If only france had sensible gun control laws, the Paris attacks of November 13th would not have happened
writes
Benny Huang acidly, with irony galore.
Okay, everyone knows that isn’t true. france has gone way beyond “sensible” gun
control laws and has, for all practical purposes, banned civilian
ownership of firearms. It didn’t stop last week’s surreal carnage—and it
won’t stop the next attack either.
Freelance reporter David Axe explained on the Daily Beast how fully automatic rifles have come to contaminate la République française. … As David Axe explains, it isn’t particularly difficult to obtain an AK-47 in france
today—provided you have the proper underworld connections. The
underworld, by definition, is the domain of the criminal class, so it
should come as no surprise that bad guys can get their hands on serious
firepower without much difficulty.
The problem is getting worse. In 2012, a young Muslim shot up a
Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a teacher and three students. In
January, a team of Muslim terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie
Hebdo, a left-wing satire magazine that regularly mocked religion—and
didn’t spare Islam. There was also the attempted shooting spree in
August of this year by a Muslim terrorist onboard an Amsterdam-to-Paris
train that was thankfully thwarted by an American trio.
And that’s just the terrorism! France also suffers from ordinary violent crime, centered in its immigrant ghettoes, of course. The city of Marseille in the south of France
has become something of a war zone in recent years, earning it the
ignominious title “the most dangerous city in Europe.” Turf wars are
fought with the same full-auto Kalashnikovs used in the most recent
Paris attacks. “Marseille is sick with its violence,” then-Interior
Minister Manuel Valls said in 2013.
If the recent Paris attacks prove anything it’s that mass shootings
are not a uniquely American phenomenon. Some people will surely argue
that the US still leads the world in violent rampages and that any
comparison between us and them would be a false one. Of course, I don’t
mean to imply that the US, when compared to Western Europe, has an equal
number of spree killings, or even a proportional number of spree
killings, but I will posit that the explanation for the disparity has
little to do with differences in our laws.
The second amendment to the Constitution has been the law of the land
since 1791. For the better part of two hundred years Americans managed
to keep and bear arms with very few instances of people “going postal.”
But then things began to change.
People were shocked when, in 1966, a man named Charles Whitman
climbed the clock tower at UT-Austin and began sniping at students
below. Stuff like that just didn’t happen in those more innocent times.
In the decades that followed, the situation only worsened. The killing
seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s—Jonesboro, Arkansas, Springfield,
Oregon, and Paducah, Kentucky. The levy broke in 1999 when two teenagers
in Colorado laid siege to their high school, killing thirteen people
before committing suicide. Since then the massacres have all become a
blur—Newtown, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Charleston, the Sikh Temple. It
never seems to end.
Liberals have indicted guns. They believe that banning them would be a
quick fix and it’s what they strongly imply we should do—usually before
issuing heated denials that anyone wants to trample your second
amendment rights. They just want a few “common sense” controls to make
sure guns don’t fall into the wrong hands, or so they say. But of course
they want to ban guns and that’s why they look to European nations like
France as their model. Spree killings just don’t happen there—except when they do.
Contrary to gun control propaganda, Europe has not escaped the modern scourge of spree killings. Norway’s tough gun control laws didn’t stop the monstrous Anders Brevik from killing 77 people, mostly children, in 2011. Germany’s tough gun
control laws didn’t prevent Robert Steinhäuser from killing sixteen
people at an Erfurt high school in 2002, nor did they prevent Tim
Kretschmer from killing sixteen people “for fun” at a Winnenden
secondary school in 2009. The Czech Republic’s gun control laws didn’t stop a gunman from shooting up a popular restaurant in 2015, killing nine. And of course France’s tough gun
control laws didn’t stop the most recent attacks, the Charlie Hebdo
attacks, the foiled train shooting, the Toulouse Jewish day school
shooting, or even armed street crime.
Banning guns won’t get to the root of the problem, it will only disarm the victims. But just what is the problem? I would argue that we have two.
The first of these problems is a
creeping darkness of the soul. I believe Mike Huckabee summed it up well
when he remarked, in the aftermath of the Oregon community college
shooting that “We have not so much a gun problem, we have a problem with sin and evil.” His remark did not sit well with liberals who were leery of his
religious overtones. Also, they don’t want to admit that the
revolutionary changes that have swept through society since the 1960s
have been anything but positive. Instead they talk about guns. They
would have us believe that the roots of our problem are as old as our
Constitution and the bitter-clinger frontiersmen who built this country.
To them it’s not evil, it’s “gun culture.”
… The other problem is even more difficult to talk about. It’s called
jihad. This unholy “holy war” is responsible for not only the Paris
attacks but also the Fort Hood massacres and the military recruiting
station shootings in Chattanooga and Little Rock.
If liberals are loathe to discuss the sin and evil problem, they are
even more reluctant to talk about jihad because it feels like racism. Take for example the recent tweet from Moms Demand Action, a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun control group which advocates European-style gun
control here in America. You’d think they’d keep quiet at a time when
their preferred policies failed so miserably but they just couldn’t
resist. “We are united in mourning all lives lost to gun violence” they proclaimed. Gun violence? Oh, I suppose that some of the people in Paris were killed with guns—and others with bombs—but none were killed by “gun violence.” They were killed by crazy-ass Muslim violence. Why can’t they bring themselves to say it?
This unwillingness to talk about radical Islam in connection with
terroristic violence does us all a disservice because it lets the perps
off the hook. It would be like calling the people murdered on 9/11
victims of “airplane violence.” Yes, airplanes played a role in what
happened that day but no one was killed by a 747. They were killed by
Mohammad Atta and eighteen of his buddies, all Muslims.
Guns are liberals’ favorite patsy, the inanimate objects they like to
blame when they can’t—or won’t—account for what really ails us.
