I still remember the day the news broke about the Sandy Hook shooting. For some reason, I was going to my dad’s to work. My baby daughter was playing on the floor playing when I heard the news. I changed the channel to see what was going on.
I still resent the fact that I knew someone, somewhere was already pushing gun control. Children, little more than babies themselves, had been murdered and all some people could do is figure out how to take advantage of the tragedy to push their anti-gun agenda.
11 years have passed since that morning. My daughter is now a middle schooler, no long playing on the floor like that.
And people are still using it to push gun control.
Eleven years after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Democratic leaders Thursday called on Congress to expand gun legislation.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke outside the U.S. Capitol, recalling how the massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., “shocked the conscience of our nation.”
Yet the violence continues. Jeffries said there have been 635 mass shootings and more than 40,000 gun deaths in the United States this year, calling it “unacceptable,” “unconscionable” and “un-American.”
Jeffries thanked members of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force for their work over the years and condemned a “do-nothing Republican Congress” for not addressing gun violence before it left for the holiday break
The problem is that there’s only one thing Jeffries thinks of as addressing gun violence, and that’s gun control. Literally no other solution would matter to him and we all know it.
Biden also issued a statement about the anniversary, also pushing the same narrative.
First, there haven’t been 635 mass shootings. There have been a couple dozen. There have also been gang shootouts, drug deal hits, and other violent crime across the nation, often as a result of various progressive policies that basically install revolving doors in our jail cells. They also involved illegally obtained firearms, meaning gun control isn’t going to do jack to stop those particular shootings.
Further, those 40,000 “gun deaths” include an awful lot of suicides.
Actual mass shootings aren’t anywhere near as high. Stop using the Gun Violence Archive to make the problem sound worse. You just devalue the real mass shootings that way.
Second, let’s remember the facts of Sandy Hook for a moment.
This is a kid who couldn’t buy his own gun, so he murdered his own mother so he could take her lawfully owned rifle. He then took that rifle to a gun-free zone where there would be absolutely no resistance to his plans and gunned down 20 children and six adults.
What gun control would have really prevented that?
An assault weapon ban might have made it so he couldn’t take an AR-15 from his murdered mother, but the worst school shooting on American soil is still the Virginia Tech shooting, where the killer had handguns. There’s little doubt this monster could have used one of those–and I have little doubt his mother had those in that gun safe–and killed just as many people.
And that is the best case scenario for gun control here. It might have shifted him to a different weapon.
But the damaged, warped mind that could conceive of killing so many children was still there, still plotting and planning.
Nothing that anti-gunners have proposed would stop such an attack. Nothing at all. That’s because they can’t look beyond gun control to see that the real universal factor in these attacks are the monsters that perpetrate them.
Every so often, there’s another mass shooting. I see and hear about it and I want to just feel sorrow for the loss of life. Yet still I know that out there, someone somewhere is almost smiling because this is the chance to push gun control.
And it disgusts me.
