Democrats are pushing gun control in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. Once again, they have no idea whether their chosen proposals would have done anything at all, and they’re already ignoring many of the facts at hand.
President Biden started the fact-free mission, rather proudly declaring that it didn’t matter that he didn’t know anything about the shooter in Boulder, Colorado, his motive, or the weapons he used. “I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take commonsense steps or save the lives in the future,” he said.
He called for an assault weapons ban, even though the shooter was also armed with a handgun. He called for closing the “Charleston loophole,” which wasn’t a loophole but a human error in the background check process. He said Republicans should back the universal background check bill put forward in the House of Representatives, even though Colorado already signed universal background checks into law in 2013.
What about other typical gun-control proposals? Fox News contributor Richard Fowler was certain that a 10-day waiting period would have prevented the Boulder shooting and the Atlanta spa shootings, but that can’t be claimed definitively until we get more information about both (the Colorado shooter bought his gun six days earlier, for what that’s worth).
What about red flag laws? After all, the Boulder shooter’s brother said he was paranoid, and former classmates of his said he had a quick temper. But Colorado already instituted its own red flag laws at the start of 2020. Like the state’s universal background checks, the red flag law obviously didn’t stop this shooting.
The fact is that we don’t know what, if anything, could have prevented this shooting. As is often the case, Democrats are chasing shiny objects, repeating talking points about background checks and assault weapons that have become stale after being trotted out for every gun-control discussion, regardless of the facts.
The impulse to “do something” is not good enough to change anything when the policies put forward by Democrats would accomplish nothing. And it certainly doesn’t help that Democrats pushing these policies that are completely unrelated to the shootings they want to prevent have endorsed gun confiscation, as both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have done.
If Democrats actually care about doing something that makes a difference, they would recognize that their proposals are irrelevant to this shooting, at least until more information comes out. But, of course, that hasn’t stopped them before, and we will probably see more Democratic tantrums than serious proposals this time as well.
