Given that this is an election year, the left is going to pull out their usual tricks to tilt the odds in their favor in November. Among their usual wedge issues, we can expect more conversations about gun control in an effort to paint Republicans as callous people who don’t care about children getting shot.
In fact, we are only another mass shooting away from having yet another national debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment.
Indeed, these tragedies are the number one tool Democrats weaponize to push their anti-gun agenda. Standing on the graves of mass shooting victims, they cynically play on people’s emotions to coax them into giving up more of their liberty “for the greater good.”
RedState’s Mike Miller wrote a piece highlighting a study from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which published a report that poked a Grand Canyon-sized hole in the mass shooting narrative peddled by the anti-gunner lobby.
According to myth-busting data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, while the national gun-control debate focuses heavily on AR-15-style rifles, handguns have been used in most mass public shootings over the past 25 years.
Moreover, according to Dr. John R. Lott Jr., the center’s founder, and author of the report, shootings primarily have taken place in what are supposed to be “gun-free zones,” according to the law enforcement officials, and none of the shootings from 1998 to 2023 would have been stopped by requiring universal background checks.
The Democrat Party was unavailable for comment.
Here's more from Dr. Lott:
When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.
These statements give an incorrect impression that there are massacres every day like the infamous 2022 Uvalde shooting, which claimed the lives of nineteen students and two teachers, or the 2023 Lewiston murders, where eighteen people were murdered. A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, shows that much [of] what we believe about these attacks isn’t true.
The numbers cited by Biden and CNN come from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) broadly defines mass shootings to include any case with four or more people shot or injured. Some injuries are not from actually being shot.
Of course, mass shootings are awful tragedies that should be prevented. Nobody is disputing that. However, it is common to see anti-gunners constantly misrepresenting the rate and nature of mass shootings occurring all across the country. However, the solutions these people put forward do very little to decrease the majority of gun violence, which typically involves gang and drug activity.
The incessant emphasis on employing gun control measures such as stricter background checks, limiting certain types of firearms, and others fail to address the underlying issues that lead to this type of violence. The anti-gunners typically neglect the role that mental health, socio-economic disparities, broken families, and substandard education play in creating environments in which violent crime flourishes. Moreover, they overlook and outright reject measures that could deter or prevent mass shootings – especially in schools.
After a tragic mass shooting that occurred at a school in an Iowa town, parents spoke out, demanding preventative measures to stop future attacks. Instead of pretending that making it harder for responsible Americans to keep and bear arms would have stopped the shooting, they were seeking effective solutions, including armed security, metal detectors, and others. Naturally, leftists were not a part of that particular discussion.
The bottom line is that the anti-gunners rarely focus on addressing the root issues that lead to violent crime. Instead, they pursue restrictions that don’t stop the types of criminals who commit these offenses.
This is because their objective is not to curb mass shootings and other types of violence. Their aim is to disarm as many individuals as possible under the guise of protecting public safety. Because of this, folks on the left don’t actually care how many mass shootings happen each year. To them, these tragedies are nothing more than propaganda tools used to persuade people to allow the government to crack down on our Second Amendment rights.
