No one will be shocked to learn that Fred Guttenberg is pushing for gun control yet again.

I get that he lost his daughter to a horrendous tragedy, one that never should have happened and that he feels obligated to crusade against the Second Amendment.

But, well, he’s not very good at it.

Oh, he can summon up emotion with the best of them, and for perfectly valid reasons. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my daughter, after all.

Yet when facts matter, Fred tends to come up short.

Such as his latest effort.

There, Guttenberg tries his damnedest to look at the recent spate of “mistaken” shootings and make it about gun control, among other things. He uses them, for example, to advocate for things such as red flag laws.

Now, I haven’t delved into these shootings as of yet for one simple reason.  I want to get my facts straight and I don’t trust the mainstream media’s reporting enough to just assume everything is as they claim.

From what I’ve seen, though, most of these cases do represent huge problems, but not with guns themselves.

At best, these are training issues. These are people who have never learned how to correctly identify a threat. Further, these all have resulted in someone being prosecuted, as they probably should.

“Then we should mandate training,” someone will respond, and I’d grant that for once, the proposed solution at least looks like it addresses the issue.

The problem is that it doesn’t actually solve it. It just kind of looks like it.

For one thing, mandated training is viewed as a box to check and little else. People focus just enough to pass any test required and then do what they were going to do anyway. Why? Because that’s all they view the mandatory class as.

Further, mandatory training can easily turn into a tool used for blocking gun ownership entirely. Making the classes too expensive and/or too onerous for anyone to be able to fool with except for a select handful isn’t the way to stop these horrific acts.

Of course, we also need to ask one very important question, one Fred is apparently unable to ask. Is this happening more? Is this an actual thing that’s suddenly happening?

Or, are we simply hearing about them more because one got picked up by the national news and people are now looking for others?

I’m not saying either way, but that’s another reason I’ve been slow in talking about what happened with these “mistaken” shootings.

No one wants to see these things happen, and I’m actually glad this is national news since it gives us an opportunity to discuss why these things shouldn’t happen.

What it’s not, no matter how hard Fred wishes for it to be, is an excuse to restrict law-abiding citizens right to keep and bear arms in any way, shape, or form. Especially since there’s little reason to believe any of these shootings would have been prevented by any policy Fred advocates for.