President Biden indulged himself in a cynical rhetorical game. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” he asked. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”
This framing was disgraceful and counterproductive — implying as it did that all Americans secretly know how to fix this problem, but that only some of them wish to do so. Worse still, it was profoundly self-deceptive. Repeatedly, the president cast himself as a brave truth-teller who is willing to “stand up” against inertia. And yet, when one examines his actions more closely, one sees little but anger and smoke. Very little of what Democrats have proposed as “common sense” measures has anything to do with what happened in Uvalde. Nothing that the president is pushing for would touch the 450 million firearms that are already in private hands. In the states, his party’s leaders have begun to shy away from the draconian measures they insist America needs (even Beto O’Rourke, for all his inappropriate bluster, has backtracked on taking away so-called “assault weapons”). And, despite all the talk about the “gun lobby” and those intransigent, obstructionist Republicans, the Democrats’ failure to move a single gun-control bill since Biden took office has been the result not of the filibuster or of the magical NRA, but of its lacking even 50 votes to do so in the Senate. Perhaps — just perhaps — this is more complicated than it seems. Perhaps the consistent behavior of elected politicians over many years in a democracy reflects the fact that American voters are not actually clamoring for these measures.
Certainly, it is more complicated than pointing to a particular sort of gun and shouting “ban!” As has now become customary in such attacks, the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15, which he bought legally on his 18th birthday. It is true that, over the last decade, this particular model of rifle has become the weapon of choice for many deranged mass shooters, even as it has remained statistically insignificant within the broader landscape of crime. (Each year, more Americans are killed by hands and feet than by all rifles put together.) It is not true, by contrast, that to remove it from the shelves of America’s gun stores would do anything useful at all. The worst mass shooting on a college campus in all of U.S. history — the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech — was carried out with a couple of handguns. The attack at Columbine High School in 1999 occurred while the Biden-written “assault weapons ban” was in place. Even today, handguns are more commonly used in massacres than are rifles. Abhorrent as it is to contemplate such things, it is difficult to imagine that the shooter in Uvalde would have been less able to wreak havoc in a classroom full of unarmed people had he been in possession of a pistol, a revolver, or a shotgun.
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This framing was disgraceful and counterproductive — implying as it did that all Americans secretly know how to fix this problem, but that only some of them wish to do so. Worse still, it was profoundly self-deceptive. Repeatedly, the president cast himself as a brave truth-teller who is willing to “stand up” against inertia. And yet, when one examines his actions more closely, one sees little but anger and smoke. Very little of what Democrats have proposed as “common sense” measures has anything to do with what happened in Uvalde. Nothing that the president is pushing for would touch the 450 million firearms that are already in private hands. In the states, his party’s leaders have begun to shy away from the draconian measures they insist America needs (even Beto O’Rourke, for all his inappropriate bluster, has backtracked on taking away so-called “assault weapons”). And, despite all the talk about the “gun lobby” and those intransigent, obstructionist Republicans, the Democrats’ failure to move a single gun-control bill since Biden took office has been the result not of the filibuster or of the magical NRA, but of its lacking even 50 votes to do so in the Senate. Perhaps — just perhaps — this is more complicated than it seems. Perhaps the consistent behavior of elected politicians over many years in a democracy reflects the fact that American voters are not actually clamoring for these measures.
Certainly, it is more complicated than pointing to a particular sort of gun and shouting “ban!” As has now become customary in such attacks, the shooter in Uvalde used an AR-15, which he bought legally on his 18th birthday. It is true that, over the last decade, this particular model of rifle has become the weapon of choice for many deranged mass shooters, even as it has remained statistically insignificant within the broader landscape of crime. (Each year, more Americans are killed by hands and feet than by all rifles put together.) It is not true, by contrast, that to remove it from the shelves of America’s gun stores would do anything useful at all. The worst mass shooting on a college campus in all of U.S. history — the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech — was carried out with a couple of handguns. The attack at Columbine High School in 1999 occurred while the Biden-written “assault weapons ban” was in place. Even today, handguns are more commonly used in massacres than are rifles. Abhorrent as it is to contemplate such things, it is difficult to imagine that the shooter in Uvalde would have been less able to wreak havoc in a classroom full of unarmed people had he been in possession of a pistol, a revolver, or a shotgun.
There Is No Magic Fix for School Shootings | National Review
None of the bills that Biden’s party has introduced in this Congress so much as intersect with the massacre in Uvalde.
www.nationalreview.com