The shooting at the high school in Santa Fe, Texas has brought out, once again, the instant gun control outrage brigade in full force. For example, senator Chris Murphy of my own state of Connecticut has been tweeting non-stop about the shooting and about the need for gun control. He claims to be outraged, but that's nothing new. If you follow Murphy on Twitter, you soon realize that being outraged is his natural state, or at least that is what he says.
But let's take a deeper look at what we know so far about Santa Fe.
1. The shooter wasn't on anyone's radar as a possible threat. This is not like the Parkland shooting where the shooter had been reported to local police 40 times and the police did nothing. The kid who shot up the Santa Fe school was just another student in the high school there. There was nothing that indicated that he might become a mass murderer.
2. The shooter didn't use anything that might be described as an assault weapon. He had a hand gun and a shotgun, nothing more in the way of firearms. He did build some bombs, but they never were set off. That means that an assault weapons' ban or a ban on bump stocks or large magazines would have had no effect of preventing this tragedy.
3. The guns the shooter used were not obtained by him legally. They weren't his weapons; they belonged to his father. The kid took them from his family home (it's not yet clear how he got them.) The father, however, had purchased the guns legally. He went through background checks and all the other stuff that is required for the purchase. This means that no strengthening of background checks or other preliminaries to a gun purchase would have made any difference in Santa Fe.
4. There are no proposed gun control measures, short of confiscating all guns, that would have had any chance at all of preventing the massacre in Santa Fe.
When you consider the actual facts, you realize that today's gun control debate is based upon a phony premise. Nothing under discussion would have made any difference for those kids in Santa Fe. The idea that "something has to be done" is not enough unless and until the people who chant that mantra tell the rest of us what exactly should be done. Then we need to have a rational and calm discussion, not the nonsense that passes for debate in which each side screams at the other and the facts get ignored.
But let's take a deeper look at what we know so far about Santa Fe.
1. The shooter wasn't on anyone's radar as a possible threat. This is not like the Parkland shooting where the shooter had been reported to local police 40 times and the police did nothing. The kid who shot up the Santa Fe school was just another student in the high school there. There was nothing that indicated that he might become a mass murderer.
2. The shooter didn't use anything that might be described as an assault weapon. He had a hand gun and a shotgun, nothing more in the way of firearms. He did build some bombs, but they never were set off. That means that an assault weapons' ban or a ban on bump stocks or large magazines would have had no effect of preventing this tragedy.
3. The guns the shooter used were not obtained by him legally. They weren't his weapons; they belonged to his father. The kid took them from his family home (it's not yet clear how he got them.) The father, however, had purchased the guns legally. He went through background checks and all the other stuff that is required for the purchase. This means that no strengthening of background checks or other preliminaries to a gun purchase would have made any difference in Santa Fe.
4. There are no proposed gun control measures, short of confiscating all guns, that would have had any chance at all of preventing the massacre in Santa Fe.
When you consider the actual facts, you realize that today's gun control debate is based upon a phony premise. Nothing under discussion would have made any difference for those kids in Santa Fe. The idea that "something has to be done" is not enough unless and until the people who chant that mantra tell the rest of us what exactly should be done. Then we need to have a rational and calm discussion, not the nonsense that passes for debate in which each side screams at the other and the facts get ignored.
No comments:
Post a Comment