Every time there is a shooting, the knee-jerk response from the American authoritarian left is demands for new gun laws. Just yesterday (as of this post) a Minnesota Catholic church and school was subjected to a mass shooting by a trans woman with no prior criminal history. This was obviously a hate crime by someone under the influence of either mental illness or an evil ideology.
Despite the absence of any suggestions this person would have failed any form of background check, and the likelihood s/he passed a NICS check to buy their "arsenal," or the fact that Minnesota already has waiting periods and red flag laws, this is being treated as an excuse to demand new restrictions on peaceable people.Addressing the root problems we face is hard. Writing laws is easy. Threatening peaceable people with fines, jail, or even death is safer than confronting real criminals. However, dissent from these hoplophobic proposals is always framed as cowardice and selfishness by those demanding violence against innocents because someone else committed violence against innocents.
This story is also incredibly weird as details of the shooter's manifesto emerge. Texas guntuber and congressional candidate Brandon Herrera was named amidst the ramblings, and incoherent claims abound.
On a wider perspective, waters are muddied by bad analysis. "Gun violence" is a catch-all for everything from homicide to suicide to justifiable self-defense, and rates of "gun violence" are used to the exclusion of overall violent crime. Mass shootings are incredibly rare, but receive a lot of media attention. And speaking of media. I suspect most people get their views on violent crime and gun use from television and film instead of real data or experience.
In reality, crime has been plummeting steadily for about 35 years now, starting before the Clinton gun ban and continuing after it ended. No study has shown any direct effect on crime from that decade of arbitrary prohibition. Every time a state relaxes restrictions on concealed carry, the hoplophobes predict blood in the streets, but that violent crime trend still goes down. Correlation is not causation, but it does directly contradict the assumptions made by the gun ban advocates.
Minnesota has relatively strict gun laws, including:
- Permit requirement to buy a handgun (the shooter allegedly had a pistol)
- Permit requirement to buy an "assault-style weapon" a nonsense term based solely on cosmetics and ergonomics, not function (the shooter allegedly had some kind of rifle, although I haven't seen specifics on make/model yet) Update: it was apparently an AR-pattern rifle, so of course the hoplophobes have again demanded a ban
- A 30 day waiting period to buy handguns or "assault weapons" while such permit requests are investigated and approved by officials (longest in the nation)
- Standard federal NICS background checks for all commercial sales, and for handguns and any long gun with a pistol grip in a private sale (again, there is no evidence the shooter failed any checks, and nothing to indicate they would)
- Almost total prohibition of NFA (National Firearms Act) items, including short-barrelled rifles and shotguns, actual machine guns and assault rifles, or "destructive devices."
- Permit requirement for open or concealed carry of handguns (the shooter likely didn't ask for permission to carry a weapon to the crime scene)
Nonetheless, the problem is not that someone with violent intentions managed to succeed, no, the problem is that everyone else wasn't subjected to enough nanny state impositions.
Gun laws don't save lives. People free to stop violence do, though. This incident was tragic, but on the low end of mass shooting fatalities when police intervene. Two victims died, and eighteen are injured. When an armed citizen is free to stop a mass shooting, the death toll averages under 3, but when people must wait for the police, the average is far higher.
"But if we ban guns, no one can commit a mass shooting!"
Not true. Guns and ammunition can be manufactured or smuggled. Worse still, bombings like Oklahoma City or the Boston Marathon bombing could become popular mass murder means instead, or poisoning, or arson, or any number of other means. people who intend evil are not restrained by law. In case you hadn't noticed, murder is already illegal.
Authoritarians cannot let a tragedy go to waste, though. Armed citizens stopping crime is not news, but murder is. People with an agenda shape how facts are perceived by the masses, and used to nudge people into demanding more laws "for their own good," never mind the real gun violence behind every new act of legislation. Those who refuse to comply face fines, jail, or even death, but "they should have just done as they were told," say the victim-blaming state apologists.
And to top it all off, I can't help but notice the people complaining most about peaceable armed citizens not wanting to be subjected to arbitrary laws are also complaining loudest about Trump's police state expansion, and asking why we aren't shooting government officials yet. Make up your mind! Do you want gun violence, or not?
We need peace. Disarming innocents is not peace, but it fits the politician's syllogism, and that's as far as most want to go. Instead, think outside the State. Stop demanding politicians fix everything, and take some personal responsibility. And maybe take a basic hunter education course so you don't make a damn fool of yourself on social media talking about things you don't understand, OK?
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