Anniversaries are important in our minds. Marking the passage of time is just something we do. I’m sure someone out there has theories as to just why it matters, but for our purposes, let’s just accept that it does.
Unfortunately, that also means people choose anniversaries as a prime time to try and push for various things. Tragedies often elicit the desire to address whatever some perceive as the reason it occurred, and the anniversaries of such tragedies have a tendency to do the same.
Which opened the door for our lame-duck president to try to make one last gun grab before leaving office.
President Joe Biden urged Congress to “do something” on gun control Saturday, the 12th anniversary of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary.
Biden released a five paragraph statement to mark the tragic anniversary, noting the attack resulted in the creation of Moms Demand Action and Gabby Giffords’ gun control group Giffords.
He painted a picture of the groups as being organic, omitting any mention of the relationship between Moms Demand and Mike Bloomberg.
The departing president mentioned the gun control he signed in 2022, and repeated the now-debunked claim that homicides and crime fell on his watch.
We know that while the FBI initially reported that they fell, the bureau also quietly revised those numbers upward.
However, what bugs me are those two words in quotation marks above. The phrase “do something” is the path to tyranny, folks. It always will be, too.
See, you’re never going to eliminate tragedy. Many think that Sandy Hook is evidence that we need a so-called assault weapon ban. They ignore the fact that as awful as that day was, Virginia Tech claimed more lives. That killer used handguns as his weapon of choice. As such, there’s absolutely no reason for me to just accept that without an AR-15-style rifle, the killer at Sandy Hook Elementary would have been powerless to claim just as many lives, if not more.
Yet that never stops people from saying we need to “do something,” which invariably means passing some law that restricts our rights simply because someone awful did something awful.
Oh, sure, a lot of the “do something” crowd aren’t really gun control activists. They’re people who are shocked and just want to see our lawmakers act in a way that signals they’re determined not to let it happen again. The problem is that the gun control bunch has convinced way too many people that the only viable “something” that can be done is gun control.
So Biden is on his way out, and he wants Congress to act, to “do something,” which coincidentally is the “something” he’s been trying to do for the last four years.
Congress, thankfully, is disinclined to do as he wishes.
Republicans control the House and aren’t likely to give Biden a win on his way out the door. The incoming Congress is firmly in GOP hands, though not without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Still, it’s enough of a majority to keep gun control from passing if everyone stays true to their stated principles.
Read the full article here
