With the twin tragedies in Rhode Island and Australia, anti-gunners on both sides of the planet are chomping at the bit to push for extensive gun control measures. They'll ignore that the gun control laws put in place previously failed to work, more or less, and instead demand we double down on what failed.
This is a script as old as time, it seems. We all know how it plays out. We've seen in a thousand times at least.
But Rep. Ro Khanna is the latest to try to beat this particular drum.
Khanna said, “It’s just disgusting. It’s just been an awful weekend. Obviously, we need to, figure out who the perpetrators were and what the cause was. And address that. And we also have an issue of mass shootings in this country, in, college campuses and high schools. And I believe that we have to get serious on the issue of gun safety in this, in this country.”
He added, “Not every, shooting can be prevented by gun laws. Obviously, the Australian one was not. But having said possible gun laws would prevent the mass amount of mass shootings that we have in the United States compared to other nations.”
Honestly, the first two sentences he said in that last paragraph are the most accurate thing an anti-gunner like him has ever said.
Then he screws it up by continuing to flap his gums.
Of course, he's not wrong that we have an issue of mass shootings in this country, though sites like the Gun Violence Archive and the K-12 School Shooting Database exist to make it look like a bigger issue than it is. However, what do high schools and colleges have in common when it comes to guns?
That's right, they're both gun-free zones in many states, such as Rhode Island.
Australia showed that you can kill a lot of people without an AR-15 or similar rifle, and Bondi Beach had a death toll greater than many American shootings that do involve an evil "assault weapon," so even trying to push a ban on those guns wouldn't do anything. Everyone's seen the video now. They know how quickly someone can work a bolt if they train a bit. You're not going to reduce the bloodshed with a gun ban, so that's a lost cause now.
Khanna thinks this is proof we need to get serious about "gun safety" in the United States, which, for people like him, always means gun control. I think that he's calling for more of the medicine that killed the patient.
Gun control failed in both of those shootings, just as it has in countless other killings across the nation over the years. It's not that it won't stop all mass murders, it's that it doesn't seem to stop any of them.
What it does, though, is make sure the targets of such attacks have no way to fight back.
Of course, Khanna is a California Democrat, and they all seem to believe that the right to keep and bear arms, which shall not be infringed, is really just a less-than-stern suggestion, and the right should be infringed as much as possible, so nothing about his position is earth-shattering.
But that doesn't make it less stupid.
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