[Ed – An earlier version of this story referenced a ridiculous-sounding tweet by Maxine Waters that turned out to be bogus. We apologize for any misinformation we helped foster.]
Since last week’s tragic shooting in Parkland, Fla., a number of recommendations have been made — some good, some not — for rectifying this recurring national nightmare. Typically, the bad ideas vastly outweigh the good.
One of the more thought-provoking recommendations was made last October by Leah Libresco, a former writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. Libresco spent three months analyzing the 33,000 gun deaths that occur in the U.S. per year. Her findings were published in The Washington Post under the headline “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”
The text that followed is seldom quoted by the Left, which seems to feel it knows all it needs to know to put an end to gun violence. Libresco wrote:
We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gunowner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled [sic] grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
The reason liberals don’t want to hear these recommendations is that are often made by Constitutionalists who see merit in preserving the Second Amendment as drafted by the founders.
That hasn’t stopped the suggestions from flowing. Someone named
From there comes his “outside-the-box solution,” designed to force GOP lawmakers to knuckle under to their Democratic brethren. It’s for him and his fellow Muslims to join the NRA. He writes:
Think about it. There are anywhere between 3 million and 7 million Muslims in the United States. There are only around 5 million members of the NRA. A mass membership drive by Muslim-Americans could effectively give them control of the organization.
It would also petrify conservatives the length and breadth of the United States.
CBS rehashes all the conventional anti-gun arguments (improve the mental health system, whatever that means) and adds a novelty: Sell only “smart guns,” which respond only to the owner’s fingerprints or hand grip.
Finally, there’s this tweet by Democratic Senator Kamala Harris who lamented, “Our babies are being slaughtered.”
This cannot be a political issue. We have to have smart gun safety laws – our babies are being slaughtered. pic.twitter.com/Z62eK5LkhP
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) February 15, 2018
One might be willing to take her suggestion a little more seriously if she weren’t so dedicated to unfettered abortion for all. Slaughtering our babies indeed!
