Progressives, as The Wall Street Journal puts it,
believe that every human problem can be solved with a policy tweak. A ban here, a background check there, and, voila, no more mass shootings.
But what’s their limiting principle? What level of gun control would satisfy them? What fundamental concept would make them believe they’ve gone far enough with their tweaks, checks, bans on an American citizen’s access to the means of defending himself and his family? Besides their empty rhetoric of “I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t take all your guns away…,” I mean.
Some statistics would seem to give the lie to the Progressive-Democrats’ claims both about the ubiquitousness of gun violence and the purpose of these persons’ desired “controls.”
[A] 2015 Congressional Research Service report found that from 1999 to 2013 assault rifles were used in 27% of public mass shootings. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 killed 32 people with two handguns. FBI statistics show that of 15,070 homicides in 2016, 374 people or 3% were killed with rifles. Some 656 homicides were committed with “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet) and 1,604 with knives.
Guns just aren’t that important to the violence humans commit against each other. This, in turn, gives that lie to Progressive-Democrats’ claimed goals of merely wanting to “control” our firearms; our use of them is not out of control.
The Left, the Progressive-Democrats, don’t have a limiting principle. Their tweaks, checks, bans are only first steps. Their purpose throughout this “debate” is to disarm us completely, so that Government—one of the entities the 2nd Amendment seeks to enable us to defend ourselves against—will have the only guns.
Now, why might that be, exactly?
And this from a different angle on the Left’s desire to disarm us, from Larry O’Connor at Mediaite:
The US government is systemically racist and, through its inaction, seems willing to allow innocent, black citizens to be murdered by its police force. Furthermore, the judicial system is often rigged to protect the evil, racist officers by never punishing them for those murders. Additionally, the very same government is now in the hands of a fascist, incompetent criminal who, not only hates blacks and Latinos so much that he is willing to let the latter die of starvation and thirst [in Puerto Rico] rather than deliver humanitarian aid to them, but also calls the former [NFL player kneelers] “Sons of bitches” for protesting the racist country he oversees….
…if I really thought this country was so evil and so racist…I certainly wouldn’t want that evil, fascist, incompetent, and racist government to determine who could and could not arm themselves.
Why would a thinking American want a Government so evil to have the only guns?
The position on gun control of the Left generally and of the Progressive-Democratic Party in particular not only has no limiting principle, it makes no sense within itself.
h/t Grim’s Hall for the Mediaite link.