on the people who don’t know anything about guns but would still be open to new information. We need to show them that everything Levine is saying is utter fecal matter and educate them on the reality. We need to hammer the truth forward not by targeting biased lawmakers, but by going out of our way to inform the average voter.
Will that turn some people away from gun control? Some, sure, but not all. There will always be some people who simply won’t step away from that particular bit of Kool-Aid.
But at least then those who are pushing for things like assault weapon bans won’t have any excuse for this kind of outright stupidity.
I’m not surprised that people in Northern Virginia elected Levine to represent them. I’m more surprised that anyone could listen to the crap that came out of his mouth could possibly delude themselves into believing he was remotely intelligent enough to champion anything, much less gun control.
