Every now and again, I come across an op-ed written by an anti-gunner that would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. Those supporting stricter gun control measures have had a hard time over recent years, as they have failed to pass the type of legislation that would limit firearm ownership enough for their liking. In light of this, it is no surprise that they are resorting to desperate and silly persuasion methods to get the American public to give ground on the right to keep and bear arms.
Enter New York Times opinion columnist Gail Collins, who is woefully unequipped to have conversations regarding gun violence and restrictions on firearms.
In this piece, Collins makes a rather dubious claim: America is not having enough conversations about gun violence and ways to curb homicides. In fact, she made the bizarre but creative choice to find parallels in the ongoing debate over abortion.
She starts by highlighting Arizonan Senate candidate Kari Lake, who recently got in trouble with folks on both sides of the aisle for seemingly switching up her stance on abortion. She also went after former President Donald Trump, who recently declared that abortion should be a state issue and argued against passing legislation at the federal level to establish limitations on the procedure.
Collins points out that “When it comes to guns, Trump clearly hasn’t seen any need to search for a pseudo-middle ground” and blasted the former president for assuring his audience that “Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office” at an NRA meeting.
The author delved deeper into the gun debate, claiming that the slew of mass shootings America has seen over recent years supposedly did not spark enough conversations on gun control.
Now, the idea of making abortion a state issue only works if you’re just looking for a make-believe answer that might let you escape from discussing the subject. But we don’t have a visible gun consensus. Even mass school shooting tragedies like Sandy Hook and Uvalde didn’t bring the debate to a head. Many, many politicians are still trying to protect the right of Americans to own weapons while giving at least some verbal deference to the right of everybody else not to be shot.
Then, Collins gets to her ultimate objective: Arguing in favor of federal restrictions on guns.
The last thing we should be leaving to the individual states is gun regulation, given that it’s extremely easy — and common — for weapons to travel across state lines. And anyway, you don’t really want to rely on state legislatures when it comes to national life-or-death issues. Basically, you’d be gambling on the wisdom and prudence of people like Colorado State Representative Don Wilson, who recently had to apologize for leaving a loaded semiautomatic handgun in the State Capitol restroom.
Or the state senators in Tennessee, whose response to the terrible Nashville school shooting that left six people, including three children, dead was to pass a bill allowing teachers to carry concealed guns to work.
So, in a nutshell, the author does not like the fact that some states like Texas, Louisiana, and others have passed legislation offering more protections for gun owners. Therefore, we need the federal government to push blanket regulations on the people to keep us from shooting each other like the OK Corral scene in “Tombstone.”
Then, after claiming there are not enough conversations about gun control, she brings up the 2022 federal legislation championed by Republican Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that was passed after gun control whack jobs used yet another mass shooting to push for more government control of firearms. To her, it was a sign that America was finally getting to the place where the populace might be more open to infringing on the Second Amendment.
A landmark bill. Truly, that’s what they called it. Because we live in a country where when it comes to guns, basically sane can be totally impossible. One of the leaders behind the bill, Senator Chris Murphy, feels Congress tackled both the abortion and gun issues because history forced it to. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the abortion protection in Roe v. Wade triggered an effort to pass some new authorization. And guns went back on the agenda after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, took the lives of 19 students and two teachers.
So, here’s the thing: The notion that America has not had enough conversations about gun rights and gun control is laughable. Can anyone think of a mass shooting that has occurred over the past five years that wasn’t used to push for more gun control legislation? Anytime such an atrocity occurs, folks like Collins pounce on the opportunity to exploit the deaths of these poor souls to insist that Americans should not be allowed to carry firearms.
In fact, six months after the tragic mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, the state legislature has passed a trio of bills intended to limit gun ownership even though an independent commission revealed that additional laws would not have stopped the shooter.
The anti-gunner crowd has exploited mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Parkland, Florida, Allen, Texas, and many others.
We have had the gun control debate ad nauseam for decades, and it is not going away anytime soon. The reality is that none of these conversations ever lead to actual solutions because that is not the goal of the anti-gunner lobby in America. The objective is not to save lives from gun crime; it is to make it harder for law-abiding folks to keep and bear arms. This is why folks like Collins never discuss effective methods for stopping would-be mass shooters, such as security measures in schools.
Collins is not the only one pushing for national gun control legislation. Indeed, if the geriatric authoritarian in the White House had his way, he would have already worked with Congress to pass sweeping restrictions. Despite what the author claims, the battle for gun rights is still in effect. Hopefully, her side of the debate continues losing.
