When I write about something out of USA Today, it’s rarely complimentary. The same people who brought us the chainsaw bayonet freakout haven’t really improved all that much since then. So, if they decided to do something different, I feel obligated to applaud them for it. While it’s an op-ed, it’s still a piece that does what ABC News did on Monday and celebrates an act of armed citizen heroism, rather than some of the other options.
In fact, the op-ed in question says we need more of what we saw over the weekend, not what we’ve been getting from people like Everytown, Brady, Giffords, and the like.
The late Mr. Rogers told audiences his mother always told him to “look for the helpers” when he saw scary things on the news. This advice can feel hard to follow in today’s world of nonstop overwhelming news.
But it’s possible. The Aug. 1 shooting at an Idaho In-N-Out Burger proves it.
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In Idaho, most adults can legally possess a firearm and carry a concealed handgun without a permit, which is exactly what gave Salinas the freedom to be prepared.
That freedom doesn’t always work. The horrendous 2022 Uvalde school shooting in Texas is proof: Armed law enforcement officers were on scene and still failed to act in time to save 19 children and two adults.
Politicians typically react to shootings with calls for more gun laws, and that was the response of many after Uvalde. But strict gun control hasn’t stopped high gun crime rates in states like Illinois and California.
And strict laws leave law-abiding citizens with little or no ability to protect themselves if a shooting unfolds while they’re eating a burger.
Self-defense with a firearm is rare. But that doesn’t make it unnecessary. There are many accounts of an armed bystander stopping a shooting in progress.
And there are likely a lot more accounts we don’t remember because the time or place of the encounter prevented the incident from getting national coverage as this one did.
Gun control is one of those things that sounds great unless you spend half a second thinking about it critically. Gun-free zones, such as those which were at the heart of the Wolford case, keep people like Jordan Salinas disarmed while it would have done nothing to discourage the killer. Restrictions on magazine capacity mean people like the armed citizen in Cambridge, MA, who took on the bridge shooter, didn’t have enough ammunition to meet the threat completely.
Banning guns in churches wouldn’t have stopped the would-be mass killer, but it might have prevented Jack Wilson from being able to put him down as quickly as he did.
I disagree vehemently with the study that claims self-defense with a firearm is rare, but if it turns out that one is right compared to all the research showing it to be much more common, then the problem is that we need it to be more common. Good people with guns are rarely the issue. Mass killers are rarely people who are just milling about their day, with a long history of being law-abiding, then suddenly decide to flip out and murder folks.
We can’t identify these people very well, apparently, so the best option is to empower regular people to be like Jordan Salinas and the many others whom we could name.
Gun laws work against the helpers. It works against the good guys.
It does nothing to stop the evil.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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