The right to keep and bear arms is an important part of the fabric of America. Our Founding Fathers preserved it in the Second Amendment because they knew it had a place in a free society, that removing our right to keep and bear arms would have negative ramifications far beyond what gun control might mitigate, if anything.
Unfortunately, freedom means that some people will misuse those rights for nefarious purposes.
That’s what happened in Minnesota over the weekend.
Now, we need to denounce what happened, and most people have. We don’t need that kind of thing here in the United States. We might get loud, but shooting people just because you disagree with them over politics is going way too far. Especially when there are still elections that work where you can remove people from office if enough other people agree that they’re doing the wrong thing.
Yet it happened, and it seems some Democrats are pointing fingers, both at President Donald Trump and at our right to keep and bear arms.
During a panel discussion later on in the broadcast, former Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) and Democratic strategist Karen Finney attempted to blame the situation on the fact that firearms were easily accessible in the United States.
“My God, we’ve got to stop thinking we can solve our problems or we can get attention for ourselves or our point of view or whatever that person thought they were doing with firearms,” Levin said. “It’s an epidemic in this country. We used to worry so much about school shootings, all the time, all the time, now people — the president himself was, you know, the target of two assassination attempts. This is something we’ve got to take on as a policy matter in this country.”
“Look, I’m a gun guy. I wouldn’t necessarily place the blame on guns,” Shermichael Singleton added, saying that he did agree that too many people believed violence was the best way to get a point across. Singleton noted that far too many people were “unstable” and apparently unwilling to engage in debate or simply vote out the people with whom they disagreed.
Levin pushed back then, claiming that mental health in the United States was not dramatically worse than in other nations, once again arguing that access to firearms was the problem. “We have a problem of firearms being accessible – sub-machine guns, all kinds of guns, and it’s — we’re not going to solve the problem until we step up to the plate and take on this epidemic —”
Singleton interrupted, saying, “By the way, you can’t buy a sub-machine gun anymore, Congressman, that was outlawed decades ago.”
Singleton is only partially right. You can still buy them, but not without extensive paperwork and not without spending a buttload of money. They’re as rare as hens’ teeth and not readily available.
But they’re still, technically, legal to purchase if you follow the steps.
For all practical purposes, though, they might as well be banned across the board for most of us.
Levin, however, is still an absolute moron for even pretending that sub-machien guns are “accessible.”
Honestly, I’m absolutely disgusted by this whole line of “reasoning” from Levin. To use this awful situation to go after our gun rights, especially when we also have recent history of an alleged assassin who used a 3D-printed firearm, a 3D-printed suppressor, and a New York street to kill a healthcare CEO he didn’t care for. He skirted all of the gun control laws, which means any would-be assassin could as well.
Gun control isn’t the answer.
Frankly, I also find the idea of blaming Trump’s rhetoric for what happened ridiculous, considering none of them accepted responsibility for either attempted assassination of the then-candidate, considering the Democratic rhetoric about how Trump was an existential threat to democracy. If his rhetoric is responsible, how come theirs wasn’t?
Now, understand that I think we need to calm down the rhetoric a bit, too. This isn’t helping and getting people so worked up, on both sides, probably does contribute to people shooting up those they disagree with.
It’s not how we handle things in this country.
I will say, though, that I haven’t seen anyone who is pro-gun celebrate Vance Boelter. I can’t say that about the other side of things with regard to Luigi Mangione.
Read the full article here
