Proponents of gun control routinely use murder rates to justify their push to infringe on our constitutionally protected rights. This is a timeless technique and, to be fair, an effective one. People look at folks shot to death and figure that if the killer didn’t have a gun, he couldn’t have shot the person.

In fairness, that’s probably true. It doesn’t account for any number of other things, though, such as whether the killer would have just used another weapon, but there’s no real argument that if the killer had not been able to get a gun, the victim wouldn’t have been shot to death.

There it’s also impossible to actually keep people from getting a gun. Yet anti-gun folks still think that you can not only keep them from getting a firearm but that it’s the only possible solution.

Last week’s mass shooting in San Jose, California where eight people were killed at the Valley Transportation Authority rail yard affected us all. When will this madness end, we wonder. How close will it to come to our home?

America has always been a country rich with a history of rich celebration and deep condemnation of guns. Today the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way America looks and feels forever. The way we work, shop, learn and gather in public is forever altered. For Black America one of the things we have seen is a sharp spike in violence coast to coast. Too many of our teens and young adults have more time, less money and more stress in their life. When these three things mix they create a deadly cocktail on the streets of Baltimore, Oakland and Tampa, Florida. Mass shootings and hood violence splash across our screens at a seemingly never ending pace. So when do things change, and how can we get some sustainable change?

For President Biden, the time for gun reform is now. “Whether Congress acts or not, I’m going to use all the resources at my disposal as president to keep the American people safe from gun violence,” Biden stated recently. “But there’s much more that Congress can do to help that effort.”

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We have to wonder how many more mass shootings—how many more innocent lives— will it take for our lawmakers and grassroots activists to bring the violence to an end.

These words from Ebony tell us that that the author isn’t interested in any potential solutions to gun violence other than gun control. That’s the only solution in their mind. Oh, they will probably argue otherwise and absolutely believe it when they make that argument. However, they resist anything that doesn’t include gun control

What’s interesting is that while Ebony itself hasn’t published a piece in support of the Defund The Police movement, the magazine has previously offered space to those who complain about “overpolicing.”

This is interesting because the two positions should be mutually exclusive. After all, aggressive tactics like stop-and-frisk are often used to enforce non-violent, possessory gun control laws. How can you support a law’s existence while also opposing the enforcement of that law?

Regardless, it would do the author well to acquaint himself with the legions of other programs and policies that can and do reduce violent crime and don’t infringe on people’s liberties. Wouldn’t it make much more sense to focus on those?

But no. We can’t do that.

Instead, we have to focus on the most controversial idea proposed; one that has been shown not to work. Sorry, but that’s just a horrible idea.