When Looking at High-Profile Violence Means Ignoring Reality

Over the past week, there have been a number of shootings that made some headlines. From National Guard soldiers shot in D.C. to a shooting in Stockton, California, we all know the stories.

And they’re all awful. There are a lot of questions left to be answered in all of them, and there were even more shootings that many of us missed.

One student publication at the University of California-Davis has a problem with this, which is understandable, but they also miss a few things while…lamenting them.

As many families gathered and enjoyed the Thanksgiving weekend, too many across the nation were forced to face the consequences of gun violence.  

In Washington D.C., a shooting against two members of the National Guard on Thanksgiving Eve left 20-year-old Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom dead and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolf in serious condition. 

In California, a shooting on Black Friday at the Valley Fair Mall in San Jose injured three. A 17-year-old suspect has been identified by police, who have said the shooting during the busiest shopping day of the year was “gang-motivated.” 

And, on Saturday, a shooting at a 2-year-old’s birthday party in Stockton left 11 injured and four dead, including three minors; the victims were aged 8, 9, 14 and 21.

The individual circumstances in each incident are different, and the Editorial Board is by no means trying to conflate these unique scenarios and tragedies into one nondistinct event. What we do recognize is that gun violence — and the culture around it — remains pernicious in American society.

As of Dec. 1, there have been 13,501 shooting fatalities in the United States in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). The U.S. gun homicide rate is 26 times that of similar high-income countries, and the GVA counts 380 mass shootings in the country so far this year. As of 2022, the U.S. had 121 firearms for every 100 residents.

Yeah, we really need to get that average up to at least three guns per person.

Seriously, though, while the editorial board here was right that the circumstances are different in each instance, they miss something key as they move on from the above-quoted section to lament the lack of gun control. They miss that all three of the instances they mention are in gun-controlled jurisdictions. 

California has the strictest gun control laws in the nation, yet it played host to two of the three shootings outlined, including one that looks like my nightmare scenario for a mass shooting. It’s almost like those laws didn’t do much of anything.

The same is true of Washington, DC. While it’s not as bad as California, it hasn’t been for lack of trying over the years.

Further, the shooter who killed one soldier and wounded another was living in anti-gun Washington state, yet he managed to get a firearm there somehow.

In every case, gun control laws failed, and yet the editorial board here ignores that. They, like so many other college-educated drones, don’t bother to think things through. They just demand more and more oppression, all while thinking the boot is really coming for them. They make no sense at all, but it’s especially bad when they’re trying to convince other people that the oppression is good when it looks like this, but bad when it’s really just something they don’t really agree with and nothing more.

And taxpayer money helps fund this.

That’s the stuff that keeps me awake at night.

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

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