(from thepoliticus.com)
Just when you thought the anti-gunners couldn’t get any crazier . . .
If you happened to take a few minutes to peruse the “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” Facebook page in an attempt to learn about the terrible events in Charlottesville recently, you might have been a little confused. Their page was filled with stories about “armed intimidation” and “armed demonstrators”.
You’d have been forgiven for assuming there’d been a gunfight, or a mass shooting, rather than a vile racist march and a cowardly murder and mass assault with a car. Precisely no one was shot at that demonstration, or at a similar demonstration in San Antonio, and yet somehow Shannon Watts et al concluded that—surprise!—GUNS were to blame. And yet they remained silent about the 9 killed and 30 more wounded by gunfire over the same weekend in the gun control paradise of Chicago.
Of course the Moms also parroted the ridiculous claim by hoplophobic Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe that the militia members had “better equipment than our State Police,” and unsurprisingly they lamented Virginia’s “lax gun laws”. McAuliffe went so far as to claim—falsely—that the state police found caches of weapons hidden around town.
Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer joined the chorus, saying, “While I am . . . a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, that right, like all Constitutional rights, comes with limits.” He went on, “Just as machine guns cannot be owned by civilians in this country . . . it should not be acceptable to open-carry or concealed-carry firearms at an event of the sort we saw last weekend.”
In case you weren’t aware, fully automatic weapons—“machine guns”—are legal to own by civilians, according to federal law, as well as by state law in at least 41 states, including Mayor Signer’s home state of Virginia.
The calls for restrictions on the Second Amendment in response to the events in Charlottesville were, unsurprisingly, echoed by the Los Angeles Times. The Times went a bit further, making the outrageous claim that “The 1st Amendment to the Constitution establishes the right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The 2nd Amendment creates a right to own firearms.” As Breitbart correctly pointed out, and as embodied in the very language of our Constitution, our rights are not “created” by any document or phrase, but are in fact “inalienable”, which means they are so intrinsic that they cannot even be given away.
Republican Paul Ryan also waded in, alleging the need to further restrict Americans’ right to meaningful self-defense in response to the violence in Charlottesville where, again, no one was shot. Like the Moms and the Times, he too was silent on events in Chicago, both on the Charlottesville weekend and the weekend following, when 63 people were shot, including 9 people killed.
Racism, hatred, threats, and unprovoked violence are repugnant, no matter who is doing the spewing or committing the crimes. On that there should be no dissent.
But if political opportunism and telling outright lies is the best tool you have to promote your agenda, maybe your agenda isn’t worth promoting. And if your opinion is driven by your own misunderstanding and naiveté, perhaps you should educate yourself before broadcasting that opinion.
On their website, Moms Demand Action links to data from their parent organization Everytown for Gun Safety which lists the 2016 murder of 5 Dallas police officers during an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration as a school shooting!
As they say, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re bound and determined to disarm Americans and deprive them of their natural right to self-defense, every crisis and act of violence looks like an opportunity. Rahm Emmanuel must be proud.
Just as the ongoing violent disaster in the poorer neighborhoods in Chicago evaded the Moms’ radar, so did a few other gun uses in recent weeks. The Crime Prevention Research Center keeps an archive of publicly reported defensive gun uses, and reported on these seven bona fide defensive gun uses in the days around the Charlottesville violence. Yet none of these seem to have appeared on the radar of the Moms, the Times, or even Paul Ryan. Two of them even occurred in Chicago.
The forces in favor of civilian disarmament remind me of a character from the children’s cartoon, Veggie Tales—the Yodeling Veterinarian of the Alps. No matter what the illness or injury from which the animals he treated suffered, his prescription was always the same—he would sing them a song and yodel to them—and, like gun control schemes, his ministrations were uniformly useless in treating his patients’ illnesses.
It’s bad enough that gun-grabbers want to prescribe the same treatment for homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings—more gun restrictions. But when racist chants, pepper spray, and automobile attacks have you stumping for gun control, perhaps its time to re-examine your ideology.
—Tom Vaughan, MD is a neuroradiologist in private practice in Louisville, KY. He is a shooting enthusiast who believes in individual liberty and personal responsibility.