Guns

Cockburn doesn’t leave the swampy bounds of the District too often, but he has now and then been tempted by a trip to Colorado’s Western Slope, where, until last Sunday, Representative Lauren Boebert ran a restaurant in the town of Rifle. Every waitress who worked there open-carried a gun. Cockburn learned of this Second Amendment-themed eatery through a video his colleague Teresa Mull produced back when Boebert was just a gun and burger-slinging small business owner. Now, eight years later, Shooters Grill has closed. According to the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Boebert was shocked to learn that her new landlord would not be renewing her restaurant’s lease: Boebert said the letter came as a shock.

Now that the horror of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas has begun to ebb away, as it always does, it is easy to think that things have returned to normal. And in America, they certainly have returned to normal. That is to say, the mass shootings continue, at the rate of about 11 a week, with a total of around 300 so far this year. As things stand, America is on course for its deadliest year of gun violence ever (equalling last year). Here are a few details of just some of these slayings. At the beginning of this June, an angry patient in Tulsa, Oklahoma shot dead his surgeon, Preston Phillips, then shot dead another doctor, plus a receptionist and a bystander – after he blamed one of the physicians for causing him pain from a recent surgery.

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.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest gun control legislation would restrict the sale and trading of many handguns. But it also does something else: it includes a substantial ban on toy guns and other functioning replicas, such as airsoft guns. This is an ignorant display of power, and far more petty than it is precautionary. If the government can control pseudo-guns, then what is safe from its interference? The actual text of the law itself states under the criminal code that (emphasis added): For the purposes of sections 99 to 101, 103 to 107 and 117.‍03, a firearm is deemed to be a prohibited device if...the firearm is designed or intended to exactly resemble, or to resemble with near precision, a firearm...

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 calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

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.

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.

SEATTLE — From Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to the Supreme Court’s late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many Americans have tried to address inequality in the nation’s justice system. Now Washington State’s part-time legislators believe they have discovered a new way. Later in January, Washington’s state assembly will debate House Bill 1692. If passed, the law would significantly reduce the criminal penalties for the drive-by shootings that have become something of a boom industry here in the Northwest, where violent assaults are up 80 percent on five years ago. It would do so by prohibiting state prosecutors from adding the word “aggravated” to any murder charge involving a perpetrator in a moving vehicle.

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.