In the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Democrats are once again proposing gun control policies that would have done nothing to prevent the shooting or any of the other high-profile shootings that Democrats grandstand over.
The most shameless of the Democratic Party’s gun control enthusiasts began their tirades moments after the shooting. Hillary Clinton, President Joe Biden, and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) all declared that something must be done. But what? They don’t have many specifics.
As usual, the few vague ideas they have would do nothing to have prevented what happened. The shooter legally purchased two firearms from a “local federal firearms licensee,” meaning that he had to have passed a background check. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor that he would bring forward two background check bills anyway. Universal background checks don’t apply here, and it’s not clear how “expanding” background checks would have done anything either.
A ban on “assault weapons” would be useless, given that such bans are entirely based on the cosmetics of a firearm. Indeed, the shooter in Buffalo, New York, circumvented the state’s assault weapons ban by altering a legal rifle in violation of the law. A red flag law may have prevented this shooting, but it didn’t do so in Buffalo or in Boulder, Colorado, last year.
In 2015, the Washington Post fact-checked a claim by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that “none of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years” would have been prevented by popular gun control proposals. The Washington Post, hardly a pro-gun outlet, determined that Rubio was correct, citing the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut (where the shooter stole his mother’s firearms), Charleston, South Carolina (where human error caused a failure in the background check system), and San Bernardino, California (where Democrats can pass all the constitutional gun control proposals they want), among others.
And Rubio’s claim remains true for shootings after 2015. The shooter in Parkland, Florida, was a walking red flag, but it was the school district and the sheriff’s department that failed, not a lack of gun laws. The shooters in Sacramento were repeat criminals with gang affiliations who were not legally allowed to own firearms. (That shooting was ushered out of the news quickly). New York City subway shooting suspect Frank James had a long criminal history, as did Andrew Abdullah, a man suspected in a separate subway shooting who was recently arrested.
Democrats can use as many ridiculous stunts and stale talking points as they like, but their righteous indignation is all an act to manipulate voters emotionally. Democrats either don’t know that their gun control proposals would do nothing, making them incompetent, or they simply don’t care, showing how insincere their rhetoric is. Whatever the answer is, they are contributing nothing to the conversation aside from turning tragedies into campaign opportunities.
