Gun control

An absolutely ghoulish spectacle unrolled on YouTube yesterday, as disgraced former CNN Trump gadfly Jim Acosta “interviewed” teenager Joaquin Oliver. The problem is that Joaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018. This interview took place with an AI simulation of Joaquin. On what would have been Joaquin’s 25th birthday, his father, Manuel Oliver, released this Black Mirror monster into the world. To make matters worse for the AI simulation, it had to talk to Jim Acosta. On the one hand, the stream, as of this writing, has barely 6,000 views. The average seven-year-old Roblox streamer does better than that. However, the interview is so deeply disturbing, so bald-facedly manipulative, that it deserves scrutiny.

Forget closing the porous southern border: the Biden administration has decided instead to take aim at gun owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, by moving one step closer to closing the so-called “gun show loophole.” The “loophole,” as I’ve written before, refers to the federal law that originally prohibited people convicted of certain violent felonies from owning firearms. Over the years, the law has, unsurprisingly, been expanded, and by 1994, firearm buyers purchasing from a dealer (with a Federal Firearm License, or FFL) have been required first to receive permission from the government to do so via a federal background check.

Speaker Mike Johnson is extending a high-profile olive branch to one of his biggest intra-party foes of the day: Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Johnson made her one of the impeachment managers as the House hands the reins of the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas to a less-than-excited Senate. Just days ago, Greene was performatively threatening to oust Johnson hours before Congress headed into a multi-week recess. Now, she’s joining with a group of Republicans in asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to expeditiously schedule an impeachment hearing for Mayorkas. It’s not just Greene who is obviously being helped out by Johnson with this announcement.

On Sunday, at a mall in Indiana, a mass shooter's rampage was cut short after he was shot by a Good Guy with a Gun. Yet according to many on the progressive left, the Good Guy with a Gun doesn't exist: he's a myth. Therefore, in honor of the Good Samaritan in Indiana, Cockburn presents the top five articles that got it wrong about the Good Guy with a Gun. Time's obligatory post-Uvalde anti-gun article Time magazine posted a plain rebuttal to the Good Guy with a Gun argument after the Uvalde massacre. Time points out (fairly) all the “good guys with guns” who conveniently showed up at the last minute, i.e. the Uvalde police department and the Parkland security guard who hid when the shooting started. (But then doesn't that prove that citizens need to be able to defend themselves?

There’s a new federal gun law in the works and it's being heralded as a “bipartisan breakthrough agreement on gun violence.” I can’t even get past the first sentence without issuing an objection, your honor! Because the proposed gun control package is just more manipulative language aimed at eroding Second Amendment rights. “Gun violence” makes it sound as if the guns are the ones causing the violence. The same goes for “gun safety” — a term President Biden used in response to this proposed legislation, which will not make guns any safer or less violent. Guns are inanimate objects, neither violent nor safe. They don’t spontaneously combust. People do.

Following every tragic mass shooting, there is outrage directed at the firearms industry. The highly popular AR-15 platform is once more in the crosshairs after the recent killings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. The AR — erroneously described as an "assault weapon” — has been targeted by politicians and celebrities who think it should be banned. A House Democrat recently introduced a bill that would add a 1,000 percent sales tax to the purchase of the semi-automatic rifle. Misinformation rather than facts has been weaponized against the AR, which has been falsely described as a "high-powered" "weapon of war." Major General Paul Eaton, US Army (retired), even suggested in a series of tweets that the AR-15 has no place in civilian hands.

My fellow Americans, I speak to you tonight with a heavy heart. Earlier this week, an eighteen-year-old wielding an AR-15 opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing nineteen students and two teachers. I ask all of you to keep them and their families in your prayers. I’ll be doing the same. But I’m tired of giving speeches like this, and I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing them. The pattern is familiar by now. A gunman opens fire in a school or a grocery store or a movie theater or a church. We offer our thoughts and prayers. We spend a few news cycles arguing about gun control and mental health and school security. And then we all move on. Rinse and repeat.

President Joe Biden delivered a speech yesterday in response to the Uvalde school shooting that can be summed up in one sentence: “I don’t trust you.” There are at least 20 million so-called “assault rifles” in the US, and in proposing to ban these weapons, Biden and his supporters are purporting that the very presence of guns causes people to be violent — that in the absence of laws making it illegal for us to kill each other, we will all inevitably become mass shooters. An assault weapons ban and increased background checks are the only things, they say, capable of stopping us from becoming one of the demented gunmen who inflict tragedy and evil on our world.

Americans aged eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murderers, almost always male. School shootings get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm. There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. It’s kids shooting kids; whether because they are left out, bullied, teased or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids.

The recent killing of ten people in Buffalo has renewed calls for gun control legislation. Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, urged “sensible gun control.” One of the victims, the Washington Post noted in morbid irony, was herself an outspoken advocate for more gun control. Sadly, there’s nothing new about any of this. Again and again we learn of senseless mass shootings by white nationalists, the mentally deranged, and substance abusers. Again and again we desperately search for answers. And again and again we are both shocked and cynically unsurprised when another mass shooting occurs. Yet as much as we declare “never again,” we seem incapable of stopping mass shootings.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Snyder, currently polling second in the primary, is campaigning as an 'absolute' Trump supporter and has snagged high-profile endorsements from Ken Cuccinelli, Mark Morgan, Sarah Sanders and Kay Coles James. One of his top campaign issues is protecting the Second Amendment, reassuring Virginians that he 'believes that the Second Amendment is NOT optional'. But according to meeting minutes from Snyder's time serving on the College of William and Mary's Board of Visitors, he once voted for a weapons ban on campus. Then he tried to cover it up. Snyder was appointed to the W&M Board of Visitors (BOV) in 2011 by Republican governor Bob McDonnell.