After another school shooting, Democrats’ foolish gun control plan is on autopilot | Opinion
A young woman opened fire on students and teachers Monday at a Wisconsin Christian school. One teacher and one 14-year-old student are dead. Four others were injured. Within hours, our diminished president issued a call for gun control.
“My administration has taken aggressive action to combat the gun violence epidemic,” President Joe Biden wrote. “We passed the most significant gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years, I have taken more executive action to reduce gun violence than any other President in history, and I created the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. But more is needed. Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
As is all too typical with calls for gun control, nothing that the president has done or proposes to do stopped this shooting or would have any impact on a similar one in the future.
Let’s start with what he has done already. According to the White House, the administration has improved school shooting drills mandated for public schools, restricted machine gun conversion devices and 3D printed guns. I can’t find a record of a machine gun or a 3D printed gun used in a school shooting. This shooting was at a private school.
The administration spent $15 billion on violence reduction strategies. The Biden administration created the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris (natch). Neither seems to have had much impact.
Regardless, the Biden administration then took credit for its bold action, noting that “data from the Gun Violence Archive indicates that the number of mass shootings so far this year is 20% lower than it was at this time last year.”
Now, Biden proposes four new steps to restrict guns in response to the latest school shooting atrocity: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons. A ban on high-capacity magazines.
- Universal background checks would have made no difference, as it is already illegal to sell firearms to a 15-year-old under federal law. You don’t need a background check to know she shouldn’t have gotten the gun she used.
- A national red flag law would have made no difference. Who would think to confiscate guns from someone who was already barred from having guns?
- A ban on assault weapons would have made no difference, as more than 95% of gun homicides are committed with handguns, just like this shooting.
- A ban on high-capacity magazines would have made no difference, as this killing was committed with a standard-capacity magazine.
When it comes to gun violence at the national level, gun control is more religious than practical. Politicians must genuflect to the solutions proposed by national gun control groups and their deep-pocketed donors, rather than examine what happens in the most common shootings and propose measures that would deal with them. Gun deaths are supposed to go down magically.
At the local level, things seem a little more sane. Missouri Democratic state Rep. Anthony Ealy proposes that to attend a parade held by a city or the state, event-goers should go through gun checkpoints with metal detectors.
You can argue with him on Second Amendment grounds, but if you are trying to prevent a replay of the Super Bowl parade gunplay in Kansas City this year, you can’t argue with it as a practical measure. Even if it did not stop all guns from getting into the event, it would have deterred some and prevented others, cutting the potential for violence at the parade. There’s a good chance less blood would have been spilled.
Using incidents of gun violence to advance gun control measures that are irrelevant to the case at hand is nothing more than empty posturing with little hope of addressing the problem of gun violence. Ealy’s more practical approach is a model for Democrats who want to do something more than sound good on TV or in a speech. Biden’s gun control autopilot won’t solve anything.
This story was originally published December 20, 2024 at 3:08 AM with the headline "After another school shooting, Democrats’ foolish gun control plan is on autopilot | Opinion."
