The horrific events that took place Monday in Highland Park, Illinois, are bound to impact the gun control debate. We all know that we’re going to see screams of people demanding more and more gun control.
In fact, they’ve already started.
Yet, despite that, there are some important matters to be considered. In particular, Illinois ain’t exactly Texas. They’ve long supported gun control, particularly in the Chicago area.
In fact, there are a whole lot of gun control laws on the books meant to stop mass shootings. They all failed.
A red flag law, a waiting period for gun purchases, licensing requirements, and numerous other gun controls did not prevent the July 4, 2022, Highland Park attack.
Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety lists Illinois as the state with the sixth most stringent gun laws in the country.
Moreover, Gabby Giffords gun control group gives Illinois a grade of A- on gun control.
Illinois has a red flag law, a waiting period for gun purchases, gun owner licensing, domestic violence gun laws, “open carry regulations,” and numerous other gun controls.
Additionally, Highland Park has an assault weapon ban in place.
So, if gun control is supposed to stop these people from carrying out these kinds of crimes, then why didn’t they?
The problem here is that gun control cannot and will not prevent mass shootings. It simply can’t.
It’s high time we started to recognize that.
These shooters rarely have a criminal record that would preclude them from getting a firearm. The “red flags” people may have seen don’t really trigger them into thinking this person they know is capable of such a horrific act. So, the red flag laws remain unused.
As it stands right now, we don’t know how the killer got his gun. Police have a suspect in custody, but that’s about the extent of what we know as of this writing. However, if history is any indication, we’ll find that he followed all of the relevant laws – laws that we’ve been told are necessary to prevent exactly this.
Illinois and Highland Park are covered by, as noted above, some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. None of them helped, much like how none prevented Sacramento or Buffalo.
For all the attention on Uvalde, it’s funny how the gun control crowd seems to ignore the gun control failures.
It simply doesn’t do what proponents claim it will do. We’ve seen it over and over again, and yet this cycle continues. A mass shooting happens – often in spite of extensive gun control laws on the books meant to prevent such shootings – and the only solution some say we’re allowed to talk about is more gun control.
It’s absolutely insane.
And yet, here we are. Once again discussing a mass shooting in a gun control state.
Now, I’m not ready to specifically blame gun control for the shootings – they can happen anywhere, after all – but I will point out that despite rhetoric to the contrary, they routinely fail to stop such shootings. They didn’t stop this one in Highland Park, and they won’t stop the next one wherever it is.
The truth is that what happened in Highland Park on Monday is about as awful as we can imagine, and there were laws specifically put in place supposedly to prevent just that from happening.
At some point, we have to recognize that the problem isn’t guns but people. We have a society full of broken people. We have way too many broken people, and we need to address the problem from that perspective if we’re going to have a hope in hell of stopping these things from happening.
Unfortunately, that’s a conversation the anti-gunners have decided we’re not allowed to have.
