After the shooting in a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, it’s unsurprising that we’ll get calls for gun control from area lawmakers.
Sure enough, it seems the state’s Black Legislative Caucus has stepped up to issue their calls for something that just isn’t going to happen.
Members of Kentucky’s Black Legislative Caucus held a press conference on Monday to show support for the “Tennessee Three” and to call for comprehensive gun control legislation in Kentucky.
Two of the Tennessee Three, both of whom are Black, were expelled from that state’s House of Representatives by the Republican supermajority earlier this month for their protest on the chamber floor, against a lack of action on gun reform following a mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school. But Justin Jones, D-Nashville, was reinstated by the Nashville Metro Council, while Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, was similarly returned to office by the Shelby County Commission.
In coordination with the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and its counterparts in other states, the Kentucky Black Legislative Caucus conducted their event at the Capitol Rotunda. The national group asked for all states to hold their events simultaneously.
Rep. George Brown, D-Lexington, who chairs the Kentucky Caucus, said the issue is very important. “Our children have the right to go to school every morning and come home in the afternoon. People should be able to go to church and come home. Kids should be able to have a sweet 16 party and come home from that party. We have an epidemic of gun violence in this country, and we need to do something about it.”
People keep talking about the so-called Tennessee Three like they’re martyrs or something. They disrupted House business in Tennessee and got booted for it, probably with full knowledge they’d be returned to their seats within a week, but making it clear that such antics wouldn’t be tolerated.
At least in theory. I think it turned out to make them such celebrities that someone will do it again in hopes of the same reaction.
Anyway, though, there’s a lot to unpack. Brown, for example, thinks we can mandate perfect safety for school kids when that’s never been guaranteed. Hell, if guns vanished tomorrow, it still wouldn’t be guaranteed. While people do have the right to come and go as they please, the government cannot actually promise they can do so without any risks.
Especially when many of these “kids” are actually involved in criminal activity themselves and that’s what gets them shot.
Yes, mass shootings happen, but there are somewhere around 60 million students in schools in the United States ranging from kindergarten to college. How many are killed by gunmen each year, even if you don’t just talk about mass shootings? A small handful.
Now, don’t get me wrong. All of those are tragic, but we don’t set policy based on statistical outliers, which is really what these deaths are in the grand scheme of things.
What happened in Louisville was awful as well, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that there’s some significant chance that you’ll experience such a thing unless we pass gun control immediately.
Yet anti-gun lawmakers don’t want you to know that. They dangle this idea of perfect safety in front of the gullible and frightened masses in hopes that they’ll keep electing them to office.
Then, should they actually get those gun control policies passed and they fall short of delivering as promised, not to worry. Then you just claim that those policies didn’t go far enough so you get to do it all over again.
We’ve seen it play out more times than I care to count.
In this case, though, the upside is that it seems unlikely Kentucky is remotely interested in going that far.
