The cry has gone out: If only Las Vegas murderer Stephen Paddock—instead of being a nihilistic scumbag who wasted his golden years in windowless casinos—had been an Islamic extremist, even the most intransigent of Republicans would be backing gun control measures now. Piers Morgan said as such; Thomas L. Friedman and others have both suggested similarly as well. The idea is that Republicans don’t actually have a principled opposition to gun control: They’re simply bigots.
Unfortunately, however, this is a falsifiable hypothesis. Because there, um, have been mass murders committed by Islamic extremists in recent years. And after each of these jihadist atrocities, Republicans didn’t budge an inch on gun control.
After an Islamic extremist killed four unarmed Marines in Chattanooga in July 2015, leading Republicans pushed for fewer restrictions on guns, in fact. Many—including then-presidential candidate Donald Trump—took aim at the notion of “gun free zones.” (The murdered Marines had been working in them.)
Later that year, Rizwan Farook and Tasheen Malik, who had pledged their support to ISIS, murdered 12 innocents in San Bernardino. Again, this did not change the Republican position on gun control. After the shooting, the Democrats pushed two measures to beef up gun control; the Republican Senate, joined by only one Democrat, voted them down handily.
And most horrifically, Omar Mateen, another ISIS supporter, murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando last year. Again the Democrats pushed for new gun control measures; once again, the Republicans voted them down.
None of this is to support the GOP’s opposition to gun control, by the way—I’m much of less of a Second Amendment absolutist than many on the right. My only aim here is to shoot a few holes in what is clearly a bogus argument about the “hypocrisy” of the Republicans over guns.
