Op-ed on lack of gun control in Texas has wrong premise

AP Photo/Jack Dempsey

The state of Texas has had its unfair share of mass shootings. We’ve all seen them through the years, too. From the tower at the University of Texas to a rampage on the streets of Odessa to an El Paso Walmart to a school in Uvalde, we can remember them and shudder at the carnage.

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But what Texas hasn’t done is pass a great deal of gun control.

For folks on this side of the debate, that’s how it should be. For folks on the other, it’s insane.

Which brings me to an op-ed from Texas that appears to me to be predicated on faulty assumptions.

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Ah, yes. Texas has refused to pass gun control laws despite all the horrors.

Yet let’s look west from there to California. In the span of just 44 hours–not even two full days–California saw three mass shootings that left 19 dead.

Sure, that’s a tenth of the Texas total presented above, but that was over the span of just a couple of days.

California has been responsive to mass shootings, at least by the definitions the authors would likely give to the term “responsive.” They’ve passed gun control laws in the wake of numerous mass shootings, including those in other states. They have extensive regulations, the kind that would never fly in most of the United States. They’ve done pretty much everything they can think of to restrict guns and prevent mass shootings.

None of it worked.

You see, the authors of this piece have predicated their entire op-ed on the idea that gun control is the only possible response to such a shooting, that there’s nothing else people in the state of Texas could reasonably do in the wake of such violence.

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That’s where they’re wrong.

Gun control doesn’t work as advertised, as we’ve seen in California. It doesn’t stop mass shootings. The most it does is make it less likely a good guy with a gun will be there to prevent such things from happening.

The authors here should check their premises and try again.

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