Passing expanded background checks after a shooting is tantamount to demanding stricter drivers tests after a hit and run

 … passing expanded background checks after a school shooting is tantamount to demanding stricter drivers tests after a hit and run

writes David Harsanyi in his Daily Signal article on The Trouble With Do-Somethingism on Guns. (merci à EJ).

Whether America is more prone to mental illness or not, these incidents are almost exclusively perpetrated by young men who have exhibited serious antisocial behavior. All of them break a slew of existing laws. All of them have either obtained guns illegally, or legally before having any criminal record. In many, if not most, cases, the shooter is already on the cops’ radar because he has threatened others or written insane, violent manifestos.

In a study of mass shootings from 2008 to 2017, the Secret Service found that “100 percent of perpetrators showed concerning behaviors, and in 77 percent of shootings, at least one person—most often a peer—knew about their plan.”

Rather than focusing on these tangible entry points for potentially useful legislation, instead of proposing ideas on better identifying shooters before they act, instead of thinking about how schools could be structurally safer, instead of debating the efficacy of putting more cops in schools—and none of these are panaceas, mind you—Senate Democrats were busy dunking on Republicans for failing to support bills that have absolutely zero to do with mass shootings.

Sen. Chuck Schumer planned to introduce HR 8, an expanded background check bill, and HR 1446, a bill that would close the alleged “Charleston Loophole” (before he realized it wouldn’t be politically expedient). “Alleged” because Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, got a clean background check, not because of any “loophole,” but because local prosecutors had failed to respond to the FBI’s request for information. It was a case of human error, or negligence. 

 … And passing expanded background checks after a school shooting is tantamount to demanding stricter drivers tests after a hit and run.

Democrats, obsessed with largely irrelevant issues like AR-15s and “universal background checks,” are largely living in the early 1990s. President Joe Biden’s address to the nation consisted of a litany of hackneyed talking points he’s been regurgitating for decades now—including that transcendently stupid joke about deer in Kevlar. “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden said—again.

 … Republicans will have to deal with a barrage of preposterous smears. “There is no such thing as being ‘pro-life’ while supporting laws that let children be shot in their schools, elders in grocery stores, worshippers in their houses of faith, survivors by abusers, or anyone in a crowded place,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., tweeted.

This was indicative of the sort of demented accusation thrown around these days. One suspects liberals who take to the internet to accuse Republicans of abetting infanticide aren’t really interested in compromise. Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, who champions laws that empower people to terminate the lives of the viable unborn, I don’t know of a single Republican who supports the gunning down of elementary school children.

Indeed, law-abiding Americans have no obligation to take ownership of a madman’s actions. Nor is there any reason for them to surrender their right to self-defense so that Murphy, who, evidenced in many of his comments, is only interested in incrementally limiting gun ownership. That’s his right, of course. He should try to repeal the Second Amendment.

Related: • In View of the Texas Mass Murder, Should the NRA's Convention in Houston Be Cancelled?
• What Is to Blame for the Connecticut Shooting? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere? (Ten-year-old post, but still entirely pertinent)
• T'is easy to tout the success of gun control laws in the rest of the Western world when you ignore certain pertinent facts from Europe
• Mourning "all lives lost to gun violence" is like calling the people murdered on 9/11 victims of “airplane violence”