More Gun Laws Would Not End Massacres

A San Mateo County Sheriff officer puts up police tape at a crime scene after a shooting in Half Moon Bay, Calif., on Jan. 24, 2023. (Samantha Laurey/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Like everyone else, I’m horrified at the recent spate of massacres using guns in California. My hopes and prayers go out to the victims and their families.

But in my job, it’s always incumbent on me to point out the policy implications of any proposed attempts at remedies. The emotions of the moment must be seen in the light of reason.

Said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), whose district is next to Half Moon Bay, the location of one of the tragedies, “There’s no silver bullet, we have to start, of course, by saying these weapons of war don’t belong on our streets.”

In fact, “weapons of war,” or “assault weapons,” are no different from regular rifles, but just look meaner. The differences are cosmetic. A ban on them would mean a ban on all rifles.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed numerous gun-control laws that make California the most restrictive in the nation. One of those laws made illegal the gun used by the killer in Monterey Park, a 9mm MAC-10. It also appears, according to ABC7, the killer was making firearm suppressors (“silencers”) at home, which also is illegal. But in these days of 3D printing, it’s easy to do. I won’t link to them, but 3D blueprints are online even to make guns.

Yet Newsom attacked Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a fellow Californian, “Where’s he been on gun safety reform? Where’s the Republican Party been on gun safety reform? Shame on them. Shame on those that allow and perpetuate that to be rewarded politically.”

Actually, last year Republicans helped Democrats pass a bipartisan gun bill, the first in three decades. One was Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. That was one reason Wyoming’s voters ousted her.

Elections Have Consequences

This shows the problem for all those backing new gun controls. In our Democracy, gun rights forces are popular enough they can win enough elections to halt any serious encroachments on the Second Amendment. Democrats found that out the hard way when the passed the 1994 “assault weapons” ban President Biden keeps boasting about how he pushed into law when he was a senator.

That November, Democrats lost control of both the Senate and the House, partly because gun rights voters organized to put Republicans in office.

Gun rights backers also have spent decades working for Republican presidential candidates, hoping they would put Second Amendment backers on the Supreme Court. That paid off with the 2008 Heller decision, which guaranteed the amendment’s right personally to “keep and bear arms.” Then in 2022, the New York Rifle & Pistol Association decision guaranteed the right to carry a gun in public.

If gun controllers are upset, they should blame themselves for backing such presidential candidates as Michael Dukakis in 1998, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In our democratic system, voters rejected them in favor of gun rights candidates, respectively, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who in turn placed on the court such justices as Clarence Thomas in 1991, who wrote last year’s gun decision.

Guns and Freedom

Perhaps most misleading was the editorial in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 22 at 4:47 pm, “Editorial: Monterey Park shooting is horrific, but all too familiar.” That was less than 24 hours after the killings, hardly enough time to gather even the most rudimentary facts.

It opined:

There is no common profile of the killers, but they have one thing in common: They have guns. And in one way or another, we hand them their weapons. The United States is the only society with such a powerful gun lobby.

Yes, and it’s still the most free society on earth for that very reason. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom also have our inheritance of “the rights of Englishmen” in English Common Law, yet have given up not only the right to keep and bear arms, but to free speech and assembly. Witness the obscene attack on the trucker protesters in Canada a year ago.

(I have to add this nowadays: By the “rights of Englishmen,” of course, I mean the rights of any resident of those countries, of any background, and of men and women. I have no English ancestry myself.)

I have a saying: Second Amendment, first freedom. If you can’t own a gun to defend your home, then how free are you? That doesn’t mean you absolutely must own a gun. Only that you can own one. And of course, a criminal contemplating a “home invasion” has no idea if you have a gun or not.

In the neighborhood I grew up in Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s, almost every father was a veteran of World War II or the Korean War. All of them owned guns—and knew how to use them. No home invasions.

The Times also is wrong about societies and guns. In Switzerland, every adult male is expected to serve in their Army and keeps at home not just a semi-automatic rifle (one shot at a time), but a fully-automatic rifle and ammunition. Crime is really low there.

The Times again:

That lobby and the manufacturers who profit from the sale of millions of weapons systematically injected right-wing politics with an ideology that equates gun proliferation with liberty, and even modest, common-sense controls with government oppression.

So the Times is against profits? How else would honest, law-abiding people acquire guns but from gun companies? And we all know “common-sense controls” is the way the Canadians, Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis lost this essential right.

‘Evil Genius’

The Times:

The gun lobby’s evil genius is so profound that it has convinced millions of Americans that the only way to defend themselves against all the violence perpetrated by a populace with too many guns is to acquire more guns.

So if you favor gun rights, you’re “evil.” It’s rhetoric like this that, whenever Americans read it, leads them precisely to go out and buy guns. They fear the gun-grabbers soon will arrive with a “rude knock at the door” in the middle of the night, as Solzhenitsyn described secret police raids in the Soviet Union. No wonder more than 400 million guns are owned by Americans. And how, pray tell, does the Times propose to grab all those guns? How many rude knocks on the door will it take?

Finally, however horrible these gun massacres are—and they are beyond horrible—psychos bent on killing have other means at their disposal. Just before Christmas 2021, in Waukesha, Wisc., Darrell E. Brooks Jr. maniacally drove an SUV into a parade, killing six people. Last November, he was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In 2016 in Nice, France, a maniac named Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a 19-ton cargo truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86 people. Police then killed him.

Should we ban SUVs and cargo trucks?

The Tragic Sense of Life

So what should be done about the gun killings? I think we have more gun laws than are needed. Maybe what’s needed is the realization of what Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called “The Tragic Sense Life.” That bad things happen to good people. And that reacting rashly to a horrible action can make a bad situation even worse.

Unamuno wrote (full book online here):

This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme beauty, or the supreme consolation. And since love is full of suffering, since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks. A tragic consolation! And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy. The consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away, and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the beautiful.

And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity. Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.