A mass shooting in a Manhattan office building isn't something you see every day. With New York City being the news media capital of the nation, though, we heard about it nonstop. The media wanted us to learn some lessons from this.
The problem is, they're the wrong lessons.
What they want is the same policies that utterly failed in Manhattan to be in place throughout the nation.
Over at The Daily Signal, Amy Swearer has some thoughts about what the shooting actually means.
Nothing about the shooting demonstrates that the rest of the nation needs New York’s unconstitutionally restrictive gun laws. Instead, it shows precisely how those restrictive gun laws punish ordinary New Yorkers by forcing them to cede their right to armed self-defense—leaving them in difficult positions when the government and corporate security measures fail to keep them safe.
Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue and concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from past months and years here.)
The piece then goes on to highlight many of those defensive gun uses.
This is actually pretty poignant when you remember that no one in that office building was able to defend themselves except for the cop, who was target number one.
Grown adults were throwing couches in front of doors so the bad guy would pick one of their coworkers to kill, as it was about the only option available to them. They were powerless.
Have you ever been powerless? Have you ever been in a situation where you know there's nothing you can do except hope the trainwreck isn't as bad as you imagine?
It's not a lot of fun, and I only experienced it in cases when the trainwreck in question wasn't going to result in the potential loss of my life. I can only imagine it being worse when there's a killer looking to rack up a body count, especially when he's pissed that he got off on the wrong floor.
New York City's gun control laws put people in that position. Corporate policies would likely do the same thing, as too many companies trust their employees with making multi-million dollar decisions, but not to protect themselves without hurting anyone else.
What happened in Manhattan wasn't unusual, except that it happened there. Usually, those of a violent disposition end up involved with gangs in cities like New York. But this guy took a road trip because he was pissed at the NFL, and not because the league has made the game a messaging center rather than a contact sport--that wouldn't justify the shooting, mind you, but at least I'd get the hate a bit better.
People need to defend themselves.
Instead, the media and anti-gun politicians are pushing the idea that gun rights led to this horrific incident. They ignore the fact that he violated numerous New York gun control laws, but the victims didn't, which certainly didn't help them protect themselves, and we know that there have been cases in the past when someone didn't have a gun they wanted to carry because of laws and/or policy.
They're pushing the wrong lessons, but what's shocking about that?
