Another Excuse for More Gun Control

By: Jacob Hornberger

Not surprisingly, the latest gun massacre in California has President Biden and American statists calling for more gun control.

But as the Los Angeles Times stated in an editorial, “California already has the nation’s strongest gun control laws, including universal background checks and a state database of firearm sales. The Golden State has at least 107 gun control laws on the books, laws that were debated, passed and signed under a Capitol dome that gleams above the deadliest of Sunday’s crime scenes.”

Any reasonable person would conclude that the latest mass murder demonstrates that gun control doesn’t work. But the gun-control crowd is far from reasonable. Their conclusion? They say that the shooting demonstrates that we need even more gun control.

Question: If California’s stringent gun-control laws didn’t prevent this latest mass killing, why would more stringent gun-control laws prevent future mass killings? 

In other words, if the shooters in the latest shooting spree chose to violate California’s gun-control laws, why should we assume that shooters in the future will obey California’s gun-control laws?

In fact, what the gun-control crowd cannot see is that enacting even more stringent gun-control laws will actually encourage more shootings. Why is that so? Because the shooters know that most Californians are disarmed and, therefore, unable to defend themselves against the illegal shooters. 

Think of it this way: If you are a shooter planning to kill a large number of people, where would you choose to shoot: (1) at a gun show in Texas or (2) at a county fair in California where carrying a gun is a felony? 

Any reasonable shooter would obviously choose (2) or any other gun-free zone. When he does so, he can safely assume that most everyone will be defenseless. That’s because most people do not want to take the chance of incurring a felony conviction and several years in a penitentiary for illegally carrying a firearm. On the other hand, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, if a shooter doesn’t give a hoot for a law against murder, he’s not going to give a hoot for a law that makes it illegal for him to carry a gun that he intends to use to commit his murders.

The gun-control crowd has to realize this. Thus, their real dream is to have a society in which it is illegal for people to own any guns at all, like in North Korea. With government officials being the only ones owning guns, there will be no more mass killings or any killings at all. Well … except for government killings of people, who would now no longer be able to shoot back when military and intelligence personnel come to their homes to round them up, and jail, torture, rape, disappear, or execute them, as the goons of U.S.-supported military general Augusto Pinochet did to 60,000 Chileans after the CIA-incited 1973 coup in Chile.

The gun-control crowd laments America’s culture of violence and blames it on the natural, God-given right to keep and bear arms. They just don’t get it. The real root cause of America’s culture of violence is two-fold:

The first is the drug war. That decades-old failed federal program has produced nothing but death and violence, not to mention official corruption and destruction of liberty and privacy. Legalize drugs, and all of the drug-war-related violence disappears. But the gun-control crowd can’t go down that road because too many of them and their friends are dependent on the financial largess, both licit and illicit, that comes with this failed, deadly, and destructive federal program.

The second is the U.S. government’s decades-old policy of foreign interventionism, which has brought death to millions of people, along with a mindset of indifference to the value of the lives of foreigners. Given the culture of death and this mindset of indifference to the value of foreign human life, why should it surprise anyone that such a culture and such a mindset inevitably permeates domestic society? End America’s policy of foreign interventionism, and mass killings would plummet. But once again, America’s gun-control crowd can’t go down that road because so many of them and their friends are dependent on the financial largess that comes with this failed, deadly, and destructive federal program.

Repeal all gun-control laws, which would enable people to defend themselves. Legalize drugs. End foreign interventionism. That’s the way to get America back on the right road — toward liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony.