AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
It’s been truly amazing to watch more and more gun control activists, anti-gun politicians, and pundits actually take the position that it’s bad that there was an immediate armed response when a man armed with a shotgun opened fire at a church in White Settlement, Texas on Sunday. I’ve already detailed some of the tweets from Shannon Watts and members of Congress bemoaning the fact that armed citizens stopped the attack within seconds, but since that original post there’ve been plenty of others who’ve let it be known that they believe it’s a bad thing that good guys with guns took down that attacker.
Writing at The Guardian, Joan E. Greve seemed a little disappointed that Second Amendment advocates may be on to something.
Every time the US suffers another mass shooting, gun rights activists make an argument that goes something like this: if a good guy with a gun had been there, this terrible tragedy could have been prevented.
That argument has been dismissed by gun control groups as an unrealistic suggestion that diverts attention away from the need to strengthen laws restricting firearm access, but a shooting that occurred over the weekend has now supercharged the “good guy with a gun” defense.
Gun control activists are now resorting to a backup argument, which goes something like this: Okay, fine, a guard with a gun stopped a shooter, but the only reason he could do it is because his years in law enforcement gave him superpowers or something close to it. On Twitter, Jon Stokes from Open Source Defense found a gaggle of gun control supporters claiming that no way could the average gun owner have responded in a similar fashion.
I don’t get the argument that because the other armed parishioners didn’t open fire first, somehow that means they and other gun owners are not equipped or able to respond in the event of an active shooter. In actuality, these other church security members did exactly what they were supposed to do. Nobody fired willy-nilly, nobody mistook a fellow parishioner for another attacker, the police had no problem determining who the good guys and bad guys were.
In other words, the nightmare scenarios that gun control advocates invent to try to scare people away from owning and carrying firearms for self-defense never materialized. The threat was neutralized within seconds, and armed citizens saved lives. It’s as simple as that.
Of course, some folks don’t see it that way. Instead of mourning those who died, yet being grateful for the fast response that saved lives, they’re clinging to the idea that with enough gun laws in place, we can prevent every bad actor from committing a crime with a gun.
Of course no one wants an America where there are gun battles in places of worship. Also, no one wants an America where helpless individuals are slaughtered in a church because they couldn’t fight back. Of the two imperfect Americas, however, I’m going to go with the one that allows evil to be met with a prompt and effective response from American citizens exercising their constitutionally protected rights.
Someone in the 2A community asked me privately today how these gun control advocates can still be spouting off in support of gun free zones after watching armed citizens stop a targeted attack before it turned into a mass murder. The most charitable reason I could think of is that they would rather try to create a fantasy world where they’ve gotten rid of all the guns than live in the real world, where guns are here to stay and an armed response saves lives.
As I said on Twitter in response to Peter Daou, we can’t ban our way to safety any more than we’ve been able to ban our way to sobriety. It just doesn’t work. You don’t have to like guns or appreciate the Second Amendment to recognize that, in a nation of 100,000,000 gun owners and 400,000,000 privately owned firearms, you’re not going to get rid of either. We’d be much better off, both in terms of protecting civil rights and actually addressing the real issues, if we focused our efforts on deterring gang and drug related violence and increased mental health resources for those in need.
This weekend’s shooting in Texas has once again made it clear that no matter how much Moms Demand, Everytown, and other gun control groups might proclaim they’re not opposed to the Second Amendment but just want a few commonsense gun safety measures, they simply can’t say anything positive about owning or using a firearm in self-defense. Since that’s the core purpose of the Second Amendment, it’s impossible to take them seriously when they pretend to support the right to keep and bear arms or care about your safety and and that of your family.