A Look Back Illustrates the Anti-Gunners’ Delusion

In 2019, things didn’t look good for gun rights. Sure, Donald Trump wasn’t really signing gun control into law, but he did direct the ATF to redefine bump stocks as machine guns. Plus, his chances of re-election didn’t look as good as anyone on his side might have liked.

But things got bad in August when, on back-to-back days, we had two major mass shootings. One in El Paso, Texas, was followed by one in Dayton, Ohio. Both made massive headlines and, frankly, gave me plenty to write about for a few months.

Earlier today, I came across an op-ed that purported to look for what’s behind mass shootings, and since this is a topic that I deeply believe we need to delve into, I checked it out.

First, despite being shown on Google as just a few hours old, it’s actually from 2019. But this does give me a chance to look at what anti-gunners were thinking and preaching back then.

Second, it’s not a look at what’s behind mass shootings, but just another anti-gunner blaming guns.

Still, let’s look at the delusions of the anti-gunner from a handful of years ago. You know, just for fun.

The back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, on the first weekend of August are widely being viewed as the straw that will break the back of the US gun lobby, particularly the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has long stood in the way of congressional passage of gun-control measures. Yet we have heard similar predictions before. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut on December 14, 2012, when a 20-year-old man gunned down 20 first-graders and six adults, then-President Barack Obama, wiping tears from his eyes, vowed to take action.

The last sentence is probably the most accurate one, but what the author forgets is that the Sandy Hook killer stole his gun from his mother after murdering her to gain access to it in the first place. How do you dismiss that kind of evil as simply an artifact of guns being available?

Plus, let’s not forget that the worst school shooting in modern American history involved two handguns in a state that even had a gun rationing law in place.

In fact, 2019 didn’t break the back of the so-called gun lobby. The NRA hit a hard patch a year later when New York Attorney General Letitia James tried to destroy the organization via a lawsuit, but that ended, and the NRA is still there, as are the rest of the gun rights organizations out there. They’re still churning.

Not only that, but they’re arguably stronger than ever, mounting challenges not against some obscure concealed carry rule in Bumbledump County, California. They’re taking on the National Firearms Act itself, and I think they actually do have a good chance of winning it.

On the face of it, adopting meaningful gun-control legislation after such a horrendous tragedy should not have been a problem. Polls showed that 92 percent of the public supported closing loopholes in the requirement for background checks—which at present don’t include examinations of individuals purchasing firearms at gun shows, privately from another individual, or online—and that 62 percent supported a ban on high-capacity magazines. It was hard to ignore the emotional appeal of the shattered parents who’d come to Washington to plead their case. Yet, even in the wake of Sandy Hook, the US Senate voted down two measures to tighten gun-control laws.

To understand why, it’s important to keep in mind that the politics of gun control emanate from the same counter-majoritarian principle that gave Americans the Electoral College. In the Senate, far less populous western, mid-western, and southern states—home to hunters and conservative-leaning John Wayne wannabes—have the same representation as far larger states like New York and California. So, even when most Americans favour stronger gun-control laws, that majority position isn’t necessarily reflected in the makeup of the Senate.  

This is completely accurate, at least for the time. The polls did show that gun control was popular, and it was never going to happen because there wasn’t a chance it would get through the Senate.

That’s true even today.

But that’s also by design. Our Founding Fathers went with a republic versus a true democracy because of the idea of tyranny of the majority. The masses can oppress their countrymen via the ballot box just as easily as a tyrant next door can. They didn’t want that, so they created a system specifically designed to make it difficult to pass laws where larger states could impose their will on the smaller. It was part of a compromise because smaller states knew exactly what would happen without it.

At the same time, gun-control opponents have benefited enormously from a seemingly nonsensical interpretation of the Second Amendment. Adopted in 1791, the Second Amendment states that, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Books have been written about the amendment’s true meaning, but to gun-rights advocates, neither the plain text nor the historical context of the amendment matters. By ignoring the governing clause—”a well-regulated Militia, being necessary” (an awkward comma, to be sure)—they assert an individual “right to keep and bear arms” as if it had been handed down from Mount Sinai.

We don’t ignore it, we just understand the context of it. I also note that the author failed to include “shall not be infringed,” rather conveniently. That’s because, regardless of whether gun rights are necessary for a “well-regulated militia” as anti-gunners want to understand it today, our Founding Fathers knew it was both an individual right and that they didn’t want the state monkeying around with it.

I’m going to stop there, because honestly, you can see nothing new here that you won’t see from far more relevant op-eds by these same people.

The author, a journalist, wasn’t breaking new ground in 2019, and they’re not breaking it today. In fact, one of the biggest issues we have in this whole debate is that no one is breaking new ground. We don’t need to, of course, because the Constitution is on our side and the anti-gunners have had to ignore key portions of the Second Amendment, focus on others, and pretend that in this one instance, “the people” meant the states when every other time the Founding Fathers meant them, they said, “the states.”

They also ignore the long line of legal experts from before the 20th Century who argued the Second Amendment was, in fact, an individual right.

Nothing has changed except that now, they know things are running against them at the federal level in most ways, and they’re not exactly winning in most state legislatures, either.

After all, since this was written, we’ve not reached a point where more than half of the states have constitutional carry.

Must suck being wrong all the time, eh?

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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