Defending schools against shooters, treating mental illness (especially among young men) seriously, and checking juvenile criminal records are all elements of the Senate’s framework gun bill that make the legislation worth early support.
So is federal encouragement of red-flag laws to take guns away from evidently dangerous people, as long as these laws are tightly drafted and administrated so innocent targets aren’t defamed (especially for political reasons) and denied due process. Republican and Democratic compromise to produce this draft is also promising.
For all the caveats legitimately raised about the Left’s ultimate goal — is it a disarmed citizenry without the protection of the Second Amendment? — we cannot appropriately walk away from the mass murder of children, such as in Uvalde, Texas, muttering “slippery slope,” and insisting nothing can be done.
Such concerns aren’t baseless, but making this nation once again orderly and well governed — restoring America — is a long-term project, certainly too lengthy to justify deferring swift measures to protect the innocent young.
The dead 10-year-olds of Uvalde did not put themselves in harm’s way. It was adults who created their fatal circumstances. This means a different moral calculation must apply to grade-school massacres than to the far more numerous murders of other types. Nevertheless, those other murders will test the truthfulness or expose the falsehood of the Left’s concern about “gun violence.”
The FBI reckons 38 deaths in 2020 were attributable to mass shootings comparable to the one in Uvalde. That’s out of 19,384 murders recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up 35% from 2019. The surge coincided with mass rioting and a breakdown in law enforcement after the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer. The hideous irony is that black people accounted for 58% of the total and 65% of the 4,957 extra deaths.
Handguns are known to have been used for 59% of 2020’s murders and manslaughters, rifles and so-called assault weapons for 3%, and shotguns for 1%. Weapon type was not recorded for the remaining 36%. This suggests handguns may have been used in 9 out of every 10 gun murders.
Although the different moral calculus of mass child murder justifies attention now being paid to rifles, anyone genuinely interested in reducing “gun violence” should want to tackle the criminal misuse of handguns.
Instead, rogue prosecutors, inspired by radical left-wing ideology, are negligently stoking a spreading blaze of violent crime by refusing to prosecute criminals and, opposing bail, keeping them on the streets.
One such prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, was recently ousted by recall voters in San Francisco. But Andrew McCarthy reveals in his cover story that Boudin is just one of many, and there is a long and difficult struggle ahead to undo the damage being wrought by the Marxist militants now wielding executive power all over the country.
Only if Democrats heed the demand of our headline to “Throw the Bums Out!” will the horror they express toward gun violence be plausible. Only if they do so will it be possible to start taking their refrain about disproportionate racial impact seriously.
If only.
