In June, a mob of men beat a gay man senseless in downtown Washington, D.C., calling him a “faggot” and assaulting him in front of his boyfriend. I wrote about the tragedy at the time.
Several weeks have passed, but with this weekend’s tragic shootings in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, and the gun control frenzy that has predictably ensued, I’m reminded of the savage anti-gay beating near where I used to live. Because once again, liberals are pushing overzealous gun control measures that wouldn’t stop mass shootings, but would make it much more difficult for gay Americans to effectively defend ourselves from hate.
National Review writer David French’s new column makes a similar point, and it is masterfully done. He writes about his multiracial family, and how their right to self-defense is more important than ever. French asks: “My family has been threatened by white nationalists. Why should they outgun me?”
Some of the policies liberals are proposing, such as “universal background checks,” wouldn’t necessarily limit our right to self-defense to any large extent, even if they also do nothing to prevent shootings. But many of these gun control policies — such as banning semi-automatic weapons, raising the age to buy a gun to 21, restricting magazine size, and more — would directly inhibit our ability to defend ourselves, and leave us “outgunned” as French described.
And let’s be clear: None of these policies could stop the high-profile mass shootings that are increasingly pushing people toward their implementation. In 2015, the fact-checker at the left-leaning Washington Post ran an in-depth analysis examining Sen. Marco Rubio’s claim that none of the gun control policies proposed at that time would have stopped mass shootings. The Post had to grudgingly admit that the Florida Republican’s statement was 100% true.
And as National Review’s statistical wizard Robert VerBruggen aptly pointed out, “Anyone who thinks gun control is an obvious, surefire panacea should look at the RAND Corporation’s enormous review of the gun violence literature from last year, which uncovered ‘no qualifying studies showing that any of the 13 policies we investigated decreased mass shootings.’”
So these policies wouldn’t stop the shootings that, understandably, have everyone so upset and eager to “do something.” How, then, can liberals justify pushing through laws that would restrict the self-defense rights of vulnerable minorities?
That doesn’t sound very “progressive” to me.
Even some supposed conservatives are joining in on the cacophonous cry for Second Amendment restrictions. Resist the urge to let raw emotion without reason and unbridled fear win the day. The urge to “do something” is understandable, but it must be resisted so long as the proposed courses of action would do little to make us safer, and quite a bit to restrict the self-defense rights of Americans who are especially at risk.
