I'm not supportive of any "office of gun violence prevention" at any level of government unless they stay completely out of the gun control debate. If they want to set up programs like Operation Ceasefire in various communities, that's great. If they want to coordinate efforts to curtail people's rights, then that's not.

But if we think about it from an anti-gun point of view, a federal office likely makes some degree of sense. It permits that level of coordination, allowing political allies in various states to draw upon resources they might not otherwise have access to.

A lawmaker in Georgia could get sample legislation that could then be introduced, for example.

It's still stupid, but I get why it would exist.

Yet a Louisiana Democrat is a little miffed at the moment because his proposal for a state office of gun violence prevention was essentially shot down.

A Democrat state senator’s bid to create a violence prevention office amid a new permitless concealed carry law suffered a setback recently after pushback from his Republican colleagues and the gun lobby.

Senate Bill 203 by Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, would establish an office of violence prevention under the Louisiana Department of Health. The office would aim to bring together stakeholders and use data to make communities safer, and would have to submit an action plan to the Legislature by Feb. 1, 2026.

“We can save money by investing a little bit on the front end rather than spending more on the back end,” Duplessis told the Senate’s Judiciary C Committee this week.

But after gun rights advocates suggested the bill could be a sneaky way to attack the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the committee deferred the bill. That means it could come up for discussion again but did not advance to the full Senate.

“We do have concerns that this could be used to weaponize the government against Second Amendment rights,” Kelby Seanor, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, told the committee. He referenced the White House’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention, launched by the Biden administration, describing it as an agency that seeks to “strip Second Amendment rights.”

Duplessis pushed back, arguing that protecting the Second Amendment and preventing violence were not mutually exclusive.

The thing is, Duplessis isn't wrong. They aren't mutually exclusive or, more accurately, they don't have to be.

The problem is that no one trusts Democrats not to use it to attack the Second Amendment because otherwise, why have it?

Oh, they could use it for projects that are really meant to reduce the underlying motivations of violent crime, but why called it an "office of gun violence prevention" knowing good and well that those last three words are often a euphemism for something far more controversial?

Especially since there's absolutely no reason to believe the deck wouldn't end up stacked to suggest gun control.

The proposal was deferred, rather than outright killed, but that likely just means it's going to die of old age instead of being brutally beaten to death by the legislature. Either way, it's good news for folks in Louisiana.