Whether it’s from mass shootings or some other kind of homicide, far too many children have fallen victim to violent crime. While the most recent study being cited by the media is an ungodly mess designed to elicit a reaction from the talking heads in the media, I’m more than willing to acknowledge that too many are falling victim to violent crime.
So I was curious about an op-ed I stumbled across that blamed both sides for failing to protect kids.
It seems that the writer, though, isn’t interested in reality. He just thinks gun control is the only solution.
America is a dismal failure in the one area where failure is absolutely unforgivable — protecting our children from gun violence.
It’s not just that we have had no success in stopping the senseless killing of America’s children, whether in mass shootings or in the daily carnage throughout our country. It’s that we haven’t tried hard enough.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, America has had 367 school shootings that caused death or injury. In the 2020-2021 school year alone, 93 school shootings occurred. Let that unfathomable reality sink in. The heartbreak of every dead child that it represents, The families left broken for a lifetime.
…
There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. being the gun-death capital of the advanced world.
It is easy and absolutely correct to blame 2nd Amendment, pro-gun Americans, the NRA, and the gun industry who do everything possible to thwart all gun-control regulations common among much safer democratic countries. They are a huge part of the problem.
Of course, as I’ve pointed out multiple times, when you look at those other countries, their total homicide rate is lower than our non-firearm homicide rates. That tells you that something else is going on beyond gun control. If it was just about guns and the access to them, then one would imagine the rate of homicides with other weapons would be drastically below those other nations, yet it’s not.
Just something to think about here.
So no, the issue isn’t the Second Amendment, the NRA, or the gun industry that’s at fault here.
Anti-gun-control Americans are in the minority, however. The majority of Americans support banning assault weapons, requiring licenses for gun purchases, closing universal background-check loopholes, banning high-capacity magazines, and other measures to reduce the terrible surfeit of guns in the country. However, this too-silent majority has made little impact on Congress in enacting the federal gun-control regulations that most Americans support.
Except that’s not exactly true.
What the author is talking about are poll results that have suggested as much, but what we’ve seen is that when people learn the details, they suddenly are far less interested in supporting such measures.
Additionally, there’s one out-and-out falsehood presented here. In particular, that the majority of Americans support an assault weapon ban. They do not.
Moving on…
Democrats also are a part of the problem. They have had their chances to pass significant gun-control laws common among advanced democracies and have failed. For President Obama’s first two years, Democrats controlled Congress and passed no significant gun-control legislation. President Biden enjoyed Democratic majorities in 2021 and 2022 and no significant gun-control legislation was passed. Democrats have failed our children when they’ve had the opportunity to make a difference, putting other priorities ahead of reducing gun violence.
And as much as I hate to defend the anti-gun Democrats, I’m going to have to show that the author really doesn’t understand a damn thing he’s talking about here.
Yes, Obama had a majority his first two years in office. Gun control wasn’t widely supported during that timeframe and there was little political will among Democrats to push for something that was so unpopular.
Biden, on the other hand, had technical majorities, but Democrats failed to control the Senate to any significant degree due to the filibuster.
Yet none of that matters, because the author isn’t grokking the facts.
He’s so fixated on passing gun control that he hasn’t bothered to ask if there’s something better. While I’m more than willing to blame both sides for where we’re currently at, the author’s premise of gun control being the only place we could possibly go is where his entire argument falls apart.
There are a lot of things we could probably do that would create a permanent and meaningful impact on reducing shootings. The problem is that both sides seem completely unwilling to even discuss them.
