The gunshots were still echoing among the landscape in Pennsylvania when the first calls for gun control sounded in the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. People who probably hated that the shooter missed, though would never say such a thing in many cases, suddenly tried to sound all concerned. The immediately told us we needed to restrict gun ownership in some way, and as more details flowed from law enforcement, the louder some of those voices became.
Most were in the media, to be sure, but not all.
And in the wake of that attempt on Trump's life, we've heard plenty of proposals.
Over at The Daily Signal, Amy Swearer takes a swing at explaining just why none of them would have worked.
The simple reality is that not one of the policies demanded by gun control activists in the wake of the Trump shooting would meaningfully affect the dead suspect’s ability to carry out his plan.
This wasn’t about a lack of “universal” background checks. The shooter’s father legally purchased the weapon over a decade ago from a federally licensed gun store, where he would have been required to pass a background check.
Officials initially believed that the 20-year-old shooter asked to borrow the gun on the day of the Trump shooting, something to which his father agreed and didn’t find out of the ordinary. Officials now believe that the suspect had, at some point, legally purchased the gun from his father.
It doesn’t matter. Even if the shooter legally purchased the weapon through a private intrastate sale—the only type of sale for which background checks currently aren’t required under federal law—imposing a mandatory background check on that sale wouldn’t have changed anything.
The shooter wasn’t a prohibited person whose attempt to purchase a gun would have been prevented by a failed background check. FBI officials confirmed that he had no prior criminal history, and there’s no indication he struggled with serious mental health issues that would have legally disqualified him from gun ownership. This is only reinforced by the fact that he’d recently passed a background check for his job as a dietary aide at a nursing home.
Swearer notes that the attempt on Trump's life was a failure of a government entity, not a failure of the Second Amendment, and she's right.
Moreover, if the Secret Service failed to protect a former president from a would-be assassin's bullet, how can we expect regular law enforcement to protect us? Trump had an entire detail whose whole existence was to protect him and they failed. Just how in the heck are we supposed to be shielded from harm by the cop who has square miles to patrol?
It's never going to happen.
Anyway, back to Swearer's point, she's absolutely right that the shooter would have gotten a gun anyway, even under a universal background check requirement.
And any kind of long gun with a decent caliber could have been used to make that shot, so even a semi-auto ban wouldn't have done anything.
The truth of the matter is that this was always going to happen. From the moment the shooter increased pressure on the trigger, it was a foregone conclusion that anti-gunners would try to make this about gun control and how it's needed.
Yet again, the issue was some little turdnugget thought taking a human life--multiple human lives considering how many rounds he fired, if we're being honest--was a viable alternative to literally anything else.
But another truth is that gun control advocates have nothing else. They can't think of anything else. They're the epitome of the term "one trick pony," so they push gun control after everything, and it's always the exact same policies. It's like they don't know how to propose anything else besides universal background checks and assault weapon bans.
So, they push this stuff because they feel like they have to do something, possibly to hide their sorrow at the fact that Trump survived or maybe not. They have nothing else.
