{"id":81478,"date":"2022-05-26T15:31:46","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T20:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=81478"},"modified":"2022-05-26T15:31:46","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T20:31:46","slug":"81478","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=81478","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t Surrender To Do-Somethingism On Guns<\/a><\/p>\n

Law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman\u2019s actions.<\/em><\/p>\n

Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, literally begging Republicans to \u201ccompromise<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compromise on what exactly? Murphy has never once offered a single proposal that would have deterred any of these mass shooters. Literally minutes after his routine, Murphy was asked about the obvious mental illness prevalent among most of these shooters. \u201cSpare me the bullsh-t about mental illness,\u201d the Connecticut senator responded, \u201cripping<\/a>\u201d the GOP. \u201cWe don\u2019t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world.\u201d That\u2019s how serious he is about compromise.<\/p>\n

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited\u00a0serious<\/a>\u00a0anti-social behavior. All of them break a slew of existing laws. All of them have either obtained guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops\u2019 radar because he has threatened others or written insane, violent manifestos. In a\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of mass shootings from 2008 to 2017, the Secret Service found\u00a0that<\/a>\u00a0\u201c100 percent of perpetrators showed concerning behaviors, and in 77 percent of shootings, at least one person \u2013 most often a peer \u2013 knew about their plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than focusing on these tangible entry points for potentially useful legislation, instead of proposing ideas on better identifying shooters before they act, instead of thinking about how schools could be structurally safer, instead of debating the efficacy of putting more cops in schools \u2014 and none of these are panaceas, mind you \u2014 Senate Democrats were busy dunking on Republicans for failing to support bills that have absolutely\u00a0zero<\/em>\u00a0to do with mass shootings.<\/p>\n

Chuck Schumer planned to\u00a0introduce<\/a>\u00a0H.R. 8, an expanded background check bill, and H.R. 1446, a bill that would close the alleged \u201cCharleston Loophole\u201d (before he\u00a0realized<\/a>\u00a0it wouldn\u2019t be politically expedient.) \u201cAlleged\u201d because Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, got a clean background check, not because of any \u201cloophole,\u201d but because local prosecutors had failed to respond to the FBI\u2019s request for information. It was a case of human error, or negligence. So maybe Democrats should be promoting a \u201claw-enforcement-should-do-its-job\u201d bill. Because all \u201cuniversal\u201d background checks do is stop friends and families from gifting guns. Straw purchases are already illegal, as Schumer, Pelosi, and Murphy already know. And passing expanded background checks after a school shooting is tantamount to demanding stricter drivers tests after a hit and run.<\/p>\n

Democrats, obsessed with largely irrelevant issues like AR-15s and \u201cuniversal background checks,\u201d are largely living in the early 1990s. Joe Biden\u2019s address to the nation consisted of a litany of hackneyed talking points he\u2019s been regurgitating for decades now \u2014 including that transcendently stupid joke about\u00a0deer in Kevlar<\/a>. \u201cAs a nation, we have to ask, when in God\u2019s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?\u201d Biden said \u2014 again.<\/p>\n

Democrats love to hammer the strawman \u201cgun lobby\u201d because they don\u2019t want to openly attack tens of millions of gun owners. The NRA, whose power has significantly diminished over the past decades, could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn\u2019t alter gun policy one bit. Either another organization would emerge \u2014 probably a more rigid one \u2014 or gun owners and Second Amendment advocates (we\u2019re in the midst of the largest expansion of gun ownership\u00a0in American history<\/a>) would continue voting for politicians who oppose restrictions aimed at peaceful gun ownership.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Republicans will have to deal with a barrage of preposterous smears. \u201cThere is no such thing as being \u2018pro-life\u2019 while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place,\u201d Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez\u00a0tweeted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This was indicative of the sort of demented accusation thrown around these days. One suspects liberals who take to the internet to accuse Republicans of abetting infanticide aren\u2019t really interested in compromise. Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, who champions laws that empower people to terminate the lives of the viable unborn, I don\u2019t know of a single Republican who supports the gunning down of elementary school children.<\/p>\n

Indeed, law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman\u2019s actions. Nor is there any reason for them to surrender their right to self-defense so that Chris Murphy, who, evidenced in many of his comments, is only interested in incrementally limiting gun ownership. That\u2019s his right, of course. He should try and repeal the Second Amendment. Until then, however, Democrats interested in genuine compromise may want to offer realistic, productive, and\u00a0germane<\/em>\u00a0ideas, rather than using another horrific tragedy to dunk on their political opponents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t Surrender To Do-Somethingism On Guns Law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman\u2019s actions. Before we even knew how the killer of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had obtained his guns, Chris Murphy was engaging in his customary performative emotionalism on the Senate floor, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81479,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81478\/revisions\/81479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}