As is often the case with a shooting that breaks into the national debate, we already see celebrities, media elites, and others lining up to talk down to conservatives about how heartless they are being for not passing more gun laws.

To understand this apparent conservative intransigence on guns, you have to be aware of a few points:

1. Conservatives do not have any power in most large cities. Kansas City, for example, has had only Democrat mayors since 1930, save for one exception who left office back in 1991. Given these cities have completely rejected them politically, conservatives don’t feel particularly responsible for their plight.

2. Much of Hollywood hates conservatives and makes that clear. Being a conservative usually means making peace with the fact that most of the artists and other famous people you enjoy following despise your beliefs. Not all, to be sure, but a very large amount.

3. Conservative voters are often not particularly wealthy, with a number of rural towns struggling a lot in recent years. Drugs have become a major problem, as have deaths of despair more generally.

4. They’ve watched in horror as more and more cities have increasingly let criminals walk with little or no consequences. They also saw rioters go completely unpunished in 2020 because they were rioting for “the right reasons”.

5. They increasingly do not identify with the prevailing values of many large cities, which they see as immoral and irresponsible.

6. They’ve always had guns, and lots of them. They grew up with them and are comfortable around them. There can be problems with guns, namely as a tool for suicide. But murder with them is rare.

So poverty, drugs, resentment, and lots of guns. According to the gun control orthodoxy, this should equate to a bloodbath, right?

Wrong.

Take Missouri as an example. It had 629 gun-related homicides in 2022, a dismal number. But 474 of those were in just two major cities – St. Louis and Kansas City. Dozens of smaller counties did not have a single homicide of any kind, gun-related or otherwise.

If Kansas City and St. Louis combined to form their own state with their two million total people, they’d have a gun-related homicide rate of 23.7 per 100,000 people. The rest of Missouri, with a remaining population of over four million people? 3.7 per 100,000. About six times less.

So popular culture, famous athletes and the major media come demanding of these people that they have to curtail their own rights, because cities in which they have no power can’t get their shit together? When the leaders of those cities constantly talk down to them and despise them, no less?

Why would you expect these conservative-leaning populations to listen to your lectures? You’ve accepted none of their ideas, you’ve tried the same thing over and over for decades, and the resulting high violent crime is, to them, entirely predictable.

We’ve seen that it doesn’t have to be this way. Look at what Mayor Suarez, one of the few Republican big city mayors, has accomplished in Miami.

Contrary to racist views that success in big cities are limited to those that are very white, Miami is a very diverse city where white people make up less than half the population. It also had a horrifyingly violent past in relatively recent history (“The Year of Dangerous Days” by Nicholas Griffin is quite a good read on that topic). In 1980, homicides in the city reached an astonishing 220 dead.

Last year, Miami had 31 homicides. That’s the lowest in its history. In 1947, the first year they counted, it had 32, and the population back then was much lower than today. This is in a state that enacted constitutional carry recently too, for all those who warned that too would be a disaster. It hasn’t been a problem.

So quit lecturing conservatives, quit demanding others compromise their rights, and quit voting for the same failed leadership pushing the same trash ideologies of government dependence, tolerance for criminality, and failure.

The continued devastation seen in cities like Kansas City is the CHOICE of its voters. And until they make a different one, they have only themselves to blame.