Anti-gun screed ignores gun control failures

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

In the aftermath of mass shootings, we know how things are going to go. We’re going to be told how we need to be more accommodating. We need to accept gun control as it is the only way to stop such awful tragedies.

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However, there are always going to be a handful that don’t even really try to convince us. They, instead, want to try and bully and shame pro-gun voices into supporting gun control.

For example, we have this piece originally from the LA Times titled, “Where have Republicans been during California’s mass shootings? They’re busy appeasing the gun worshiping cult.”

Well…someone read “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” now didn’t they?

First, I have to ask, if we’re a cult, do I get a snazzy robe?

Anyway, what does this kind and loving soul have to say? About what you’d expect.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spoken more eloquently than anyone else about the three California mass shootings that occurred in rapid sequence, killing at least 24.

“What the hell is going on?” the longtime gun control advocate asked simply Tuesday in Half Moon Bay, where a 66-year-old farmworker was accused of fatally shooting seven co-workers and wounding another because of some grievance.

“Only in America. … The absurdity.”

Yes, America is certainly not great on gun deaths, and never will be as long as we’re blocked from much-needed national firearms regulations by Republicans.

Among the major industrialized nations, the United States has by far the highest gun homicide rate. No other country is anywhere close. That’s because other nations tightly restrict access to firearms.

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We also have higher knife homicide rates that outstrip other nations’ entire homicide rates. If the problem were simply free and easy access to guns, why are knives used more on a per capita basis to take lives here than all weapons combined in other parts of the world?

For all the author’s talk about “much-needed national firearms regulations,” he fails to note that California has extensive gun control laws that simply failed to do anything. Of course, he also quotes UCLA’s Adam Winkler, who was quoted in another idiotic article I talked about earlier today who again tries to explain away those failures as the result of too few gun laws even in California.

But again, our knife homicide rate makes it pretty damn clear that the problem isn’t access to guns. There’s something fundamentally wrong within our nation, something that seems to suggest murder is a viable option for far too many people.

So no, we’re not going to be shamed into accepting gun control. We won’t be shamed into it not because we simply don’t want to give up our guns but because we recognize that it doesn’t work. Even before the events of the last week in California, we knew that gun control didn’t do what proponents claimed.

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Just asserting over and over again that gun control is “much-needed” regulation doesn’t make it so. Especially when events make it clear that those regulations aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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