Sure as the gods made little green apples, Red Flag laws are back in the headlines.
For the people who think these are a great idea, I have one simple question:
How many people have been convicted of misusing a Red Flag law?
Whatever you want to call it — “Misusing”, “False filing”, “Obtaining under perjury”, whatever — a fraudulently-obtained Red Flag law denies the person it was obtained against a civil right. Civil rights that the Government should be bending over backwards to protect.
The first Red Flag law was passed in 1999. 23 years ago. People are people, and someone has blatantly lied to obtain a Red Flag order against someone.
Someone in the last 23 years has misused a Red Flag law to harass someone else. So. Show me their conviction for doing so.
I know about the time someone tried to get a Red Flag order against the cops, and that doesn’t count — some animals being more equal to other animals, and all that.
I’m talking about Joe Average having his civil rights taken away for a year with a misused Red Flag order. It has happened — we all know that it has happened — and I want to see the criminal record of the person who fraudulently deprived someone else of their Second Amendment right for a year.
Any claim of “Well, they’re so well checked that it’s never been abused” it complete and utter horse-puckey — I was in law enforcement for 26 years, that isn’t going to fly.
Absent a conviction, I will accept the name of a judge who rubber-stamped every Red Flag request to cross his desk, never turned one down, and was removed from office because of it.
If you don’t have that information, then your opinion on Red Flag laws means nothing; and you should be ignored.
Washington, D.C. – So-called “fact checkers” and Big Tech inadvertently validated Gun Owners of America’s concerns while targeting a tweet as disinformation for censorship.
Immediately following passage of the “Untraceable Firearms” section of H.R. 7910, Gun Owners of America tweeted that the bill would “criminalize disassembling, cleaning, and re-assembling your gun without a firearm manufacturer’s license.”
Despite labeling the tweet “false,” the Associated Press’ source presumes Gun Owners of America’s interpretation might be valid, acknowledges that the bill’s language is “confusing and ambiguous,” and instead claims that no one is likely to “ever be charged under this statute.”
The Supreme Court usually declares such laws “void for vagueness” under the 5th Amendment, but that hardly makes policy analyses of unconstitutionally vague legislation untrue!
In fact, GOA was merely pointing out that the definition of a “ghost gun” was so vague that it included many unserialized parts on guns in circulation today, like a slide on a handgun or an upper receiver on a rifle or shotgun.
With “assembling” a “ghost gun” criminalized by H.R. 7910, gun owners would no longer be able to disassemble their firearms, clean them, and “assembl[e]” them back into “a functional firearm” if even one unserialized part meets the new definition of a “ghost gun.” The fact-checkers claim that this only applies to manufacturers, but the bill states “it shall be unlawful for any person to manufacture…a ghost gun.”
That is why all of the Associated Press’ sources lean heavily on the qualifier “serialized.”
For example, the “AP’S ASSESSMENT” emphasized that the ban didn’t apply to “firearms [with] serial numbers” and a Giffords gun control activist emphasized that the law wouldn’t affect “a firearm that is serialized.” Again, they must have intentionally skipped over the other portion of the same bill that changes the current definition of parts that would be subject to serialization or otherwise be classified as “ghost guns.” Our research indicates that several parts of most modern firearms would meet this new definition (see examples mentioned above).
Therefore, if most guns today are made up of multiple unserialized “ghost gun” parts, as the bill proposes, then you won’t be able to clean your gun without violating the law unless you have a firearm manufacturer’s license.
Big picture: these anti-gun Democrats didn’t even do their own research, because when ATF tried the same definition change last year, GOA and our activists fought back, and ATF later acknowledged and backtracked [Page 24727] this change.
For the first time since 1994, it looks like we’re going to get gun control. In the wake of Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and Smithsburg, it was probably too much to hope that there wouldn’t be anything at all.
On Sunday, as Cam noted, a bipartisan committee announced they had reached a deal.
US campaigners have welcomed a potential cross-party deal on gun safety reforms but stressed the proposals do not go far enough.
“This is progress even if small,” said David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida.
Ex-lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords, injured in a 2011 shooting in Arizona, said it was an “important step forward”.
The plans include tougher checks for buyers under the age of 21 and cracking down on illegal gun purchases.
They were announced by a cross-party group of US senators on Sunday. Crucially, the proposals are supported by 10 Republicans, meaning they have the numbers to be voted into law.
President Joe Biden also said the plans were “steps in the right direction” but they fell far short of what he and many Democrats have been calling for.…
“It’s a great first step but that’s just what it is,” Mr Hogg told the BBC. “No single policy is going to stop every shooting but this policy could stop the next Parkland and that’s a good step.”
Except, the measures reported that are most likely to prevent the next Parkland have absolutely nothing to do with gun control.
Increased effort to address mental health and school security will do far, far more than including more information in the background check process would.
Now, to be fair, this could be a whole lot worse.
For most of us, this isn’t likely to create any kind of an issue and we’ll keep going about our lives like we always have. Part of the deal apparently calls for encouraging states to pass red flag laws, but since they can’t actually make them, I think it’s unlikely we’ll see too many take advantage of such “encouragement.”
However, it’s also clear that Democrats won’t be satisfied by this, either.
Sure, they reached a deal here, but it’s far from what they want and they don’t know how to accept that. When these measures fail to stop the next shooting, the 10 Republicans who backed this can expect to hear all about how they didn’t go far enough and it’s still all their fault.
I say this because much of this fails to actually address the root of mass shootings. In fact, it fails to even look for the root of mass shootings. It’s not guns, for crying out loud.
Yet something to think about is that now the pressure to accept more gun control will be greatest since these Republicans have signaled they’re willing to budge. They’re the ones who are going to be targeted to budge yet again.
This is far from over.
Democrats won’t be satisfied with what they’ve gotten and they will begin pressing for all these new regulations they want in the very near future. What just happened won’t even be acknowledged or, if it is, it’ll be labeled too little to make a difference.
Just like every other bit of gun control ever passed.
Some Republicans still have a spine
"Governor Tom Wolf today condemned Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee for refusing to move forward a package of commonsense bills that would help address the gun violence crisis facing Pennsylvania." https://t.co/elhtIcdFj8
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) June 13, 2022
With a new state gun law going into effect Monday, allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a license, some might think people are out buying guns.
Not so, says Daryl Upole, owner of Ohio Guns in Ashtabula, a federally licensed firearms dealer.
“Mostly people are concerned about gun control after the Texas shootings,” he said. “As far as the concealed handgun license (CHL), I’ve had no one buy a firearm because of that.”
Ohio joined its neighbors as a “permitless carry” state on March 14 when Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law Senate Bill 215. Under the new law, set to take effect Monday, adults who can lawfully own a firearm will be able to conceal carry a handgun without a permit or background checks.
“It’s important to note that under the new law, you can carry a concealed handgun, but you can’t buy a gun [at a federally licensed dealer] without a background check,” Upole said.
Sunday, a bipartisan group of Senators agreed to an expanded package of ‘common sense’ gun control measures. The Vichy Republican contingent consisted of Pat Toomey (PA), Susan Collins (ME), Lindsey Graham (SC), Thom Tillis (NC) and Bill Cassidy (LA) under the leadership, if I may be so bold as to use such a word, of John Cornyn (TX). My colleague Bonchie covered the deal in Republicans Prepare to Play the Sucker After ‘Gun Safety’ Bill Is Revealed. This is how he sums it up:
Here’s the thing. There is going to be another mass shooting. No matter how many laws we pass, evil people will get their hands on the tools necessary to commit evil acts. When that mass shooting occurs, Democrats are going to scream about how the last “gun safety” bill wasn’t enough and how we must “do something.” That “do something” will include confiscation and outright bans on common weaponry. By compromising now without laying a marker down they are willing to stand by, they are simply handing Democrats the leverage to take the whole pie the next time around.
The left-wing push to ban semiautomatic weapons is not going to end here. Republicans that don’t recognize that are being suckers.
Now Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has released more detail on what is included in the deal, and “suckers” hardly does the Republican participants credit for their duplicity.
NEWS: We have a deal. Today a bipartisan group of 20 Senators (10 D and 10 R) is announcing a breakthrough agreement on gun violence – the first in 30 years – that will save lives.
2/ Major funding to help states pass and implement crisis intervention orders (red flag laws) that will allow law enforcement to temporarily take dangerous weapons away from people who pose a danger to others or themselves.
3/ Billions in new funding for mental health and school safety, including money for the national build out of community mental health clinics.
4/ Close the “boyfriend loophole”, so that no domestic abuser – a spouse OR a serious dating partner – can buy a gun if they are convicted of abuse against their partner.
5/ First ever federal law against gun trafficking and straw purchasing. This will be a difference making tool to stop the flow of illegal guns into cities.
6/ Enhanced background check for under 21 gun buyers and a short pause to conduct the check. Young buyers can get the gun only after the enhanced check is completed.
7/ Clarification of the laws regarding who needs to register as a licensed gun dealer, to make sure all truly commercial sellers are doing background checks.
8/ Will this bill do everything we need to end our nation’s gun violence epidemic? No. But it’s real, meaningful progress. And it breaks a 30 year log jam, demonstrating that Democrats and Republicans can work together in a way that truly saves lives.
9/ So grateful to @JohnCornyn @kyrstensinema @SenThomTillis @SenToomey @Sen_JoeManchin @SenBlumenthal @SenatorCollins @LindseyGrahamSC @ChrisCoons @TeamHeinrich @BillCassidy and others for their amazing work to get us this far.
10/ Drafting this law and passing it through both chambers will not be easy. We have a long way before this gets to the President’s desk. But with your help and activism, we can get this done. This time, failure cannot be an option.
2/ Red Flag laws are a civil rights non-starter as far as I’m concerned. Giving a disgruntled neighbor, a deranged leftist relative, or a vindictive current or former “partner” the ability to have your weapons confiscated while you bear the burden of proving you are not dangerous is antithetical to our system of justice. Above and beyond the Kafkaesque process, the procedure is a sham. A judge will not deny a “Red Flag” order and risk that person killing someone with a firearm. They are never giving your firearms back for the same reason. This is simply a backdoor for anti-gun activists to harass and intimidate gun owners. Any Republican who votes for this is not worthy of our support.
3/ I’m not convinced “community mental health clinics” do very much other than provide a sinecure purple-haired transgenders with an MSW degree. Be that as it may, linking these clinics to a bill ostensibly designed to prevent school shootings means that schools will be pressured to refer students to the clinics for evaluation and treatment. If they don’t, their reason for existence will be revealed as a fraud (SPOILER ALERT: it is). Those mental health referrals will be made by the same people who teach Critical Race Theory, make your elementary school student experiment with “pronouns,” and groom them towards transgenderism and the remainder of the alphabet soup of perversions. If we want more “community mental health clinics,” then authorize them independent of any gun control law. By the way, mental health people are pretty adamant that mental health is not a factor in the overwhelming majority of shootings. The problem is Evil, not crazy.
4/ If you want to understand what “closing the boyfriend loophole” opens the door to, check out what goes on in Title IX sexual harassment/assault hearings in colleges. Without a cohabitation requirement, you are fair game for any woman you went out with one time who wants revenge. If you feel in danger, get a restraining order and stay the hell away from the person. If you can’t qualify for a restraining order, then maybe vindictiveness, not personal safety, is your goal.
5/ Straw purchases are already illegal. Gun trafficking, unless you have a Federal Firearms License, is illegal. Without seeing an actual proposal, my best guess is that this will end the private sale of weapons, the so-called “gun show loophole” that the anti-gunners have been after for years.
6/ Other than the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), I don’t know of any other systems available for background checks that do not involve field investigators. I suspect there is no such system, and this law will try to create any additional level of surveillance of American citizens. The problem with NICS continues to be incomplete and inaccurate information entered into the system. I am at a loss of what an “enhanced” background check would include that isn’t a restraining order, a felony conviction, or a civil commitment order. Just joking, those “community mental health centers” will feature prominently here. I also don’t know how you make a juvenile record available for “young” buyers without making it available to nearly everyone and why only “young” buyers would be subject to such an “enhanced” background check
7/ What constitutes a “licensed gun dealer” is damned clear. This is aimed at shutting down the private sale or gifting of firearms.
10/ Dude, you are in Congress. Failure is always an option.
This is all eyewash. Besides funds for hardening schools, the whole plan is an exercise in “doing something.” Literally, nothing in this proposed bill would have done any good in any major shooting. It wouldn’t even have an impact on Saturday night in Chicago or LA, which is where the focus should be for anyone serious about ending firearms deaths. I’d done playing this game. As Bonchie and I have pointed out, this is not an end state but a waypoint. This is just the anti-gun left getting Republicans to buy into the concept of silly measures that can’t work so that at some point in the future, the left can say we’ve tried everything, and they know there will be quisling Republicans to help them ban firearms.
Looks like standard operational unspecific jabberjawing to me
After days of negotiations that worried Second Amendment advocates and law-abiding firearm owners due to talk of sweeping new restrictions, it seems like — for now at least — the Republican members of the bipartisan working group held the line on the strictest proposals, though they didn’t stop Democrats on all fronts in the talks that made many conservatives scratch their heads.
The bipartisan group of Senators — led by Chris Murphy (D-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) — announced their proposal for legislation they seem to think has a chance of making it through their evenly-divided chamber.
In a joint statement, the senators said their plan will “protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country” while citing a duty they feel to “come together and get something done.” Never mind, apparently, that all the restrictive gun laws in Chicago and elsewhere haven’t protected residents.
The statement continued saying the agreement “increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons,” again, as if previous laws to keep guns out of criminals’ hands had worked. “We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense proposal into law,” the statement concludes. We’ll see.
The proposal includes providing “resources” — likely grant incentives — to states if they implement so-called “red flag laws.” It also includes investing taxpayer dollars in mental health services for families and in schools along with school safety resources to “to help institute safety measures in and around primary and secondary schools, support school violence prevention efforts and provide training to school personnel and students.” The proposal announcement also says legislators will seek to include an “enhanced review period” for firearm purchasers under 21 years old.
Perhaps notably — and showing Democrats did not get all the things they’ve called for in the wake of the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas — is a lack of their buzzword assault weapons ban, high capacity magazine restrictions, a federal red flag system, or an increase in the minimum age to purchase certain rifles.
To be clear, the lack of those items in the framework proposal does not mean Democrats won’t try to sneak in some version of them as an eventual piece of legislation is developed.
As WaPo previewed before the official announcement of the proposal, the inclusion of billions of federal dollars for school security programs and mental health care is probably the only thing the proposal has going for it with most Republicans.
Townhall reported last week that an armed school resource officer and secured doors kept an aggressive man from entering an elementary school filled with children. The SRO took the individual down with assistance from local law enforcement while most children inside the building were unaware that anything had happened outside. The training and protocol that worked there should be used for a framework, not gun-grabbing Democrats’ CNN talking points.
Throughout the negotiations, Republicans involved had tried to assuage concerns from firearm owners and gun safety advocates. Sen. Cornyn said that the forthcoming deal was “not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens” but “about ensuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.” Yet several of the pieces of the framework seem to include new restrictions, albeit lesser than a blanket ban on “assault weapons” or magazines.
And while the group may have reached a tentative agreement, they’re only a small group of the U.S. Senate — and several Republicans in the crew such as Susan Collins (ME) and Mitt Romney (UT) are not exactly known as standard bearers for the GOP. At least 60 senators in all would be needed to support any resulting legislation in order to overcome a potential legislative filibuster.
As we’ve learned before, a statement of agreement between a small group of senators is anything but a done deal. We’ve also learned that what might seem to be a workable legislative framework can turn into a Frankenstein’s monster of horrible policies as Democrats scheme to use the bipartisan cover of squishy Republicans to ultimately get their way.
The best thing for any Senate Republican to do at this point is walk away from the table and declare opposition over anything even remotely concerning in the tentative agreement — the incentive for red flag laws or the enhanced review for under-21 purchasers, for example — or legislation as it ends up being written.
There’s less than five months until the midterms, Democrats need at least ten Republicans to even move a bill to a vote, and there’s no reason for Republicans to cave on an issue as critical as Americans’ Second Amendment freedoms just to look like they’re playing nice. Democrats would never do the same if they were in the minority, and there are better, more effective, less freedom-depriving options available to respond to tragedies like the one in Uvalde. Harden schools, fund resource officers, train willing staff, and work to remedy the myriad failures of government that are discovered in the wake of such tragedies.
And when they come back into session, they’ll probably conveniently let it die with some bland boilerplate statements.
Senators have wrapped up their work and left Washington, D.C., without reaching a deal on gun violence legislation, disappointing Democrats who had hoped to issue a joint statement with Republicans on a framework.
Democrats say they are “very close” to an agreement with Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the lead Republican negotiator, but Democratic and Republican staff still need to hammer out differences over language, according to Senate negotiators.
Senate sources say that Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), the lead Democratic negotiator, was “itching” to put out a joint statement with Cornyn before lawmakers left town but that Cornyn declined to sign on to any public statement until there’s an agreement on the language of the core proposals.
“There’s not an agreement until we agree on everything,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday afternoon. “We’ve narrowed the issues considerably.”
Cornyn said the group had hoped to release a joint statement by week’s end but isn’t there yet.
“We were hopeful there might be something we could do today, but we have this remaining issue we need to resolve,” he said.
Sources familiar with the negotiations said Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, doesn’t want to sign off on any framework until the language of the core provisions are finalized.
“How outrageous is that?” Cornyn quipped about his insistence on knowing the details of the agreement before endorsing a framework for the legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he wanted a deal by the end of this week and has come under pressure from progressives to force a Senate vote on gun control legislation if Republicans don’t agree to a compromise bill soon.
Schumer received a briefing from Murphy on Thursday afternoon, telling reporters afterward that the bipartisan group is making good progress and that he hopes to get something from the group soon.
The four core negotiators — Cornyn, Murphy, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — are scheduled to hold a virtual meeting to continue the talks Friday afternoon.
They are looking for a deal that can bring along 10 Republican votes to overcome a filibuster in the 50-50 Senate. Every Democrat is expected to vote for the legislation.
The Republicans in the negotiating group also include Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.).
If those four plus Cornyn and Tillis agree to vote “yes,” Democrats would still need to round up four more Republicans to overcome the 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster.
Senior Democrats briefed on the negotiations say the two sides are “very close” to a deal and expect to see an agreement by sometime next week.
“I think we are very close,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “We have good vibrations. I think Schumer did the right thing by focusing on a date to complete the negotiations.”
Schumer said soon after a gunman killed 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, that he would give Republicans only a short amount of time to work out compromise legislation before he would begin to force them on gun control proposals.
Republicans want to create tax incentives for the sale of safe storage equipment, while Democrats want to also add mandates for safe storage.
Another tricky issue is how to handle people who make a business of selling firearms online but are not required to conduct background checks because they don’t hold federal firearm licenses. Gun control advocates view this as a loophole in the law requiring firearm dealers to conduct background checks.
Cornyn on Thursday said significant progress has been made since then on classifying people who make a business of selling firearms, noting that he and Murphy have worked on the issue for more than a year.
Another potential landmine in the negotiations is a proposal to encourage states to set up red flag laws to remove firearms from people deemed a danger to the community.
Marshall on Thursday said he doesn’t “see how any red flag [law] passes” and called it a “poison pill.”
“I don’t think the red flags address the real issue,” he said. “I think it could sure be abused. I think it’s an infringement on the Second Amendment.”
Daines said he would oppose using taxpayer money to give states incentives to establish red flag laws.
Nineteen states and the District of Columbia already have such laws on the books.
“What hasn’t been talked about a lot is the school resource officer at Uvalde was not at his post. Why are we not talking more about that? Imagine for a moment if you had a couple of Capitol police officers who weren’t at their post and someone came in the Capitol. There would be a lot of discussion about what do we do to keep the security hardened around the Capitol,” he said.
Blumenthal, who has negotiated a red flag law with Graham, however, said members of the bipartisan group should be able to reach agreement on that issue.
“We’re going to keep working on language. I’m enormously encouraged having worked on this for quite a few years,” he said of red flag legislation.
Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator, declined to say whether he could support a package that doesn’t include incentives for states to set up red flag laws.
“I’m not drawing any lines in the sand at this point,” he said, though he added a red flag law “could have made a difference in Uvalde.”
Another senseless act of violence against children and anti-gun groups are blaming gun advocates for this violence, but the answer could be closer to home.
Gun control has been with us since 1968 and since then a myriad of gun laws has emerged. Clearly, they haven’t worked. Totally ignored are the shooters who have been from broken homes, isolated, prone to other types of violence, had interactions with police and been active on social media. Their behavior was excused or ignored.
The politicians say it’s easy to get a gun, but if the system was effective and criminals prosecuted, it could be more of a deterrent to block sales to potential shooters. While enhanced background checks may sound good, if the local authority doesn’t inform the investigating agency, and in most cases they don’t, then a shooter will be able to get guns. Reporting agencies aren’t obligated to inform them.
If all factors are considered, then it is not a gun problem, and a new gun law will not fix it. The legal gun owner is not the problem, and within the context of self-defense they prevent potential victims in defense of self or others, often without shots fired. The gun-owning public has grown and includes women, minorities and prior gun control advocates due to violent criminals having gun charges disappear in plea bargaining, as well as being released before the ink is dry on the booking form.
The danger of being a victim has increased because of an agenda that puts criminals ahead of the public’s safety. Unfortunately, many mass shootings are ignored by the media such as in Chicago or New York, but gang violence has become commonplace and non-newsworthy except to those affected in the inner cities. Poor minorities tend to bear the brunt of ineffective political policies.
President Joe Biden has suggested that the Second Amendment is “not absolute” and if so, then freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press are also “not absolute.”
William Aherin, Southampton
This is not ‘journalism’. This is theater. And it’s deceitful theater at that.
Can you count how many lies were told?
Left-leaning media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post claim there have been hundreds of mass shootings this year alone. The real numbers are much lower.
The figures they use are based on data from the Gun Violence Archive which currently clocks the number of mass shootings in 2022 at 251, on par with the number of shootings on their record this time last year.
The FBI does not have numbers yet for 2022, but in 2021 they reported 61 active shooter incidents. Only 12 of those were considered mass killings according to the federal definition which says three or more deaths constitute a mass killing. The GVA, on the other hand, reported 692 mass shootings in 2021. That’s more than 11 times greater than the FBI’s official recorded number.
The culprit of the difference between the two agencies’ numbers is that the FBI gathers data on active shooter incidents and the GVA counts mass shootings. The two terms have slightly different definitions. However, the FBI’s active shooter data contains comparable information to the GVA’s mass shooting data.
In fact, the difference between how the FBI defines an active shooter and how the GVA defines a mass shooting reveals how the larger numbers provided by the GVA’s data collection criteria can be twisted by the left to spread fear and further their gun-grabbing agenda.
The GVA says a mass shooting occurs when there are “Four or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” They also note the way they collect their mass shooting information (via GVA):
GVA uses a purely statistical threshold to define mass shooting based ONLY on the numeric value of 4 or more shot or killed, not including the shooter. GVA does not parse the definition to remove any subcategory of shooting. To that end we don’t exclude, set apart, caveat, or differentiate victims based upon the circumstances in which they were shot.
GVA believes that equal importance is given to the counting of those injured as well as killed in a mass shooting incident.
The FBI does not define Mass Shooting in any form. They do define Mass Killing but that includes all forms of weapon, not just guns.
In that, the criteria are simple…if four or more people are shot or killed in a single incident, not including the shooter, that incident is categorized as a mass shooting based purely on that numerical threshold.
Note that the GVA definition of a mass shooting does not have a threshold number of deaths required to define an incident of gun violence as a mass shooting.
The FBI defines an active shooter as follows (via FBI):
One or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.
The FBI also looks at the inclusion of the following features to determine whether or not an incident is an active shooter event (via FBI):
Shootings in public places, shootings occurring at more than one location, shootings where the shooter’s actions were not the result of another criminal act, shootings resulting in a mass killing, shootings indicating apparent spontaneity by the shooter, shootings where the shooter appeared to methodically search for potential victims, shootings that appeared focused on injury to people, not buildings or objects.
In their reported numbers of active shooter incidents, the FBI does not include incidents of gun violence that result from the following (via FBI):
Self defense, gang violence, drug violence, contained residential or domestic disputes, controlled barricade/hostage situations, crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing criminal act, an action that appeared not to have put other people in peril.
These criteria make the FBI’s definition of an active shooter much more exclusive. Because of the GVA’s broad definition of a mass shooting, they would count incidents fitting the above descriptions as mass shootings so long as four or more people were injured or killed.
In other words, if someone was attacked by multiple criminals and shot the attackers out of self defense, the GVA would consider it a mass shooting. If four or more people were shot in an incident of gang violence, the GVA would consider it a mass shooting, and so on.
These sorts of shootings are no less significant, but by labeling every incident of gun violence affecting four or more people a “mass shooting,” the Left makes it sound like acts of violence on the same scale as Uvalde or Buffalo happen every day.
The term mass shooting has strong connotations that are not applicable to most of the shootings in the GVA’s numbers. As Katie wrote, referring to something as a mass shooting implies a lot more than the number of people shot.
All violent crime should be cause for concern and the GVA’s numbers reveal violence is no small issue in the United States. But untruthfully referring to so many of these incidents of violent crime as mass shootings is just a fear-mongering tactic used by the Left to push their agenda of greater government control over law abiding citizens.
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.
Home Defender by Oleg Volk, image used with permission
This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9/11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.
In this case, the “something” is gun control. In Canada—where no attack even occurred—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the introduction of legislation that would freeze handgun ownership across the country.
“What this means is that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” Trudeau said in a press conference.
In the United States, the rhetoric has tended to be more heated but also vague, though some specific proposals have emerged.
Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an all-out ban of “assault weapons.”
“We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban,” Harris told reporters in Buffalo after attending the funeral of a victim.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden, while speaking from the White House before a candlelit backdrop, called on Congress to pass new gun control legislation, including a ban on assault weapons.
“How much more carnage are we willing to accept?” Biden asked.
The 1994 ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban: A Brief History
There are numerous problems with this proposal, starting with the sticky question of defining what an “assault weapon” is.
Assault rifles, which by definition are capable of selective fire, are already banned under the National Firearms Act of 1934. The vague phrase “assault weapon” is basically a tautology—by definition, any weapon can be used to assault someone—and virtually useless. The term might be effective politically, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the guns politicians choose to define as “assault weapons” typically “are no more dangerous than others that are not specified.”
We know this because the US had a ban on “assault weapons” as recently as 2004, something gun control supporters recently pointed out on Twitter.
“We had an assault weapon ban for 10 years: 1994-2004,” said Dr. Joanne Freeman, a historian at Yale University. “The world didn’t end. People kept their (other) guns. They bought new guns. It was hardly an attack on gun ownership.”
Freeman is right that the ban lasted a decade before expiring on September 13, 2004. She’s also right that the world “didn’t end” and Americans continued to use and purchase other types of firearms.
What Freeman didn’t bring up was the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the government’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Nearly two decades ago the Department of Justice funded a study to analyze this very topic, and it concluded that the assault weapon prohibition had “mixed” results.
Researchers noted there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms classified as assault weapons, but noted “the decline in AW use was offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns.”
In other words, there was a decline in crimes committed with firearms that were banned, but the drop was replaced by crimes committed with other types of firearms that were not banned.
