We’ve smacked Sen. Chris Murphy around an awful lot here at Bearing Arms, but in our defense, he kind of asks for it.

When you routinely say horribly stupid things as a sitting United States senator, we’re duty-bound to point it out and explain just how stupid it is.

Plenty of others do this as well, obviously.

Yet a piece at the Washington Examiner pointed out something rare–so rare that it makes unicorns look common. Murphy said something smart.

Perhaps unintentionally, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said something smart on the Senate floor last week. Appearing flabbergasted by news of the recent spate of shootings in which seemingly understandable circumstances resulted in the use of lethal force — including one in which a 16-year-old boy who knocked on the wrong door was shot in Missouri and another in which two teenage cheerleaders who mistakenly approached the wrong car were shot in Texas — Murphy asked an oft-overlooked question in mass shooting discourse:

We need to ask some deeper questions about why people in America are just so unhappy and so alone that they would resort to violence this regularly and this casually.

I can’t disagree with that. What’s more, this question also relates to the fact that our non-gun homicide rate is much higher than what we see in many other developed nations.

However, the author goes on in the next paragraph and says something the very opposite of intelligent.

For proponents of a political ideology that professes abiding concern for solving “root problems,” Democrats’ fixation on guns and guns alone to solve the mass shooting epidemic has been curious. “It’s the guns,” they tweet reflexively to the news of shootings as if our politicians could magically wave away the 400 million guns circulating the U.S. if only they possessed the political will. And while certain reforms in the sale of firearms would indeed slow down would-be mass murderers, such as universal background checks and red flag laws, they wouldn’t address the most fundamental issue of the mass shooting epidemic: that our culture consistently pumps out maniacs willing to die in a demented orgy of indiscriminate murder.

Wow.

Now, we’ve shown all kinds of problems with red flag laws, so I’m not going to delve into those again. I will say that I can understand why people think they’d stop mass shootings, even if the truth is that they likely won’t.

But universal background checks are an issue that I can’t let slide as easily. After all, most mass shooters buy their firearms in gun stores and pass the criminal background check with ease. Often, it’s because they simply haven’t been convicted of anything that would prohibit them from buying a gun, though sometimes that data just isn’t input such as with the Sutherland Springs killer.

A handful are prohibited, but they tend to skirt the law in some manner that wouldn’t be changed with a universal background check law.

So we have a columnist for the Washington Examiner–the kind of person who usually talks a fair bit of sense–actually making a bit less sense than Sen. Chris Murphy.

Now, going back to Murphy’s comments, he’s absolutely right for once. There is something fundamentally wrong with people here so that they will commit these kinds of atrocities, why they’re so violent toward their fellow Americans.

The Connecticut Democrat has said something that we really do need to discuss and debate and hopefully find a solution to. If we can do that, we won’t need the gun control that’s such a central part of what Murphy has been pushing for years now.