This exploitation of the tragedy is as predictable as it is dishonest and irresponsible:
- The shooter, who was nuts, had a prior criminal conviction and should not have been able to acquire a firearm. So again, as in so many of these episodes, it wasn’t the law that was the problem, it was the human and organizational incompetence in enforcing the law.
- President Biden, in his mastery of fatuousness and ability to issue empty pronouncements, said that these kinds of events “happen too often.” Gee, Joe, what would be “just often enough”? Are there any tragedies that only happen the right number of times? A guy in a U-Haul truck just ran amuck in New York City, running down pedestrians. That’s never happened before—was once “too much”? Should we have back-ground checks on truck rentals?
- Some Michigan House member—it doesn’t matter which, I’m sure her demagoguery is fungible—said she was furious that law-makers couldn’t or wouldn’t “do something” to prevent such shootings. Do something. Every time, the same stock, meaningless demand. When pressed on what “something” would be, the answer is inevitably something that would violate the Second Amendment, a law that is already on the books, or “something” that wouldn’t have stopped the shooting that prompted the rant.
- The NBC newscaster I was listening to concluded from the fact that the shooter couldn’t legally own a gun that the problem was “too many guns.” She did not enlighten us about how, short of armed gun confiscation, “too many” could be whittled down to “just enough.” [I checked: It was Rep. Elissa Slotkin.]
Ethics Alarms 
For those of you scoring at home, one of the victims was black, two were white. The shooter is black. Calling Mr. Crump and Reverend Sharpton. Have at it, boys.
“A guy in a U-Haul truck just ran amuck in New York City, running down pedestrians. That’s never happened before—was once “too much”? Should we have back-ground checks on truck rentals?”
I’m sorry to say it did, on Halloween 2017, when an upstanding immigrant and adherent of the Religion of Peace decided he was going to use a truck to wage jihad on whoever he could nail, since renting a truck was easier than getting a gun or building and planting a bomb. He was just found guilty in Federal court of a slew of charges, including some capital ones, and the U.S. Attorney’s office IS asking for the death penalty. As a sign of just how weak their hand is, his public defenders are pointing to the fact that his family was from Uzbekistan and two of his victims were from Belgium and Argentina, none of which have the death penalty, to which the appropriate response is “so what?” I for one hope he fries.
As for the question of guns, I think my brother said it best when he said that in an epi of Law and Order involving a shooting, Michael Moriarty’s Ben Stone would say, “Why are there so many guns in this city?” while Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy would say, “You shot him HOW many times?”
I was going to make this exact point. The Muslim “Truck of Peace” was a meme for a multi-year stint because it was happening so frequently and I’m pretty sure there more than one attack in New York.
“The NBC newscaster… concluded… that the problem was ‘too many guns.’”
By the standard of guns per capita, my house should be one of the most dangerous places on earth. I would venture to say the same is likely true for my community and my county. Chock full of guns, but a dearth of gun violence. How can that be?
Shhhhhh! Don’t tell anyone that, statistically speaking, the percentage of gun violence is minuscule compared to the number of guns owned or possessed in this country.
jvb
My ARs and pistol braces are apparently not living up to their very special potential for havoc. Maybe it’s their lack of opposable thumbs.
Never forget this.
The same side that accused cops of habitually hunting down and gunning down unarmed Black men, the same side that the criminal justice system is systemically racist…
…is the same side that wants stricter gun control laws to be enforced by these very same cops in this very same system?
Apparently these klansman cops morph into freedom riders when they are enforcing gun control laws.
It was a point that I made back in August of 2017.
https://groups.google.com/g/soc.culture.israel/c/k4OvsDOxGlM/m/gdo8uXL1BQAJ
I knew I’d heard that somewhere before.
The current arc of useless gun control efforts seems to have started with responses to the early-mid 60’s spate of assassinations and social unrest. It was decided then, for example, that curbing mail-order purchases of old military surplus bolt-action rifles would be an effective policy in a time when anyone with a few $20s in his pocket could buy a brand new rifle at his local Sears or Western Auto. The pattern since has been for advocates to cling to the fiction that just one one more magic law or regulation, that burdens only the sane and law-abiding, will somehow be that elusive one that cures the violence largely perpetrated by the villains and lunatics they otherwise coddle.
A few years back, former Everytown (Bloomberg’s Astroturf organization) Executive Director, Mark Glaze, in a fit of accidental candor rhetorically asked “Is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting? Sure it’s a challenge in this issue.” Good to know it’s just a challenging messaging problem rather than a failure of “common sense gun regulations”.
The “too many guns” is a current favored argument, and as uselessly illogical as most of its predecessors. Has there been a sudden plague of octopeople who can use more than one or two firearms at a time? Are middle-class suburbs in Texas or Alabama, with a majority of gun-owning households, awash in shootings? Could it instead be that outsized everyday death counts are more of an issue in democrat-run hell-holes with every firearms restriction imaginable put in place, and every firearm illegally obtained, by some in their fatherless democrat-voter demographics who live and idolize a violent and dysfunctional sub-culture? Is it possible that even statistically rare events in some less hardware-restrictive areas are more related to a tolerance for criminals and crazies than any actual ratio of gun ownership? No, no, there can’t possibly be any correlations there; give us a new “assault weapons” ban, Joe. That’s the ticket!
Willem Reese wrote, “…tolerance for criminals and crazies…”
This is a HUGE problem, especially in urban areas, where social justice warriors have brainwashed “the system” into tolerating that which should not be tolerated thus enabling those that should not be enabled. This tolerance and enabling begins with tolerating extremely bad behaviors from children in our public school systems without adequate correction all the way up to our criminal justice system tolerating and enabling criminal behaviors without adequate correction.
Something that has been coming to the forefront of the firearm debate for a while is that gun control advocates and 2nd Amendment advocates actually agree on a very critical point in the firearm debate and that point is that people that are mentally unstable (crazy people) shouldn’t have firearms; however, the underlying problem is that there is a significant difference in who gun control advocates and 2nd Amendment advocates think are mentally unstable.
Here is a summary of the kinds of things I’ve been hearing from gun control advocates…
After some reflection on what I’ve been hearing, I’ve come to the conclusion that hive-minded gun control advocates believe that anyone that wants a firearm is mentally unstable. It appears to me that they are going to try to “prove” their hive-minded beliefs using gun control advocates within the psychology and psychiatry world. They’re going to try to ram their hive-minded belief down everyone’s throat as yet another “settled science” so they can use it to disarm anyone they deem as mentally unstable (aka anyone that wants or possess a firearm) and ultimately make the 2nd Amendment completely useless.
These totalitarian minded people what to severely limit or intentionally infringe on the Constitutional rights of the ALL OF THE RESPONSIBLE FIREARM OWNERS that own 99.999852% of firearms because 0.000148% of firearms are criminally misused, this is pure tyrannical hysteria!
Statistics prove that the number of firearms owned by people in the United States of America that are criminally misused in the United States is statistically indistinguishable from zero and yet gun control advocates continue to believe that the inanimate firearm tool is the problem and it’s the only problem; these people are a very special kind of stupid.
Root cause analysis (RCA) is the process of discovering the root causes of problems in order to identify appropriate solutions.
The root cause of the problem we are having is morally bankrupt criminally minded human beings justifying murdering others and the damn fools that choose to blame the inanimate tool the morally bankrupt human beings use instead of the blaming the morally bankrupt human beings wielding the inanimate tool.
Here is an interesting question; perhaps you can post an answer.
https://www.quora.com/Some-gun-control-supporters-seem-to-have-animus-against-all-non-cop-gun-owners-instead-of-just-muggers-and-carjackers-and-gang-members-Why-It-doesnt-make-sense
Come to think of it, in my twenty-six years in participating in onlinwe discussions, I never heard a gun control advopcate use the terms “street thugs” or “gangbangers” or “muggers” or ‘carjackers”.
“Some gun control supporters seem to have animus against all non-cop gun owners, instead of just muggers and carjackers and gang members? Why?”
I suggest asking gun control advocates to get their answer.
I suspect there’s an unspoken rule in anti-gun activism to not to talk about the criminal human aspect of gun violence because it would likely undermine their arguments to disarm everyone. Remember it’s either the gun that’s loading itself, growing a pair of legs, walking onto a public where it murders and inflicts horrible physical and psychological injuries on innocent people or it’s the gun that’s possessing the person and turning them into a murderer. To anti-gun activists, anyone that wants a gun is mentally unstable; therefore, all gun owners are are mentally unstable and potential murderers.
“The root cause of the problem we are having is morally bankrupt criminally minded human beings justifying murdering others and the damn fools that choose to blame the inanimate tool the morally bankrupt human beings use instead of the blaming the morally bankrupt human beings wielding the inanimate tool.”
^^^THIS
Reading your laundry list of the “controllers'” claims and desires one might assume that they want accountability. They don’t. They want to DODGE accountability for their failed policies that have largely fueled the rise in mayhem by unchecked criminals and crazies, lay off the blame on inanimate objects, and have their law-abiding opponents pay the price.
If they were truly concerned about lives, they wouldn’t be so eager to limit people’s right to effectively preserve their own individual existence. They might even start to wonder why it’s democrat-voting constituencies who commit the majority of murders in the US, in spite of not having the higher level of firearms ownership.