Charlie Kirk was assassinated less than a week ago. The video of his shooting has been watched by millions upon millions. It's a horrific thing to see, not because there's blood, but because a man was murdered because he said things some people didn't like.
Right now, a whole lot of people are celebrating that murder. They're thrilled with it and have tried to justify it. It's pretty disgusting.
One group of people who are being mostly quiet--not entirely, but mostly--are gun control advocates. Sure, a handful, including a number we've highlighted and will continue to highlight, have tried to make it a thing, but they're running into one major problem getting any traction.
The weapon used was one they swear they don't want to touch.
The single shot that killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s last week upended decades of the gun control debate.
As high-profile shootings piled up, activists said the solution lay in background checks and bans on semi-automatic AR-style assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and 3D-printed firearms.
But authorities said the shot that killed Mr. Kirk came from a Mauser bolt-action rifle chambered in .30-06 caliber — a classic hunting gun and the type of weapon that had previously been immune from the gun control debate.
“As usual, the Democrats wasted no time before weaponizing the assassination of Second Amendment advocate Charlie Kirk to promote their unconstitutional gun-grabbing agenda,” said Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America. “But the murder weapon is a sporterized, Mauser Gewehr 98 — a bolt-action rifle first manufactured in Germany over a hundred years ago in 1898. So, when Democrats call for ‘assault weapons’ bans, every gun owner must realize that means grandpa’s old hunting rifle too.”
Bolt-action rifles load each round one at a time by manually working the bolt.
The rifles usually at the core of the gun debate are magazine-fed semi-automatic guns, in which the firearm itself automatically brings a new round into the chamber after each trigger pull — though, like a bolt-action, each trigger pull fires only a single round.
Automatic rifles, or machine guns, fire continuously until the magazine or belt is empty. They are already heavily restricted under U.S. law.
In other words, the weapon wasn't any of the "evil" categories gun control advocates routinely scream about.
Further, the alleged killer was over 21, didn't show any signs of distress that would trigger a red flag order, or any of the other things they routinely claim we need in order to stop so-called gun violence.
The truth is that this horrific incident shows that gun control won't stop horrific violence.
This was a gun that's been around for more than a century, that's been modified specifically for hunting--you know, the "hunting guns" no one is coming for--and it wasn't any of the things they wanted to make it about.
So, they're in a bit of a conundrum. The anti-gunners want to make this about gun control, and they've been trying, but this undermines all of their policies to some degree or another. Nothing they've pushed anywhere over the last 30+ years would have prevented this awful tragedy. Absolutely nothing.
Sure, I suspect they'll try to call this a sniper rifle and offer some kind of legislation, but then they're going to have a harder time convincing Fudd-sympathetic people that their hunting rifles will never be a target, so a lot of anti-gunners are either sitting this one out or are just pushing generic calls for "gun control."
This shooting undermined the narrative, and they don't know what to do.
Unfortunately, it's not stopping nearly enough from being idiots and trying it anyway.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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