Right now, a lot of attention is focused on Lewiston, Maine, and for a pretty good reason. When 18 people are killed and another 13 injured, folks are going to notice and talk about it.
I don’t have an issue with that, even if I also know a lot of people are just going to regurgitate anti-gun talking points.
But there were a number of other shootings that didn’t quite rise to the level of “mass shooting” as most of us think of it.
Yet the anti-gunners are still going to offer surface-level takes.
On the heels of Maine officials confirming that the shooter who killed 18 people in Lewiston earlier this week was found dead, shootings in Florida, Illinois, and Indianapolis early Sunday fueled further calls for action by U.S. lawmakers to reduce gun violence.
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Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement: “This morning, we are waking up to news of another deadly shooting. Our communities are exhausted… My heart breaks for the victims’ families whose children did not make it home, for the people who were injured in the gunfire, and hundreds of others who ran for their lives in Ybor City last night.”
“Guns turned this night out into a nightmare,” she added. “How many more times do we have to wipe the blood off our streets before action is taken? Once again, we urge Congress to do their jobs and pass responsible gun laws to protect all Americans from gun violence.”
Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts called the incident “the logical outcome of Florida’s permitless carry law, which went into effect in July” and means that “civilians no longer have to have background checks or training to carry hidden, loaded handguns in public.”
Kris Brown, president of the gun violence prevention group Brady, declared in response to the violence in Tampa that “this isn’t normal and we don’t have to live this way,” highlighting that the U.S. gun homicide rate is 26 times that of peer nations.
It’s amusing, in a dark way, because they’re completely ignoring the fact that one of these shootings happened in gun-controlled Chicago.
Moreover, there’s absolutely no evidence that permitless carry had anything at all to do with what happened in Florida or in Indiana.
Unsurprisingly, all the shootings are being used to justify an assault weapon ban, but I don’t actually see any evidence that such a weapon was used.
Then again, what do anti-gunners need with evidence?
See, in all of these cases, all they see is that a gun was used. They’re not looking at the multiple stabbings or beatings that occurred during this time period. Granted, many of those didn’t result in quite as much bloodshed, but it has happened before where it did.
Unsurprisingly, if challenged, these anti-gun voices will claim the only common denominator is the gun, but that’s wrong. It looks right but only because you’ve decide to only pick instance where that is a common denominator and excluded everything else.
The common denominator in all mass killings? People.
There’s always a person who is trying to hurt others. The anti-gun side always ignores this aspect and instead thinks that if you take away their guns then they’ll somehow become peaceful, law-abiding citizens. That’s delusional to the extreme.
Yet these surface-level takes in the wake of mass shootings, even by Gun Violence Archive definitions, don’t actually accomplish a thing. Then again, all they’re meant to accomplish is to take our guns away. When they’ve gotten our AR-15s and AKs and FALs and other such weapons, then they’ll start focusing on something else, probably our handguns.
They’re not interested in resolving crime. If they were, they’d at least pretend to be interested in addressing the root causes of it, yet that’s never even looked at by the anti-gun crowd.
Of course, doing that is tough and would require more effort than what we’ve currently seen out of them.
