... have no relationship at all. The Democrats have held a supermajority in both houses, the governorship and everything else in the state long enough to have enacted any gun laws they wanted. They could have made it practically impossible to by a gun, ammunition or anything else associated with weaponry at any time, but they didn't. They could have instituted gun buy back programs, created massive, strict re-registration drives and gone house-to-house with warrants from the Democratic AG and some arch-liberal judge looking for guns. None of that happened.
So the next time someone online raves about gun control as a result of this act of terrorism, the proper response is, "Well, why didn't the progressives do something to stop it?"
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| Err, Chris? Your party runs the whole state, lock, stock and two smoking barrels. Not sure why you're yelling at me for praying. |
4 comments:
I think the big point about this latest shooting is that it wouldn't have been prevented by any of the measures that constantly get bandied about as ways to prevent shootings:
- Greater scrutiny of immigrants and refugees wouldn't have stopped them, because the man wasn't an immigrant, and his wife went through (and passed) a security check when she came over two years ago.
- Watching for people with mental health issues wouldn't have helped, because up until the event they didn't show outward signs of being mentally ill. They just looked like another presumably-happy couple with a new baby.
- If they had direct connections to terrorist groups, they evidently were doing a good job of keeping them under wraps. To the point where, if we expected the FBI to pick up on people like them, we'd have to allow the FBI to routinely make full investigations of everybody who ever so much as makes a phone call overseas, or haul all 7 million or so US-resident muslims in for questioning on a regular basis.
- Increased background checks before allowing gun purchases wouldn't have caught them, because so far nobody has found anything about them that would have raised a flag in a background check.
- Banning guns in California wouldn't work, because it's trivially easy to buy them in another state, and unless California institutes border guards, who's to know? And even if all civilian guns in North America were somehow eliminated altogether, well, they were clearly ready to fall back on pipe bombs. And who's going to ban pipes? Or the thousands of things that you can seal into pipes to make them into bombs?
- Arming everybody in the room they attacked probably wouldn't even have stopped them. They burst in, shot for a rather short time, and then were done. The people in the room would have had no warning and little time to go for their weapons, even if they had had them. The presence of a lot of armed people there would probably just have made the attackers shift their emphasis away from guns and more towards bombs.
There are certain kinds of crimes that it is just impractical to prevent. If somebody wants to kill, and doesn't care whether they get killed themselves afterwards, there is no necessity for them to give any warning and precious little that can be done to stop them, short of living your life barricaded inside of a bunker.
California needs to go the extra mile and make murder illegal. I don't know why they didn't think of that before.
Tim, I'm not sure about banning guns in California not working. I think if you did that and enforced it with regular, thorough searches, you could keep the number of guns way down. It's an easier problem to solve than banning guns in a city where driving in from outside the law's boundaries is easier.
What I'm saying is that if you're ever going to try enacting gun control measures to stop these things, you're never going to have a better laboratory than California.
So get on with it, if that's what you (editorial you, not specific you) think we need to do!
Hawaii's the better laboratory, you can't drive in, and there are inspections of everything coming in and out. But have you ever watched an episode of the documentary Hawaii 5-0? That place is crawling with weapons and shootouts.
Your "regular, thorough searches" would probably raise a lot of constitutional questions -- would it be reasonable for cops to search your house for a meth lab every time they smelled bleach (as you ran the clothes drier on a load of white laundry)? What if the probably cause were even more tenuous?
Perhaps you could move closer to the police state model, but we've had three (known) incidents in France already this year.
An armed citizenry can't stop every shooting, but they sure can deter and slow them. Every time I hear of the shooter stopping to reload, then continuing, I'm annoyed. That's a great opportunity to shoot back.
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