The Aurora, Colorado theater shooting was a wild case. The killer was trying to be some kind of a Batman villain. I mean, he was basically worshipping The Joker.
It was insane, but not quite as insane as a Colorado editorial invoking the shooting.
See, while I understand the tendency for people to embrace gun control following a mass shooting--I understand it, but don't agree with it, it should be noted--one doesn't get to use that to ignore reality. That's basically what this editorial did.
Since July 20, 2012, when [Killer's name redacted] sneaked into a packed Aurora movie theater just after midnight and started shooting, a staggering 1,694 Americans have been murdered during another 493 mass shootings, and another 2,358 have been wounded during mass shooting gunfire, according to a recent catalogue of shootings compiled by the Rockefeller Institute of Government Reports.
That pales in comparison to the far more than 1 million Americans dead or injured from gun violence outside of mass shootings since the Aurora theater massacre.
Gun rights extremists point to a need to lock down schools, or lock up mentally ill people, or just deal with it as the price we must pay to live in a “free” society.
Mental health treatment is a complicated and pervasive problem in the United States, as it is in other modern democracies, which don’t have epidemic gun violence. Only the United States has an undeniable crisis with shooting deaths.
The nation’s unwillingness to even slow, let alone end, epidemic gun violence is among America’s most shameful failures.
It isn’t that the United States is incapable of ending not just rampant mass murders. The nation also is unwilling to stem the leading cause of childhood death among Americans: gun violence.
We have refused to limit the power and abundance of American firearms.
Well, Colorado has. They've gone deep down the anti-gun rabbit hole since that shooting, pushing businesses from the state and punishing law-abiding citizens for the actions of a handful of madmen.
Since then, though, there have been other mass shootings in the state. So-called gun violence has risen and fallen much as it has throughout the entire nation, including states that tend to favor the "gun rights extremists" point of view.
It's like gun control doesn't actually do anything.
And seriously, I'm more than a little sick of the "gun rights extremist" label. I don't mind the idea that I can be extremist in some things, because I can, but this idea that defending the Second Amendment as it is written is somehow extremist is incredibly worrisome. After all, what other rights as written are on the agenda for restriction?
So yeah, we've "refused to limit the power and abundance of American firearms." We've refused because we value not just our right to keep and bear arms, but our right to speak freely, among other things.
If that makes me extremist, then so be it, but I can't see how.
The truth is that the anti-gun zealots are the ones trying to upend the Constitution and historic tradition by ever-encroaching regulations on our gun rights.
Gun control, prior to the 20th Century, was a vile, racist attempt at keeping undesirables from owning guns. The problem was that "undesirables" weren't whack jobs, criminals, or anything of the like. It was black people, American Indians, Catholics, for crying out loud. Really, anyone who was a minority was prevented from owning a gun.
In the 20th Century, we got things like the NFA and Gun Control Act and the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapon Ban of 1996.
That's the extremism, though, and the truth is that Colorado has done everything this editorial board would like to see happen, and for what? Nothing has changed there.
So no, we're not going to suddenly embrace gun control. We're not going to give up our safety for your illusions of it.
