Nine years ago, I was working while my young daughter playing on the floor. I had the television on the news–she didn’t care, she was less than a year old and wasn’t really paying attention to anything besides her toys–and the news broke of Sandy Hook. As a parent, sitting there with my daughter, it was a gut punch, to say the least.
We knew what was going to come, though. We know what always comes in the aftermath of anything like that.
We were going to hear people demand gun control, and we did.
Nine years later, they’re still demanding that and more.
Progressives on Tuesday marked the nine-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting with fresh demands for U.S. Senate Democrats to kill the filibuster, this time eyeing a need to pass gun reform legislation.
“Nine years ago today, 26 loved ones were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary,” tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We can’t allow children to be gunned down in schools, year after year.”
“Congress should’ve acted nine years ago—but that opportunity isn’t gone today,” Jayapal added. “It’s time to end the filibuster and pass gun reform.”
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Former U.S. congressional candidate and Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner also lamented that after “nine years… no action has been taken to pass meaningful gun legislation.”
“Abolish the damn filibuster,” tweeted Turner.
First, with regard to the filibuster, the left needs to remember that Democrats use it just as much when they’re out of power as Republicans are doing now. Want to pass any legislation you want without Republicans being able to block it? Win more elections.
But the continued push to use Sandy Hook to push gun control has always seemed weird to me.
Yes, I expect it, but I still don’t get it.
The shooter in Sandy Hook murdered his own mother to obtain his firearm. What laws are you really going to put in place to prevent that from happening? Let me say it again for the dense kids in the back: He murdered. His own. MOTHER.
How are you going to stop that kind of evil with some kind of law?
The short answer is that you’re not.
“But we can ban assault weapons. If he hadn’t had that, he might not have been able to kill so many people,” someone might say. To that, I simply remind them that the worst school massacre on American soil was Virginia Tech, which was carried out by a maniac with two handguns.
In other words, banning one category of weapon–even a made-up category like “assault weapon”–isn’t going to have any impact.
What we need, though, are answers. We need to understand why people do this. What breaks inside of the human mind that somehow directs this kind of evil to target the most vulnerable in society?
So far, the only “answer” we’re hearing about is how folks like you and I need to forego our rights so that some monster might have to spend two more minutes planning some horrific massacre.
Sorry, but that’s not a trade I’m willing to make.
Anti-Second Amendment types like those quote above cannot guarantee the United States government will never be tyrannical. They can’t guarantee giving up our rights won’t result in bigger problems. They can’t even guarantee that giving them up will stop mass shootings.
But they’ll still expect us to give everything up just so they can pat themselves on the back for “doing something,” even when that something actually accomplishes nothing.
They want to build their political legacy on the backs of our rights, all while knowing on some level that what they’re wanting won’t work as they intend.
Which is why we didn’t bow down nine years ago and why we won’t bow down now.
