Mom’s Demand laments 14 dead in California shooting that “no one is talking about.” Sorry Shannon, we may be too busy watching the post-war order my grandparent’s generation established fall apart all around us, like Germany for example, where apparently an axe lost it and decided to chop a bunch of people on a train. I’ll have to go chain mine up after this. Same headline at CNN: “Germany ax attack injures several on train, police kill suspect.” Maybe I need to start drilling axe shooting scenarios!
Where there’s a will to maim or kill, there will be a way. The media and elites believe if they just stick their heads in the sand a little farther, everything will be fine. Then, on the other extreme, you have the folks who think the only good muslim is a dead one, despite the fact that muslims are doing the majority of the fighting and dying to put an end to this barbarity.
California just passed a battery of enhanced gun control laws, already having had some of the toughest in the nation. Yet bad things still happen, and people like Shannon Watts don’t ever accept that there will always be evil in the world. They’ll keep demanding more and more laws, and burying their heads ever deeper in the sand.
UPDATE: An another one. Good thing Europe has such strict gun laws, or someone might have gotten hurt.
The other reason “no one’s talking about” it (read: “the media isn’t pushing it 24/7”, because I heard about it before this) – it’s obviously gang violence.
Mentioning that makes for all kinds of political and agenda-related awkwardness.
Only non-gang shootings “count”.
[B]ad things still happen, and people like Shannon Watts don’t ever accept that there will always be evil in the world. They’ll keep demanding more and more laws, and burying their heads ever deeper in the sand.
As someone else put it, you can’t legislate morality. The Shannon Wattses of the world think that if you ban the tools that evil sometimes uses, that you effectively ban evil. That’s not how it works. If you try to ban evil intent by banning tools, then you also effectively ban good intent since good people also use the very same tools.
The tools have no intent, no consciousness. They act solely and entirely based on the mind and morality of their users. Regulating the tools cannot regulate intent because the tools have none.
Bottom line: Morality cannot be legislated; evil intent cannot be banned by passing a law. Evil intent must be faced, fought, and overcome when and where it arises. Sometimes that requires violence and the tools of violence. Banning violence or its tools doesn’t ban evil; it just makes it harder for good people to prevail.
I have a rhetorical device when people start talking about passing “sensible gun legislation”. I ask them what is the maximum number of gun deaths they would find acceptable. They invariably answer “Zero”. Then I point out that what they really want is not whatever proposal they are current pushing, but a complete and total ban on all gun ownership. Because you can’t have zero gun deaths with any significant level of gun ownership. It’s literally impossible: Even countries like Japan where gun ownership is exceedingly rare and all but banned have a non-zero gun death rate (mostly suicides, but the occasional homicide).
I then usually follow up that with “Since you have a position that is unconstitutional and impossible to achieve, we have nothing further to talk about”.
I am so stealing:
“Since you have a position that is unconstitutional and impossible to achieve, we have nothing further to talk about.”
I hope you don’t mind.
Not at all. In fact, I encourage you, and anyone else for that matter, to use it.
It’s 14 wounded, not 14 dead.
Their end goal is the only goal
Another thought came to mind. 12+ years before that “shot heard ’round the world” the British were asking nicely or at the point of a bayonet recruiting the militia and even helping arm them. All of a sudden they changed their minds.