Members of the Washington Post’s editorial board want to limit the gun rights of Americans, and in their quest to make that happen, they are directly targeting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
In a full-page editorial entitled “Do Something, Mr. McConnell,” the board lists the names of victims from several high-profile mass shootings and accuses McConnell and other Republicans of lacking “the moral imperative to act” when people are “randomly slaughtered.”
“Thirty-eight people were slain in three such shootings in August — in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, as well as West Texas — and still Senate Republicans and President Trump refuse to act.”
Disingenuous “solutions”
It is certainly true that those deaths are utterly tragic, but what isn’t clear is how the Post’s suggestions would have prevented them.
One such recommendation is to “ban the sale of military-grade assault weapons” as they are “unneeded by civilians” and “a blight on the nation.” Readers are told that “eliminating them would slow the growth” of mass killings. However, there is little to support those claims.
The term “assault weapon” was coined towards the end of World War II and referred to a selective fire rifle chambered in an intermediate cartridge. All privately owned selective fire weapons are required to be registered with the federal government and the sale of new models has been banned since 1986.
Semiautomatic rifles with similar designs are often referred to as “assault weapons,” but these are used in a very small percentage of all homicides. Of the of the 15,129 murders committed in 2017, the FBI reports that only four hundred and six involved rifles of any kind.
Nor is there evidence that banning them would stop mass shootings from occurring, as some of the deadliest attacks in the country’s history have been committed with pistols and shotguns. However, such a regulation would halt the ability of potential victims to effectively defend themselves.
Right to self-defense
Being able to fire multiple rounds without reloading can allow one person to take on multiple attackers, something a Milwaukee man demonstrated with his AR-15. A business owner in Detroit did the same, as did a Houston resident who stopped a drive-by shooting in his own neighborhood. A Michigan mom also used her rifle to chase off three home invaders.
What’s more, a semiautomatic rifle is one of the few ways a lone individual can successfully ward off an angry mob. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, many Korean-American store owners used them to protect their property despite being heavily outnumbered.
Figures from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention from 2017 show that 626 children aged nine and under drowned that year, yet the Washington Post’s editorial board is not calling for more restrictions on hot tubs, pools, or plastic buckets, and none of those can be used to defend one’s life or the lives of others. That alone shows that they’re less interested in actually saving lives than in advancing an ideological agenda.
Mitch McConnell must continue to fight.
No comments: