Democrats for Assault Weapons!
An autopsy on police response to the Uvalde shooting makes the strongest 2A case the party of gun grabbing has ever accidentally proffered. And it’s glorious!
The Twitter account “Call to Activism” (@calltoactivism), which boasts nearly 1 million followers and describes itself as “Democrats working hard to save Democracy” while “successfully diminish[ing] MAGA on social media,” was not the first — nor close to only — left-wing advocacy group quick to trumpet the findings of a new postmortem examination of what went wrong in Uvalde, Texas, where a single gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle was able to kill 21 people, 19 of them children, even as Uvalde police staged outside a classroom door.
As “Call to Action” breathlessly reports:
“Our police are outgunned,” they worry. So naturally, law abiding citizens must once again surrender another chunk of their rights. So it goes.
In fact, as if reacting to an invisible clarion call from the ghost of FDR himself, Democrats and gun control zealots from Dianne Feinstein to Martina Navratilova rushed to social media to make their case that, as the Uvalde shooting clearly showed, a criminal with an AR-15 is such a menace to police — police in Uvalde having concluded that, as Zach Despart “reports”in the Texas Tribune, to take on such a killer would prove fruitless, so the best course of action was simply to clear the building and wait for him to stop slaughtering helpless children and teachers — that the obvious answer is to ban AR-15s, a semi-automatic rifle platform that, as Despart writes, is “less powerful than many rifles, such as those used to hunt deer or other large game [but] has significantly more power than handguns, firing a bullet that has nearly three times the energy of the larger round common in police pistols.” One of the officers involved described the shooter’s weapon as “a battle rifle.”
Leaving aside for the moment that Despart, and I suspect much of his Tribune target audience, seem stunned to learn that the longer barrel of a rifle, by way of that right-wing wizardry some ballistics nerds would call “physics”, will allow a fired projectile an advantage in energy over shorter-barreled pistols designed for closer quarters, what we’re supposed to be focused on here — and indeed, this seems to be the whole narrative tact the left immediately embraced and decided it prudent to wield as its newest anti-gun cudgel — is the fear the Uvalde police felt when asked to face off against a “weapon of war,” as Despart wrongly catalogues the civilian rifle.
As a very distraught Martina Navratilova, reacting to the Huffington Post’s gloss on the Tribune piece, asks 3-times harder than average, “One would think the police would then be in favor of an assault weapons ban???”
Well, one thing is for certain: these particular police seem to be. And they aren’t alone, post Columbine. So the question is — and this is implicit in the critique, and in the entire debate over gun control in toto — how much say should police have over which arms, protected under 2A and upheld in several legal rulings as in common use, we filthies can legally own?
One thing to consider, as we begin to muse on this question, is the foundational premise the anti-gunners want us to accept: the very police they wish to de-fund, and whom they’ve marched against, declared systemically racist, shot at, hit with their vehicles, and whose cruisers they’ve firebombed in the name of “social justice”, have an authority to determine the extent of our natural right to keep and bear arms. Further, an infringement on that right for private citizens would not obtain to law enforcement officers themselves — the idea being that LEOs should have superior firepower when confronting criminals (and, it follows, law-abiding citizens) with guns. And were we to ban certain semi-automatic rifles, police would have the advantage over those criminals who — while they may not hesitate to shoot up a school — will almost certainly abide by a bombastic paper edict declaring that their means of slaughter shall not be legally tolerated. I mean, they aren’t savages!
To suggest that the argument has begun in bad faith is a dazzling, glistening — nay, iridescent! — understatement; everyone on both sides of the gun control issue knows what is afoot, that gun control proponents are seizing on the next bit of agitprop they hope will help their cause and win over those who, because they have no interest in gun culture, are more willing than not to sacrifice rights they’ll most likely never take advantage of. With this understanding — that the argument is being raised to constrain the rights of legal gun owners, while pretending to protect the po-po — I think the anti-gunners make one of their biggest missteps yet.
As Despart tells us in his piece, an Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting report, released in July of 2022 — while “comprehensive and scathing” — “made no mention of the comments by law enforcement officers in interviews that illustrated trepidation about the AR-15.” Despart, showing a generosity to the officers I’m not certain he might elsewhere, lets this seeming omission over officer trepidation at the prospect of having to face a “weapon of war” linger over his story like a braunschweiger fart: why weren’t we told by the Texas House investigative committee, chaired by Republican Rep Dustin Burrows, the implication is, that the real issue police had was with the shooter’s rifle?
I can answer that. Because it’s bullshit. This was a case of cowardice, calculation, and self-preservation. Nothing more. And because of that, it is abundantly clear that self protection is the best, most reliable form of protection, and that our Founders and Framers, in their wisdom — and having come out of an armed revolution with a new country founded from their particular “insurrection” — knew that the right to self-protection was not only a natural right they sought to forever protect, but one essential for a free people to remain free.
One thing Despart does not detail in his long piece is what weaponry the Uvalde police had to combat the shooter and his AR-15. And that’s an omission, I’d suggest, with a rhetorical purpose and an editorial design. Because whether they had tactical shotguns, sidearms, or even fistfuls of loose rocks, the fact of the matter is the gunman — not the police, as Newtown and others would have you think — was overwhelmingly outgunned and out manned.
The shooter’s weapon operates on exactly the same principle as do the sidearms used by every police department in the country: one squeeze of the trigger equates to one cartridge struck, then another cycled into place. In each instance, this leads to a single bullet being fired — which is what differentiates civilian weapons from military weapons, which can fire in bursts of fully automatic engagement. And while it seems to be Despart’s aim, as a “journalist,” to detail the carnage a round at close range from an AR-15 into the body of a child can do, it is nevertheless true that, at close range, there are any number of pistol rounds that will do as much, if not more, damage, depending on the type of ammunition being fired. More than the energy of the round, the speed at which the shooter can acquire the sight picture, take aim, and take the shot on target is by far the more important variable at close quarters. Presumably, the police are trained to do this with professional competency; whereas the 18-year-old shooter most likely was not. And while an AR-15 magazine may hold more rounds than a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, eg., (although some 9mm duty pistols can hold up to 22 rounds + 1 in the chamber) it most certainly doesn’t hold more rounds than 3 or 4 9mm semi-automatic pistols deployed at once, which would include 3 or 4 presumably trained trigger fingers on 3 or 4 presumably well-calibrated triggers, all taking aim simultaneously at a single gunman with a single trigger finger and no training.
And then what do we make of the Uvalde S.W.A.T. team? Like the shooter, they, too have semi-automatic rifles and body armor; they also have ballistic shields. Along with the advantage in both numbers and in overall firepower. And yet we’re being told that the failure on the part of the entirety of the Uvalde law enforcement contingent to breach that door and save some of those victims was, their concern over the gunman’s “battle rifle”.
— meaning, we’re being asked to accept that, even when the police have an overwhelming advantage in numbers, ammunition, equipment, and training, the chance that one of them may be shot with a semi-automatic rifle is reason enough not only to stay back themselves, but to actively prevent unarmed parents who were willing to do so from rushing the building to try to save their children.
The Uvalde police on scene that day weren’t averse to using their authority. They threatened to arrest and in fact detained several of the parents who wanted to enter that building. So it wasn’t their power that they were willing to surrender. Instead, what they were willing to surrender — and this is the absolute crux of the matter — is the lives of children who were not their own, and whose attempted rescue may have led to their own injuries or death. They valued their own safety over the safety of those who they swore to protect and serve.
Making what happened in Uvalde one of the most compelling cases for 2A imaginable. Police officers armed with semi-automatic weapons, ballistic shields, body armor, and even AR-15-style rifles, failed to run toward the slaughter. When the “trained professionals” the left allows should be some of the very few provided legal access to such weapons decided, consciously, not to act based on the calculus of their own safety, they gave up any moral or professional authority to decide who should and should not be allowed to have access to the kind of gun used by the shooter in order to combat him.
Every police officer who responded that day had access to a semi-automatic weapon. Many even had AR-15s. So the obvious question is, why should law enforcement, but no one else, be given access to semi-automatic rifles if not to stop a shooter they had vastly outnumbered and outgunned?
The bottom line is this: They didn’t act because those children meant less to them than their own lives. And that is precisely why it is a potentially lethal mistake to outsource your own safety and that of your family solely to civil servants who have nothing more than an oath they may or may not uphold, at the moment of truth, to incentivize them to act on your behalf.
I like to tell people that, in my house, we are each our own militia. What the Uvalde police — along with the Democrats and their gun control advocates quick to latch on to this latest anti-gun narrative — have proven so magnificently here, is that it takes good guys with guns to prevent bad guys with guns from running amok in a country awash in guns, most of them held legally by people who commit almost none of the gun crime.
A badge, a duty weapon, and the ability to write parking citations or bully kids for loitering in front of a gas station Quick Stop, does not “a good guy with a gun” necessarily make. The audacity of Uvalde police to justify their own measured calculus by laying the blame on a single weapon they know to represent a cultural flashpoint and wielded by a single, untrained teenager — and for the left to use that cowardice as reason to take away weapons from those who would have been more than willing to rush into that building, to be those “good guys with guns” — is as abhorrent as it is cynical.
What people like Dianne Feinstein, Zach Despart, Newtown, et al., need know is that, in battle, any weapon you use is a “battle weapon.” And yes, guns — as Despart in his piece seems shocked by — are designed to kill humans (though not exclusively) fast and efficiently. Guns are tools, and tools have uses. Those uses are dependent upon the user, however.
The left has just bombarded us with hysterical proclamations showing that the police may not be willing, much less able, to protect us from criminals with rifles.
And I can live with that. But only provided the same politicians, celebrities, and advocates acknowledge that it is for that very reason that I be permitted to defend myself within the bounds of the law using my common-use firearm of choice.
Any other conclusion drawn from this amounts to your being told that, for the greater good, you may one day be compelled to sacrifice your life and your family’s lives on the altar of left wing neuroses, your faith placed squarely in the Deity of State and his secular law enforcement priesthood.
Call me a heretic. But that seems like bad religion to me.
Pass.