Once upon a time, columnist Jennifer Rubin was the token conservative at the Washington Post. She held onto that title for a long time after it should have been abandoned. Instead of holding the line on her principles, she morphed into just another columnist willing to sell out our gun rights under the misguided idea that gun control works.
It doesn't.
But now, in the wake of the Apalachee High School shooting and the charges of the alleged killer's father, she's arguing that not only was that a good thing, but that it doesn't go far enough. We should also punish millions of Americans who did nothing wrong.
Charging a parent of a teen mass shooter with murder might be emotionally satisfying. It is not sufficient, however, to address the problem of easily accessible weapons of war. We should take no solace, then, in the arrest of the father of the latest minor accused of destroying the lives of children and their families.
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Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance (Ohio), putting a lie to the “pro-life” mantle his party claims, calls mass shootings a “fact of life.” That cringeworthy admission reflects Republicans’ willingness to allow an endless string of mass murders. Scores of dead children each year is a fact of life as long as Second Amendment absolutists, a minority of Americans, hold the rest of us hostage. (The Harris-Walz campaign responded to Vance’s statement: “Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Walz know we can take action to keep our children safe and keep guns out of the hands of criminals. Donald Trump and JD Vance will always choose the NRA and gun lobby over our children.”)
He did not put lie to anything. Yes, he acknowledged that it was an unfortunate fact of life, but also went on to argue that we need to increase security in our schools. People like Rubin keep pretending this was just a shrugging off of what happened rather than the prefacing comment to a call for something intended to save kids lives.
Anyway, moving on...
We do know how to reduce gun violence; Republicans simply refuse to challenge the MAGA movement’s gun fetish. The center-left think tank Third Way has documented the disparity between blue states with stricter gun laws and red states with lax gun laws. “The red state murder rate was 33% higher than the blue state murder rate in both 2021 and 2022,” the group reported this year. “2022 was the 23rd consecutive year that murder plagued Trump-voting states at far higher levels than Biden-voting states. … From 2000 to 2022, the average red state murder rate was 24% higher than the average blue state murder rate.”
Third Way is a left-leaning group that pretends to touch the center, which would be fine if they weren't also vehemently anti-gun.
What they "documented" was a disparity, sure, but they didn't bother to look at literally any other factors beyond who voted for who. Rural southern states, for example, tend to be rife with poverty--much like our blue-voting inner cities, it should be remembered--and that is a known driver of violent crime, which includes thing like homicides, just to provide one example.
Further, they also forget that some of the safest states historically are pro-gun states. Those may be overshadowed by some that are anything but, yet when most of the nation is considered a pro-gun state, you're going to get some differences in the stats.
The gun problem is as much a democracy problem as anything else. Gun measures such as universal background checks and red-flag laws garner supermajorities. Even in deep-red Tennessee, for example, large majorities support raising the age to 21 to purchase an assault rifle (64 percent), requiring safe storage of weapons (76 percent) and mandating universal background checks (80 percent). When it comes to an outright ban on assault-style weapons, support is nearly as high. Multiple polls show 60 percent or more favor such a measure. But as long as heavily gerrymandered states produced hyper-conservative state legislatures and the Senate filibuster allows sparsely populated red states to dominate, the popular will is thwarted.
Given all that, putting parents of mass shooters on trial should be seen for what it is — a poor replacement for a pro-life policy of serious gun-control measures. Though it might provide some small measure of comfort to grieving families, it does little to prevent the next shooting. And the next after that.
So Rubin really has given up any pretext of being a conservative.
This isn't new, but it probably just bears repeating.
Here's the thing Rubin isn't acknowledging, though. Those polls she's citing? Those are all from last year, just weeks after the Covenant School shooting. We all know that support for gun control spikes in the immediate aftermath of those shootings, then settles within a year. So instead of using anything more recent, she's using older polls and pretending there's been absolutely no change in people's opinions.
This is an old anti-gunner trick, of course. They latch onto the last poll that supports their position and then keep pushing it as fact until another poll comes out that supports their position. Any that show a lack of support for gun control are dismissed or ignored.
Those polls never illustrate how strong that support is, for one thing, so unless there's other evidence to indicate that it's strong enough to make people vote Democrat who would otherwise side with the Republicans, there's absolutely no reason for anyone to take it seriously.
Through it all, Rubin continues to twist some facts and figures, misrepresenting them and trying to craft a narrative that gun control is an imperative and isn't political suicide for anyone. Yet it doesn't take a lot of looking to see just how she's distorting pretty much everything to push that agenda.
