The logic of the gun control advocate shouldn’t be considered logic by any measure and I’m tired of mainstream culture thinking that a virtue signal is akin to a solution.
I’m consistently amazed at the pattern I see from gun grabbers after a mass shooting like the kind seen over the weekend in Allen, TX, a town just up the road from me. As soon as the news hit, the demands to politicians began flowing in like a river on Twitter, and for some reason, all of them had to do with limiting gun access and usage for the law-abiding.
The restrictions come in various forms. A large chunk of people believe that it’s time to repeal the 2nd Amendment and get rid of guns in our country. As I’ve discussed in detail, this is an impossibility.
But it’s those that shout “common sense gun reform” that are the more annoying, in my opinion. These are the people who come up with what they think are middle-of-the-road solutions but are, in truth, just as illogical as the extremists who want to appeal for the right to firearms.
For instance, they say they should limit magazine sizes and then throw out a number they deem to be enough for a person to carry in their magazine. This can range from ten to six, or even one. Their belief is that few bullets will mean fewer deaths. Their belief is going to get people killed.
For one, this “solution” has the same bad backbone as all of these other solutions do, it weakens the defensive capability of the law-abiding and empowers the criminal. Many basic firearms have been in circulation for decades that have 15 or more bullets in their magazines. One of the most popular semi-automatic handguns is easily the Glock and its variants. Depending on the model, a standard magazine for a Glock can sit around 15 rounds or higher. While it’s unclear how many Glocks have been sold in the United States since the 80s, it’s pretty safe to assume it’s in the millions and millions…and that’s just Glock. Sig Sauer, another very popular brand, also likes to double stack rounds in some of their more popular handgun models as well.
The point is that handgun manufacturers have been able to saturate the United States with magazines that pack as many rounds as possible for decades. Suddenly limiting magazine capacities is like trying to put the rain back into the clouds. It’s not going to happen. Not only will criminals not give up their higher capacity magazines, but the law-abiding also won’t do it because the criminals won’t. Why would we give the bad guys the same advantage?
The same concept applies to “limiting assault weapons.” If you were to line up 100 people and ask them what an assault weapon is, you’d probably get 100 different answers, but these answers will be followed by “I’m not giving up any of my weapons because the bad guys have them.”
The bottom line always comes back to that singular issue. Every “common sense gun reform” law that they throw out only punishes the law-abiding. It’s wholly illogical and it’s inconsistent to boot. None of these people squawking about these asinine solutions are also advocating that we take away people’s cars because drunk drivers kill over 15,000 people a year. They aren’t trying to outlaw forks since obesity leads to the deaths of four million a year. They drive and love their eating habits, so that would be a massive inconvenience to them, so they suggest nothing.
The solutions are staring us in the face and it begins with not punishing but empowering the people.
For one, get rid of gun-free zones as it only creates soft targets. Someone intent on killing as many people as possible wouldn’t dare start shooting in a place where he or she knows people can quickly begin shooting back.
Moreover, we need to start leaning into America’s gun culture and not condemning it. The 2nd Amendment is a bulwark against an overbearing government. It’s one of the checks and balances that keep our government from misbehaving in the worst way possible. It’s also our line of defense against people who decide to do evil to the citizenry.
Ask yourself how many school shootings would have been accomplished if a few of the teachers were trained and armed. The answer would be very, very few. Either they wouldn’t have attempted to shoot the school up in the first place, or they wouldn’t have gotten very far.
We need to encourage education and training about firearms, not blind fear. Whether people like it or not, this country is a gun country and has been for generations. The number of firearms circulating around would make it impossible for this country to ever be gun-free. It is absolute lunacy to think that it would be anything else. It’s in our foundations as a nation. Guns aren’t going anywhere. The fact that people aren’t more knowledgeable about them and the laws that surround them is ass-backward and is getting people killed.
There are two types of criminals in this nation, those lurking among us and those lurking in the halls of DC. The 2nd Amendment is there to protect us from both, and trying to strip the people of their ability to defend themselves from both of these entities is the height of stupidity and ignorance.
How many more people have to die before this is understood by the general population?
