The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention is no more. I'm truly thankful for that. I didn't like my tax dollars being funneled to an office whose entire reason for existing was to push gun control onto the American people via the states.

Now, it's a footnote in history, if that.

Good riddance.

However, there have been a handful of states that have created their own, similar offices. Now, a bill in Virginia seeks to do the same thing there. One op-ed tries to frame it as somehow a good thing that shouldn't be opposed.

Efforts to create a state firearm violence intervention and prevention center, given the number of related killings and suicides in Virginia every year, are straightforward and innocuous.

The center would be a positive step in getting at the roots of gun crimes around the state. It should help reduce the number of people killed and injured by guns.

The legislation, sponsored by Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News, would make the center the primary resource for research, best practices and other strategies to reduce gun violence in communities around Virginia, as the legislator envisions it. The center also would administer money and provide grants to local government agencies and organizations to do prevention.

“This is about research, this is about data, this is about resources so that we can address problems that are killing children, killing older people,” Price said, according to the Capital News Service at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Goodness knows there’s a huge need for something like this:

Some 1,234 firearm deaths occurred in 2023 in the commonwealth, according to the Virginia Department of Health. The bulk of killings were suicides, at 59%, compared to homicides, at 39%. Gun violence costs Virginians more than $14.2 billion each year, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Among the slayings: Earlier this month, a Chesapeake woman fatally shot herself after fatally shooting her three children. Chesapeake police said they’d been called to a residence for a welfare check.

You would think gun-rights groups and most Republican legislators, who usually oppose any whiff of gun-control measures, might get behind this idea since it’s designed to reduce shootings and slayings. And you’d be wrong.

You would be.

See, the problem isn't in the concept. In theory, such a center would be beneficial for a lot of things, including reducing violence. It shouldn't focus on just one kind of violence--we'll get to that one in a bit--but reducing violent crime is a good thing.

The problem lies in how Price and her effort want to go about it.

For example, research sounds like a good thing, but we also know that researchers are incredibly biased and engage in practices that discredit pretty much everything they do. They play games with research to reach their desired conclusion. When the research still doesn't pan out well for gun control, they self-censor and refuse to publish their findings because it will hurt the cause or draw the ire of their colleagues.

And for the record, Johns Hopkins University's Center for Gun Violence Solution is a prime example of this. They've never found a gun control law they wouldn't support, even if the research actually shows it doesn't do much.

But the author wasn't done.

Some opponents utter hackneyed arguments. They pronounce red herrings that have little to do with the issue.

“Why isn’t all violence the problem?” Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, told me during an interview. When you separate violence into the categories of tools, he added, that’s a concern.

...

Let me be clear: Guns are the major problem with violence in this country, so much so that crimes not involving guns tend to be the exception. Nor are firearms going away, given the overall culture, the Second Amendment and an industry that stokes fear to drive sales.

Van Cleave also said that this was an attempt to go after gun rights and he's correct.

Additionally, let's talk about how guns are the problem for just a moment. Yes, the majority of violent crime involves a gun, but we've also seen that even if every gun crime vanished tomorrow, we'd still have a violent crime problem. Our non-gun homicide rate, for example, is higher than many nations' total homicide rates. That includes their own homicides that involve a gun, which they still have.

And you're an idiot if you think that none of the homicides committed with a gun wouldn't have been committed at all without one. If you want someone dead, you're going to find a way.

So yeah, we probably should be looking beyond "gun violence" and just look at "violence." If you're serious about preventing murders, this shouldn't be contentious.

The fact that it is shows there's a very good reason Virginia doesn't need any such center.