Anti-gunners are consistently trying to sell people on the idea that gun control works. In theory, their arguments make a degree of sense...so long as you don't think much about it. You have to believe that guns come from law-abiding sources, though, and that's simply not always the case.
And the leftist media is starting to wake up to this fact.
Oregon, for example, is currently at the epicenter of much of the gun control debate, and when one of the leftist States Newsroom publication drops a story with a headline like "Oregon has some of the nation’s strongest gun control laws. Some groups want more," then you have to recognize that things are changing, at least a little bit.
The body of the story is worse for the anti-Second Amendment bunch.
Oregon ranks as 12th in the nation for its gun safety laws, according to gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.Those laws include banning guns at the state capitol and giving universities the authority to ban guns on campus. Oregon also bars domestic abusers from having guns while subject to restraining orders, and it prevents people who have committed certain violent misdemeanors from buying a firearm for up to four years. In 2023, the state also banned homemade firearms known as “ghost guns” and 3D-printed guns.
And yet, Oregon has experienced four mass shootings this year, with the latest taking place on Oct. 15 when a 16-year-old gunman climbed over a school fence, fired a shotgun through the glass panels of locked doors at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend and killed three children and a teacher before being tackled by another teacher and fatally shot by a local parent who followed him into the school.
His mother legally purchased him the shotgun for his birthday, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
Despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, some groups say Oregon needs to do more to protect Oregonians from gun violence.
Now, a common tactic among anti-gun journalists is to point out inconvenient facts later in an article, knowing full well that most people don't read the whole thing. As a result, you end up with a lot of people knowing the anti-gun talking points and not the pro-gun ones. Even if they do read the whole thing, they still come away with the impression that the pro-gun point of view is somehow less important.
This one, though, starts out this way.
It lays out that Oregon has a lot of gun control, is an anti-gun state, and has had four mass shootings this year, including the shooting in Bend, where a good guy with a gun actually violated state law to put an end to the carnage before it could get far, far uglier.
I find that genuinely fascinating.
I've railed against States Newsroom before. They're heavily biased toward leftist ideology, so when they start pointing out how Oregon's gun laws aren't doing the job, that's something to stand up and notice.
They do note that Measure 114 factors into the state's ranking but hasn't gone into effect because it's tied up in the courts, but it's still kind of savage to acknowledge that their buddies haven't seemed to deliver what was promised.
It should also be noted that Measure 114 has no provisions that would have stopped the mass shooting in Bend, so it's not like that law would have done a damn thing. So-called high-capacity magazines? The killer used a pump-action shotgun. Requirements for gun purchasers to undergo training? That isn't stopping a mass killer, especially when his mother bought the gun.
The rest of the piece isn't exactly fantastic from a bias standpoint, but I still find it telling how the writer started versus how she wrapped up.
Maybe even the Left is starting to realize gun laws don't work.
Of course, that assumes they care.
