There are mass shootings and there are "mass shootings." The latter are those that the Gun Violence Archive and their buddies in the media like to count that no one else really would.
Either way, though, we're told gun control such as you'd find in, say, New York City, would prevent either such event from happening. We're told we need to enact it immediately.
We've long argued that the laws don't actually stop the criminally minded, including potential mass murderers, from carrying out any kind of deadly attack they might have planned. We've also been told we're idiots for thinking such a thing.
So, guess who was right yet again?
Five people were shot, including two who were critically injured, near the parade route of the West Indian Day parade Monday in Brooklyn, the NYPD said.
“Of the five, two are critical and three are expected to survive,” NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell told reporters at a 4 p.m. briefing. Chell said among the injured were four males and one female.
He called the violence “an intentional act by one person towards a group of people.” Chell said he did not know if all the victims were the intended targets. He assured the public that there was no “active shooter … running around Eastern Parkway as we speak.”
He added the popular Labor Day parade and festivities would continue.
“The parade is going on and it will go on until later tonight,” Chell said. “We have multiple cops working very hard this weekend and working very hard to keep this community and to keep this parade safe. And we’ll be working until the wee hours of the morning doing just that.”
Police said the assailant has not been apprehended. They are looking for a Black male in his 20s with a slight build who was wearing a bandana and a brown shirt with paint stains on it.
Now, let's think about all of the gun laws in place in New York City for a moment.
In the wake of Bruen, the state tripped over itself to create a plethora of regulations to try and keep guns from being carried pretty much anywhere, up to and including demanding all of people's social media accounts so they could see if the would-be permit holder was "the right sort of person" or whatever euphemism they might prefer.
I'm pretty sure a 20-something guy shooting people near a parade on a holiday is someone who didn't jump through any of those hoops.
Criminals never do.
Meanwhile, how many people in the area might have been willing to act to stop the attack but couldn't because the law made it too difficult for them to carry a firearm lawfully? We'll never definitively know, but that's sort of the problem, isn't it?
If this happens in a pro-gun state, we'd at least know that no one was present. There wouldn't have been laws preventing it like there are in the Big Apple.
See, the bad guys aren't worried about laws. They figure they won't get caught anyway, so they do what they want to do and don't worry about the consequences. That includes carrying where they're not supposed to, which isn't surprising since this is someone who shot five people. If he's not going to follow the laws against shooting people, why would carry restrictions bother him?
Anyone who thinks they would is smoking the good stuff.
And the kick in the butt is that this isn't unusual. We've seen hundreds of similar enough incidents that it should be more than enough to convince people that maybe gun restrictions don't actually work. However, for that to happen, they'd have to use their eyes and ears for something other than taking in the anti-gun narrative.
Figure the odds of that happening.
