A policeman searches a small handbag of a young lady during a large police search for guns and other weapons, in Berlin, March 28, 1933. (AP Photo)
The brutal news about the mass shootings over the weekend has once again left social media and the blogosphere flooded with thousands of ignorant hot takes offering solutions that won't solve anything.
Predictably, the Democrats running for president have been some of the worstoffenders. As expected, they're all full of cries for congressional action, however vague. The tragedies have highlighted just how little difference there is between them.
I try to avoid social media in times of tragedy but I allowed myself to be lured in today and made a couple of quick observations, this one coming after seeing three or four elected Democrats blame Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for America's societal woes:
I will say this: none of the top-down, increased federal intervention solutions to society's ills are worth a damn. They're all about a lust for power & further entrenching a bureaucracy that keeps them rolling in $$$.
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The progressive brain trust over at Vox.com posted a rather long article that was one of the more honest leftist anti-gun pieces I've read in a while and illustrates precisely why law-abiding gun owners are so distrustful of the anti-Second Amendment crowd.
The post admits early on that Congress doesn't have a magic wand it can wave an make it all go away:
But let's be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur, most recently in Dayton and El Paso. Congress's decision not to pass background checks is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What's behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns.
Once getting to the obvious, the article moves on to the thing we normal gun owners have been called paranoid for believing all these years:
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
It's the main points of those paragraphs that always bring me to my main problems with the Democrats' lust for "sweeping gun legislation" in whatever form they propose.
The first is the number of guns issue. We have always had a lot of guns here in the United States. The proximity/availability argument from the left has always been weak to me, especially as I'm an Arizonan. I grew up around guns. Heck, my liberal friends are all gun owners here. If there were a logical thread that could be run through the availability argument then we should be under siege here.
The tragic mass shooting we had in Tucson years ago was done by a lunatic who had been on local law enforcement's radar for years and nothing was done about him.
Of all of the worn-out lines from either side, one remains true: most proposed legislative "fixes" to gun violence largely end up just punishing people who obey the law.
My reward for having done everything right is to be left more vulnerable to attack from those who don't?
As arguments go, that one moves me not at all.
There are plenty of deep conversations that should be had about the recent mass shootings in America, all involving ideas that can't be zipped up in a convenient social media rallying point.
Nobody's got time for that though.
At least the leftists have gotten to the point in this "debate" where they have — unwittingly or not — admitted that they've indeed been lying about wanting to take our guns.
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