We know next to nothing about the suspect in the shooting at Brown University on Saturday that resulted in two people being killed and nine others injured, but that lack of information isn’t stopping gun control advocates from demanding changes to our laws.
USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb, who graduated from Brown, was quick to pin the blame for the shooting on the inanimate object that was used, rather than the person who pulled the trigger.
“It’s the guns,” Gottlieb said as she began a post-game news conference at the Ivy League school. “It doesn’t need to be this way.”
Gottlieb said she got back to the locker room Saturday after the USC Trojans’ home game with No. 1 UConn Huskies and had “a million text messages” from former Brown teammates. A gunman had opened fire during final exams, killing two students and injuring nine others.
“We’re the only country that lives this way,” Gottlieb said, her voice shaking as she noted that she knew people who have children at Brown. “Parents should not have to be worried about their kids.”
Is that really true, though? According to a 2020 study by Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center:
Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, our list contains 2,772 attacks and at least 5,764 shooters outside the United States and 62 attacks and 66 shooters within our country. By our count, the US makes up less than 1.13% of the mass public shooters, 1.77% of their murders, and 2.19% of their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average. Out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 66th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.
Gottlieb wasn’t the only figure from the wide, wide, world of sports who were quick to call for gun control in the hours after news about Brown broke. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who’s been a vocal advocate for more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms for decades, also immediately demanded new laws in response to the shooting.
“We know there are common-sense measures we can take that will save people’s lives,” Kerr said. “I just want people out there, it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat or Republican, gun owner or non-gun owner, I just want people thinking ‘What if it were my child, what if it were my brother or sister?’”
Kerr later added, “Or are we just going to continue to let the gun lobby run us over and not let us do anything to protect each other, to protect our children, protect our future. We have to make that decision.”
Authorities have said very little about the gun or guns used by the shooter, but the individual who was held and then released over the weekend was seen as a person of interest at least in part because he had two firearms in his hotel room that resembled or matched the description of a gun used the shooter’s gun; a revolver (the other firearm found in the hotel room was a semi-automatic handgun).
When a high profile shooting like this happens I think most of us wonder “what if this was my child/family/friend/me”? That doesn’t mean, however, that most of us immediately assume that more gun control is the answer.
Without a suspect in custody it’s impossible to make any informed guesses about the firearms used in the attack or if they were legally purchased or possessed, but we do know that Rhode Island has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. The state was recently given an “A-” by the gun control group Giffords, in part because of the state’s ban on “large capacity” magazines and so-called assault weapons, universal background checks, partial licensing of gun owners, waiting periods, and ban on gun sales to adults under the age of 21.
If those laws didn’t prevent this shooting, then what exactly are those “common sense measures” that Kerr believes would have made a difference? The coach didn’t provide any specifics, but it seems to me that if we supposedly know what measures we can take, it would be easy enough for him to identify them. The fact that Kerr kept his rhetoric vague speaks volumes all on its own, but he won’t be the last to declare we need to “do something” to crack down on our Second Amendment rights in response to the tragic and terrible act by a violent criminal.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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