Category: Safety
The Power to Tax and Regulate Guns is the Power to Disarm Women and Minorities
The world has changed. Racial minorities are buying guns for lawful self-protection more than ever before. Urban women are the fastest growing segment of legal gun owners. That is wonderful news and long overdue. Tempering that good news are the unfortunate conditions in our inner cities that may have provided new motivations to own a gun. Recently we’re seeing gun-prohibitionist Democrats propose huge taxes on guns just as minority members of society become gun owners. We’ve seen this political behavior before, and politicians repeat behavior that works. It looks like Democrat politicians are doing it again, and racism and political advantage are always wrapped in the excuses of public safety.
Because the AR-15 Can Deter a Mob
Americans deserve the chance to protect themselves from rampaging mobs and (God forbid) the government itself if tyranny arises.
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Now to the point. This is not a piece about dealing with misinformation. Official efforts to combat “misinformation” are laughably political and partisan. This is about gun control. Why do Americans need AR-15s with a high capacity magazine? Because too often, mobs inflamed by planted rumors are allowed (even encouraged) to rampage through American communities. Ask Kyle Rittenhouse. The AR-15 is a jury-approved tool of self-defense against a mob of attackers.
Mobs like these don’t materialize in a vacuum. Tyrants, dating back to the Romans, have employed mobs to influence politics. Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, all developed an “on and off” switch for their street goons. And no, it’s not different when the mob is inflamed by social justice concerns. Every mob since before the Romans claims to be fighting for justice of some kind.
Recall that Kamala Harris rather conspicuously pledged to “stand by” Kenosha rioters and helped raise money for Minneapolis rioters who burned down an entire police facility. Biden excused the Kenosha riots on the grounds of “the original sin in this country . . . slavery, and all the vestigages of it.” One should not hold one’s breath for help from the Biden Administration if one’s city descends into chaos.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey and Kyle Rittenhouse have demonstrated that the AR-15 with a conspicuous high-capacity magazine is the appropriate tool to deter a mob (in the case of the McCloskeys) and may be wielded as a legitimate instrument of self-defense (in the case of Rittenhouse). And, as I pointed out in 2020,
Americans can also see that powerful rifles are turning up in the possession of violent rioters and looters. In this video, one can clearly see Raz Simone, then a noted leader within Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,’ handing out an expensive, tricked-out AR-15 to a complete stranger.
Simone somehow went from an Airbnb host to a Tesla-driving, arsenal-distributing mogul in the space of a few weeks. As shown in this video, a militant left-wing militia group called NFAC . . . staged an armed protest in Kentucky during which an accidental discharge wounded three people.
Unfortunately, we live at a time when social and legacy media help agitators spread lies to incite mob violence. And for a variety of reasons, one may not be able to count on law enforcement to engage a violent threat. Once the threat materializes, it’s possible that the police will “maintain a perimeter” while “waiting for equipment and backup,” while people continue to die. Jurisdictions governed by the Left have been particularly brazen about selective protection based on politics. The University of California recently was forced to settle a lawsuit charging that UC Berkeley withheld security and protection from conservative speakers.
Americans deserve the chance to protect themselves from rampaging mobs and (God forbid) the government itself if tyranny arises. And they should not take for granted that their Republican representatives will stand firm to protect these rights.
Things are different now. Gun confiscators are willing to weather the backlash of moderate gun owners to achieve their greater objectives. Indeed, the hopeless condition of their midterm prospects leaves them with little to lose. It’s in the air. The NRA is bankrupt and compromised. Anti-gun forces (not all of them Democrats) control Congress and the White House. And before you count on the Supreme Court, remember the mob now knows where each of the conservative justices live. The Second Amendment has never been in greater peril.
Constitutional Rights vs. Ideological Rights
On 31 July 1982 I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign, and domestic. Today I am the Executive Director of the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU).
As a career military serviceman and combat veteran, I believe the oath that I took then has no statute of limitations. As a Member of Congress, that oath was my guiding principle and light, as the Constitution is our rule of law.
The U.S. Constitution was established to restrain the powers of the federal government. As a matter of fact, when you read Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution you will find the (18) enumerated duties of the legislative branch, the most powerful of our three branches of government. Article II and Article III lay out the duties, qualifications, duties, responsibilities and scope of the executive and judicial branches. Our founders intentionally described and limited the federal government.
Unfortunately, the left does not subscribe to these limitations. Today there exists competing philosophies of governance — constitutional conservatism and progressive socialism. Leftists do not believe in the absolutism of the Constitution, our rule of law, and certainly not the ideal of constitutional rights. Leftists believe in the dangerous concept of ideological rights.
The left in America embraces an ideal that is the antithesis of our constitutional rights. They believe their ideology defines our rights. They believe they can grant and take our rights away.
I find very disconcerting the repeated assertion by the current occupant of the oval office, Joe Biden, that no amendment to the Constitution is absolute. His current focus is the Second Amendment, whose language is quite simple and forthright. His line has been parroted by many progressive socialists, elected officials and media pundits.
The Second Amendment is part of our individual Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. It is established in our founding documents, along the principle of natural rights theory, that our unalienable rights and all individual rights come to us from our Creator God, the Judeo-Christian God. They do not emanate from the government, and that is codified in our Declaration of Independence which Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “laws of nature and nature’s God”.
Here we have the President of these United States of America who took an oath to uphold the Constitution declaring our constitutional rights are not absolute.
The left tells us that we have a right to healthcare. We have a right to free college education. We have a right to change our gender. None of these are enumerated rights, but they are ideological rights of the Left.
Once upon a time, during the Carter administration, the Left told us that every American had a right to own a home. They passed legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act which led to the subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown some 30 years later. Just last week a Democrat Congressman from Rhode Island publicly stated that he deemed constitutional rights as bovine excrement. Yes, a US Congressman who is supposed to have taken an oath to the Constitution says constitutional rights are BS!
Now you can see why we need an organization called the American Constitutional Rights Union?
If no amendment to the Constitution is absolute, then I guess the left wants to make me a slave again? Recall, Democrats did not support the 13th and 14th Amendments. Today, this same group, who now embraces socialism and Marxism, is promoting economic enslavement.
If the left in America is able to define our rights based upon their ideological agenda and have it enforced by the rule of the mob…America faces dark days ahead. And if the Left is successful in disarming the American populace, their sponsored mob, Antifa, will leverage coercion, threats, intimidation, fear, and violence against anyone not in compliance.
If the progressive socialist left does not like our Constitution, they can go through the amendment process. Passing ideologically based laws, or issuing edicts, orders, mandates, and decrees, does not override our constitutional rights.
Recall, our respective States would not ratify our constitution until it had an individual Bill of Rights. The 10th Amendment clearly states, “All the powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the States and to the People.” If the 10th Amendment is not absolute, then the leftists in America become the repository of all power in America.
America is the longest running Constitutional Republic because of individual constitutional rights…not rights based upon progressive, socialist, statist, Marxist ideology.
Steadfast and Loyal.
Click on the pic for a large image
Feminist Naomi Wolf takes the red pill and takes the first tentative steps on the path to see reality
BLUF
Without the brilliantly-conceived and clearly-worded Second Amendment, without the deterrent to state and transnational violence of responsible, lawful, careful and defensive firearms ownership in the United States of America, it is clear that nothing at all will save our citizens from the current fates of the people of China, Australia and Canada; including the children; who are facing — unarmed, defenseless as their parents sadly are — even worse fates, perhaps, still ahead.
Rethinking the Second Amendment
I wrote this essay some weeks ago, but I kept waiting to publish it til tragic mass shootings were no longer in the news. But that day looks as if it will never come, so I am publishing it anyway, with grief and mourning for those lost to gun violence, as we must nonetheless have this difficult conversation.
The last thing keeping us free in America, as the lights go off all over Europe- and Australia, and Canada – is, yes, we must face this fact, the Second Amendment.
I can’t believe I am writing those words. But here we are and I stand by them.
I am a child of the peace movement. A daughter of the Left, of a dashingly-bearded proto-Beatnik poet, my late dad, and of a Summer of Love activist/cultural anthropologist, my lovely mom. We are a lineage of anti-war, longhaired folks who believe in talking things out.
By the time I was growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s, weapons were supposed to have become passe. When I played at friends’ houses in our neighborhood in San Francisco, there were posters on the walls: “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” Protesters had iconically placed daisies in the rifle barrels of unhip-looking National Guardsmen.
We were obviously supposed to side with the daisies.
Weapons were archaic, benighted — tacky. A general peace was surely to prevail, in the dawning Age of Aquarius.
Food security is national security and a crisis is coming.
I first drove the semi on my family’s farm when I was around 12 years old. My dad and I were leaving the field with a full load of corn, when he told me to take the wheel, giving his only advice before climbing down: “Make your corners wide.”
From my family’s farm to the State Committee for the USDA Farm Service Agency to the House Agriculture Committee, I have worked in agriculture in some capacity since I could walk. Now as South Dakota’s governor, I serve alongside a third-generation cattle rancher, Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden. We are the only farmer-rancher pair to lead a state’s executive branch, and we are both deeply concerned: America’s food supply system is at risk.
To keep our food supply consistent and affordable for all families, it is essential that no one else controls it. When another nation controls your food, it controls you. Our leaders recognized this threat and put in place risk management tools and programs to ensure Americans would never go hungry because of a foreign entity’s influence.
But for years now, foreign countries have been investing in our food supply chain, buying up the chemical and fertilizer companies that make American agriculture possible. Purchasing processing facilities, they have introduced vulnerability into the food supply chains Americans rely on to eat. Today, China is buying up millions of acres of land across the United States, following the same blueprint they have used in other countries for years.
While Americans have awakened to China’s military expansion and its grab for critical minerals worldwide, we have not yet realized our strategic vulnerability when it comes to our nation’s food supply.
The Second Amendment was inspired by British plans to disarm every American.
A part of you probably already knew this, but didn’t have the details.
I’m about to chill you to the bones And give you every piece of evidence you need moving forward. So buckle up.
It began In 1768, “the freeholders” led by John Hancock and James Otis, met in Boston at Faneuil Hall and passed several resolutions. Including “that the Subjects being Protestants, may have Arms for their Defense.”
The royal governor rejected this proposal.
So this petition was circulated under the pseudonym “A.B.C.” (Who was more than likely Sam Adams)
Shortly after Sam Adams’ petition was circulated, per the Boston Evening Post, (Oct. 3, 1768) British troops took over Faneuil Hall.
And per The New York Journal, (Feb. 2, 1769) they ordered colonists turn in their guns.
BLUF
Disarmament, national or personal, is not a moral stance, but the abandonment of morality.
Gun controllers have had a field day with the inaction of the Uvalde cops, but it never occurs to them that’s who they are, standing around, wringing their hands and waiting for someone to tell them what the plan is, so they don’t have to make any difficult choices in the face of a crisis.
Gun control is the moral idiocy of the irresponsible blaming those who have taken responsibility.
The Moral Idiocy of Gun Control
Is it more moral to own a gun or to pay someone else to do it for you?
I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada.
“There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head.
We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month.
Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers.
Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous.
The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns.
The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was “puzzled”. “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, and they want to get a gun on Staten Island,” he argued. “That’s not rational, but some people really want guns.”
Perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer muggings in Staten Island is that more of the folks there can prevent them. Muggers, like most predators, prefer victims who don’t fight back.
I know how to stop a looter and that looter still won’t spend a day in prison!
Two George Soros-backed prosecutors in suburban Washington, D.C., bounced a serial looter who committed multiple grand larcenies and assaulted a cop between their offices for years without a felony conviction.
Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.
The out-of-state offender, Ronald Thomas, spent virtually no time in jail after his arrests thanks to bail reform policies instituted by Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. At least five times he was charged for committing crimes in one jurisdiction while on pretrial release in another. He was twice charged for committing larcenies within a day of having similar larceny charges dropped—with one of those incidents happening in the same county.
The case exemplifies the degree to which lightened sentencing can embolden repeat offenders. Studies have shown that releasing defendants before their trial increases crime. A few years after Cook County, Ill., instituted bail reform, a 2020 study by the University of Utah found a 45 percent increase in the number of released defendants who were charged with committing new crimes and a 33 percent bump in released defendants charged with violent crimes. Continue reading “”
The state with the most restrictive gun laws had the most active shooter incidents last year
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is out with a new report on active shooter incidents across the United States last year, and there are some significant findings worth talking about, including the fact that several of the incidents were stopped by armed citizens.
The report details 61 “active shooter incidents” last year, which the agency defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in ai populated area.” Specifically excluded are acts of self-defense, gang and drug-related shootings, and domestic incidents, as well as “crossfire as a byproduct of another criminal act”. And while gun control activists invariably point to these types of attacks as justification for their attempts to criminalize the right to keep and bear arms, the report’s data suggests that gun control doesn’t serve any sort of preventative benefit to stopping these attacks.
According to the report, the most restrictive state in the Union when it comes to gun control laws also led the way in the number of active shooter incidents. California had six such incidents last year, more than any other state, though Texas and Georgia were close behind with five such incidents reported in each state. Active shooter incidents were reported in 30 states altogether, up from 19 states in 2020, with a total of 243 Americans killed or wounded in the attacks.
The FBI report notes that in 17 of the 61 incidents, law enforcement “engaged the shooter,” while there were six incidents where citizens either “engaged” the attacker or where “citizen involvement impacted the engagement.” It’s unclear to me what differentiates those two categories, because in both cases there were armed citizens who put a stop to the attack or prevented any further bloodshed.
One example of “engagement” noted by the FBI was the attack at a Metarie, Louisiana gun store in February of 2021, in which a suspect shot and killed two people and wounded two more before he was shot by multiple armed employees of the business. An example of “citizen involvement” in the FBI report was the shooting at an Agrex grain elevator in Superior, Nebraska last October when a recently fired employee left the building only to return a short time later with murder on his mind.
NSP said [the suspect] made his way into the door and shot a manager, Darin Koepke, 53, twice in the chest and the arm, the former of which was fatal. Roby said [the suspect] shot Koepke again as he lay on the floor.
The entire shooting event lasted under 20 seconds, according to NSP, and was briefly halted due to the gun jamming. NSP said [the suspect] fired a total of five rounds in the incident.
NSP said there were eight employees in the building at the time and others outside. Roby said supervisors were on scene during the shooting due to the termination and other employees were there “because they worked there.”
Roby said Koepke likely saved “countless lives” by barricading a door.
In addition, troopers say the man who returned fire did prevent it “from becoming even worse.”
Troopers say the Nuckolls County Attorney will not prosecute the man who returned fire.
… “The Nebraska State Patrol considers all the survivors of this terrible incident to be victims,” said Capt. Jeff Roby.
Roby said NSP would not be naming the man who returned fire “and actively stopped this active shooting event. That man’s quick actions likely saved lives.”
Of the six incidents in which civilians either “engaged” or “involved” themselves in stopping the active shooter, four of them involved the defensive use of a firearm (the other two involved citizens tackling the shooter after five people were shot, and an Idaho teacher who talked a 12-year old girl into giving up a gun that she had used to shoot three people at a middle school). None of the incidents involving armed citizens took place in “may issue” states, by the way.
Just two of the 61 incidents covered in the FBI’s report took place at a school, with three other incidents unfolding at other government buildings. The vast majority of these targeted attacks took place in “areas of commerce” (32 incidents) or “business environments open to pedestrian traffic” (28 incidents).
The FBI report also notes what the agency calls an “emerging trend involving roving active shooters”; individuals who shoot in multiple locations and in some cases over multiple days, though it didn’t provide any details on exactly how many of the 61 incidents could be classified as such.
L-o-n-g unroll of a thread, but read the whole thing.
Andrew Follett says ‘the media is telling you two major lies’ about mass shootings and gun control
A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control
1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings.
2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence
Although events in the U.S. tend to get the lion’s share of media exposure, mass shootings are clearly a worldwide issue.
The US makes up about 1.15% of the world’s mass shootings while having almost 5% of the world’s population.
Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.
And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster
4 times as many per capita died in mass shootings in FRANCE as in the US. 21 times in Norway.
BLUF
The truth is that proposals for a prison society of disarmed and surveilled subjects shepherded by public employees are unworkable. The state can’t defend us from danger, and nothing obligates us to pretend otherwise. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to do it yourself.
If You Want Protection for Your Loved Ones, Do It Yourself
Police in Uvalde, Texas, face a barrage of criticism for delays in confronting the shooter who slaughtered children and teachers last week. Officials admit law enforcers screwed up; worse, they impeded parents who wanted to intervene, leaving the crime to be ended by agents who ignored police orders. As politicians rush to leverage tragedy to advance legislative agendas, we’re reminded again that it’s foolish to place our trust in authority or to surrender our ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted of police choosing to wait for backup and equipment before intervening in a massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers. “It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”
That decision delayed the response for over an hour. Finally, a Border Patrol team that drove 40 miles to the scene defied orders and stopped the shooter’s rampage.
“Federal agents who went to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday to confront a gunman who killed 19 children were told by local police to wait and not enter the school — and then decided after about half an hour to ignore that initial guidance and find the shooter,” noted NBC News.
The feds weren’t the only ones willing to intervene. Instead of taking on Ramos, local police tackled, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed parents rather than allow them to take action at which officers balked.
“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez who was briefly arrested for challenging official indecision.
“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”
This isn’t the first time police faced criticism for dithering in response to danger. By the time officers entered Colorado’s Columbine High School in in 1999, 47 minutes had passed allowing the shooters to do their worst before killing themselves. Columbine was supposed to spur changes in police policy, but that wasn’t apparent during a 2018 incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
Uvalde – The Case For More Guns
Democrat politicians and their Liberal media megaphones have been screaming for control since the massacre in Uvalde last week. No one needs an AR-15, they screech. The resident in the Oval Office jokes that the AR-15 is not necessary because the “deer aren’t wearing Kevlar” and lies that the 2nd Amendment is not absolute, although James Madison would beg to differ. Based on what we saw, Uvalde actually makes the case for more armed residents.
Like most Americans, I have been both furious and nauseated about the slaughter of innocent school children in Uvalde since word began spreading. I have been a police and military supporter my entire life. I have always believed the police were the good guys. In Uvalde, the police were some of the cowards. Good guys aren’t cowards. Piers Morgan in the New York Post wrote, “Uvalde shooter wasn’t the only sniveling little coward — so were the cops“:
Yet incredibly, there were up to 19 armed police officers inside the school for 70 minutes before 18-year-old Salvador Ramos finished his hellish homicidal rampage.
That’s one for each of the 9 and 10-year-old children who were murdered.
These cops were all trained to use guns to protect the public and were all carrying guns to protect the public.
But when the moment came to protect the youngest, most vulnerable and defenceless members of the public, they went AWOL.
Or rather, they stood there outside the classroom where the kids were trapped, doing absolutely nothing.
This was despite several of the desperate children frantically calling 911 on cell phones pleading for help.
Eight calls in total were made from the classroom between 12.03pm and 12.50pm when the police finally went in.
We’re told they were waiting for keys to access the classroom, tactical equipment, and an order to go in.
But it sounds to me like what they were really waiting for was a collective infusion of bravery and duty like the kind Rob O’Neill and his fellow SEALs displayed in Abbottobad, Pakistan, 11 years ago.
And it never came.
Instead, these shameful excuses for ‘law enforcement’ did nothing as 19 children and two teachers were blown to pieces at close range by a maniac with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
The cowardly cops made a cordon to keep parents back. Initially. I thought that was necessary. Can’t have Moms running into the school willy-nilly endangering others and hampering the cops who are in there to make holes in the shooter. But I was waaaay wrong. The videos of parents pleading with law enforcement to go into the school. I identify with the emotion of each of the parents in this video:
You can feel their anger, desperation, fear and frustration.
The Uvalde cops are cowards. That’s clear. The residents claim it’s a small town where everyone knows everyone. Really, it has been almost a week and we are just now finding out that Creepy Massacre Kid was a bully (not bullied), who tortured animals and threatened to rape girls. Really? No one thought to snitch on Creepy Massacre Kid?
The Twitterverse had their collective knickers in a knot because the NRA was still going to hold its convention. I’m not a big fan of the NRA because they are more interested in selling life insurance than educating the public on safe weapons handling. Watching the protesters on Twitter scream about guns made me even more furious.z
Why do people think behavior like that is going to convince anyone about anything?
The “blood on your hands” mob are even more wrong than usual. What we need in this country are more armed and trained citizens. When Antifa burns down a city, what do the police do? Nada. When a gunman is murdering children, what do the cops do? Nothing. Imagine a few of those angry desperate moms in the video armed. Armed with a gun, a long rifle, a window breaker. The Creepy Massacre Kid would have assumed room temperature in a few seconds.
What the heck is this waiting for a master key? Take care of yourself, my people. Don’t rely on anyone else. Cops or government. Buy a gun and take a safety class.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he is going to “Do something”. It won’t help you, whatever he does.
No, Raising the Age of Gun Ownership Won’t Stop School Shootings
America is still reeling after the unspeakably tragic mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children dead. In the aftermath, we’re all understandably looking for answers. Yet many top Democrats are rallying around one gun control proposal that’s actually a false solution.
Their idea is simple: Raise the age to buy a gun to 21. Most school shooters are teenagers, the argument goes, and you can’t drink alcohol until age 21, so why can you buy an AR-15?
This idea is gaining training on the Left, with many Democratic politicians, progressive commentators, and even the White House throwing its weight behind the proposal.
But there are a few big reasons why this proposal is unrealistic, impractical, and ultimately unlikely to accomplish anything.
First, any law uniformly raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would face immediate constitutional challenges, and likely be stuck down as a violation of the Second Amendment. You don’t have to take my word for it: A federal appeals court just recently struck down a California law raising the age to purchase semiautomatic weapons to 21 as unconstitutional for exactly this reason, calling it a “severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home.”
Think about it like this: Whether you like it or not, the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, which differentiates this right from something like drinking alcohol. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to drink a Brewski with the boys.
And the age of legal adulthood is still 18. (Whether it should be is another question). It would obviously be unlawful and absurd to pass legislation saying that the constitutional right to free speech, for example, only kicks in at age 21. (although it would save us some headaches). As long as we consider 18-year-olds legal adults, we cannot legally or morally justify stripping them of their constitutional right to self-defense.
Any bill attempting to do so is likely doomed, especially with the current conservative Supreme Court. And any legislative solution to the rise in school shootings that won’t hold up in court isn’t a “solution” at all.
Yet even if these proposals did somehow survive constitutional scrutiny, I still don’t think raising the age to buy a gun would meaningfully reduce school shootings. Any 18, 19, or 20-year-old so disturbed that they decide to kill elementary school children is almost certainly going to be determined enough to circumvent an age limit, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Do high schoolers really struggle to get their hands on alcohol, after all?
It wouldn’t be particularly difficult for a determined killer to simply have someone purchase a firearm for them (like every teenager in America has done for booze). Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in the Columbine shootings. The killers were both under 18, yet simply had someone older buy the guns they used. In many other school shootings, the killers stole the guns from an older family member.
In short, raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would not help us meaningfully reduce the frequency of these atrocities, though it would strip millions of law-abiding young adults of their right to self-defense. This isn’t just a hypothetical disadvantage; according to the Institute for Medicine, guns are used in self-defense approximately 500,000 to 3 million times per year in the U.S.
Like everything, gun control has trade-offs. By leaving law-abiding people defenseless, it can also create its own victims.
What’s more, the misguided focus on age-based gun control pulls the national attention away from more promising solutions, like reforming the way the mass media covers mass shootings. Mass shooters crave the infamy that’s granted to them by our if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage of these atrocities, and the status quo encourages copycats—so much so that experts estimate that if we stopped plastering the names and faces of these villains and instead focused coverage on the victims, we could reduce mass shootings by up to 33 percent.
It bears repeating: We could potentially reduce mass shootings by up to one-third with simple media reforms. Unlike far-fetched and legally dubious gun control proposals, this kind of reform wouldn’t face such monumental political and constitutional hurdles.
Those who insist on trying to raise the age to buy a gun to 21 are almost certainly coming from a good place. But in reality, their efforts are worse than useless.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
The Lessons We Learned.. and Forgot.. About Defending Our Schools
We saw two young men kill innocent people this last month. We’ve seen mass murder before. Determined men and women studied the murder of innocent victims. It isn’t easy to look death in the face but it is dangerous to look away and pretend it couldn’t happen again. Any responsible adult should be haunted by what we could have done and yet chose not to do. These are a few of the lessons we learned from mass murders in the US and around the world.
We learned that time is critical. The mass murderer will kill several people during the first minute. Then, the attack slows down as victims run for cover and become harder to kill. The exception is if the murderer can trap his victims where he is unopposed and can kill at will. The sooner we stop him the better. Every second counts.
It’s a thought, but I’ve heard that more veterans and the retired than were deployed around the capitol would quickly volunteer and that would keep from having to activate the Guard and take those people away from their jobs that the economy needs.
If they can do this for show at the Capitol for six months, surely they can get one armed guard at each school. pic.twitter.com/0YRQLu16cS
— Maze (@mazemoore) May 25, 2022
BLUF
Meanwhile, our politicians and academics pit Americans against each other based on the color of their skin, while the media machine grants notoriety to cowardly killers whose names deserve to be forgotten. Add to that our social media-crazed culture’s obsession with a few seconds of fame at any expense, and it’s clear that the gun market isn’t what’s radically changed. We need to address the rot we’ve sown for our children to grow up in, and no amount of blaming firearms for our culture’s depravity is going to change that.
Guns Aren’t Radically Deadlier Than They Were 50 Years Ago, But Our Sick Culture Is.
Our culture has incubated a disdain for human life while preaching a gospel of indulging selfish urges, no matter how evil.
Various versions of the AR-15 are some of the popular firearms most relentlessly targeted by anti-gun lobbyists, with their semiautomatic capability (i.e., the ability to fire multiple rounds without manual reloading, while still requiring the pull of a trigger) blamed for the deadliness of many recent shootings. But Colt sold an AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle starting in 1964, 58 years ago.