One Major Problem With ‘Gun Violence’ Focus

In the aftermath of so many acts of violence involving a firearm, it’s hardly surprising that so many anti-gunners are once again beating the drum over “gun violence.” Whether we like the term or not, it’s entered the lexicon of American political dialogue and it’s being used to justify restricting our rights in various ways.

For many people, the only way to approach so-called gun crime is to focus on the gun. If you eliminate the gun, you eliminate gun crime.

That might be technically correct–if there are no guns at all, there can’t be any crimes committed with guns–but not only is it impossible to accomplish, it’s looking in the wrong place.

Over at the National Review, Dan McLaughlin notes five problems with blaming guns for the problem, and you should check out the whole thing, but I want to primarily focus on just one.

First, the diagnosis is too narrow. To harp on “gun violence” and convene working groups and legislative sessions on the topic is to suggest that other kinds of violence are just not the same kind of problem. But that’s not realistic. Plenty of spectacular and brutal crimes are committed without guns, from the horrific stabbing of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train earlier this month to the stabbing, burning, and “molesting” of an elderly couple in Queens the same week. Many nations with few guns still have serious problems of violence and murder on the street. France this year has had a wave of school stabbings.

Historically, guns have by no means been the only weapon of assassinations, terror attacks, or attacks on schools. September 11 wasn’t gun violence. Neither was the Boston Marathon bombing. Neither were Oklahoma City, the first World Trade Center bombing, the Molotov cocktail attack in Boulder in June, or recent car and truck attacks in New York, Waukesha, Charlottesville, or New Orleans (although the New Orleans attacker subsequently shot at the cops). The 1999 Costa Mesa school attack used a car. Bombs were used in the worst school attack in American history, in Bath Township, Mich., in 1927, which killed 44 people (38 of them kids). Alexander II of Russia was assassinated with small, handheld bombs. Most of Japan’s garish history of assassinations didn’t involve guns.

None of that is to deny the obvious: Guns are very useful in committing violence, and they are particularly useful in killing political figures from a distance or hunting down people inside a school or workplace. There’s a reason why they are the most common weapon of choice for these kinds of assaults. But when you focus exclusively on the guns as the problem rather than the violence, you’re already missing part of the picture — a part that would be bound to grow bigger if you actually succeeded in doing away with guns.

The truth of the matter is that the focus on the guns used seems premised on a belief that somehow, being killed by some other means is inherently preferable to being shot to death.

I can’t think of anything more ridiculous.

“I’m sorry, your daughter is dead, Sir.”

“Was she shot?”

“No, she was raped and hacked to death with a meat cleaver.”

“Oh, thank God!”

Stupid, right?

No one feels better that their loved one wasn’t killed by a gunshot, but by some other means. No one feels relieved that someone they care about was killed with a knife, or with a hammer, or literally any other weapon imaginable.

And let’s understand that our non-gun homicide rate is higher than many other nations’ total homicide rate. Even if every so-called gun death vanished overnight, we’d still be more violent than most, if not all other developed nations. And let’s be realistic here, at least some of those homicides would have still happened no matter what you banned.

But if you focus on the fact that a person commits every one of these acts, you cover them all. You don’t ignore some awful atrocity simply because they didn’t use a particular weapon. You don’t seemingly excuse every horrific act that happens to skip a firearm.

The fact that they don’t is annoying, but it’s also telling.

It’s telling because no matter how much they act like they’re about saving lives, they’re not. They’re too wrapped up in focusing on a weapon that scares them to actually look at the people on either side of the equation.

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

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