Every time some mass murder happens, someone will invariably call for restricting the rights of those who had nothing to do with what happened. The argument, at least as presented, is that if we had more gun control then the killers couldn’t have gotten the kind of guns they used and if they couldn’t have gotten those, then the murders wouldn’t have happened.
It involves some very selective memories to hold onto that thinking, of course, but here we are.
And a lot of Republican lawmakers seem hesitant to punch back at these calls out of concern for seeming callous or insensitive.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, however, summed it up perfectly on Newsmax recently, though.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., argued against the need for more gun control laws Wednesday during a recent interview on Newsmax, stating that the real problem lies in “idiot control” following a tragic school shooting in Georgia that left four people dead.
In light of a tragic school shooting in Georgia that claimed the lives of four people, Kennedy appeared on “The Record With Greta Van Susteren” to express his opposition to the possibility of liberal cries for new gun control legislation. Kennedy said that the U.S. does not need more laws regulating firearms but instead must focus on addressing those who abuse their rights under the Second Amendment.
“It’s horrible. We’ve had a number of mass shootings this year,” Kennedy said. “I don’t think the answer is more laws. We’ve got hundreds, maybe thousands of gun control laws on the books. I don’t think we need more gun control. What we need, obviously, in my opinion, is more idiot control.”
Kennedy went on to explain the difficulty of managing individuals who act out in violent ways, stating that it is almost impossible to control people who are mentally unstable or inherently evil in such a large country.
“I don’t know how to control people who are sick or just evil in a free country as big as the United States of America, over 300 million people,” he said. “You can just do the best you can.”
Now, “idiot control” isn’t a serious policy proposal, but it touches on where the problem really lies. It’s a people issue, not a gun issue.
If you take away every avenue for obtaining a gun–something that’s impossible, by the way–then you simply make the violent look elsewhere for ways to kill people. In 2016, a terrorist used a truck to kill 86 innocent people. That’s more people killed than at the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas where the killer had AR-15s equipped with evil bump stocks.
By focusing on the guns, you’re ignoring that the common denominator in all mass murders is the mass murderer. That’s where we need to devote our efforts. That’s who we need to be addressing.
It’s not an answer to take away one method of mass murder and just pretend that mass killings of other sorts are perfectly acceptable. I say this as someone who has felt the loss from a mass shooting. I’ve been there, but I wouldn’t have felt better if they’d been killed in a truck attack or a mass stabbing. The problem then was not the tool but the tool using it.
That’s the problem now and what the problem will be tomorrow.
