Gun Control Is Never Going To Stop Things Like This

Gun control advocates like to believe that the policies they support actually prevent violent crime. Sure, some of them are pushing them for other reasons and know otherwise, I’m sure, but most of your rank-and-file activists don’t believe that. They really do think that they’re working to make our society safer.

But for me to buy that they’re right, they’d need a lot more evidence that it would work. I wouldn’t support it anyway, of course, but I could at least accept that they had a point.

While they can point to heavily biased studies as “proof,” we’ve got reality showing us otherwise.

Take this situation in Pennsylvania, for example.

A man who was 15 when he was involved in a gun battle outside a high school football game that set off a chain of events that ended in the death of an 8-year-old girl in Sharon Hill has been sentenced to 14 to 28 years in prison.

Nineteen-year-old Angelo Ford was sentenced Friday in Delaware County on several cases including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and related convictions stemming from the 2021 gunfire in Sharon Hill that eventually led to the death of Fanta Bility.

Prosecutors said Ford and a group of other males got into an argument while leaving an Academy Park High School football game in August 2021. Ford, then 15, pulled a handgun and exchanged gunfire with a 21-year-old man about a block away from the stadium, firing five times as the other person fired twice, authorities said.

Authorities said two shots went in the direction of three Sharon Hill police officers monitoring the crowd leaving the game. The officers returned fire toward a car they believed was involved, and one of the rounds hit Bility, who was leaving the game with her family, authorities said.

“There is not loss of life that night if AJ Ford doesn’t bring a gun,” Deputy District Attorney Laurie Moore said. “Fanta would still be here. She’d be 11 years old.”

Moore sought a term of 32 to 67 years, citing the trauma of the child’s family and the community. She also said Ford had never displayed an ounce of remorse, fleeing a juvenile facility after the arrest and eluding police for more than a year as he posted Instagram videos taunting his pursuers and waving guns around.

Remorse should probably not play a factor, in part because some people are wrongly convicted and I don’t like the idea that an innocent person will be punished worse because they don’t show remorse for something they didn’t do, but that’s just me. When someone is taunting the police and basically bragging that they can’t be caught, that probably takes it to a whole new level.

But let’s focus on the facts here. This was a 15-year-old kid who got a gun and opened fire around a high school football game. More accurately, he got into a gunfight with a 21-year-old man around a block away from the game, where plenty of people were still around as they left the game. This resulted in an innocent girl being killed.

Yet there’s no way that Ford got that gun through lawful means. There’s not a gun store that would have sold it to him even with a fake ID and there’s no law-abiding person who would have sold it to him in a face-to-face transfer with the belief he was of legal age. Not at 15.

No, this was a prime example of why gun control doesn’t do anything except create issues for law-abiding gun owners and gun buyers.

Gun control is premised on stopping stuff like this, but the reality is that it doesn’t. It can’t. It can’t do it because those who would be caught up in this don’t buy guns through law-abiding gun stores or from lawful private parties in the first place.

If 15-year-old kids are getting guns, it’s a sign that the laws meant to curtail that aren’t working. When will some people get this through their thick skulls?