Once again, Democrats are pushing radical gun control legislation, as they usually do on the heels of a mass shooting that garners a certain level of attention from the mainstream media.
According to Breitbart, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that the best and most effective solution to curbing gun violence across the country would be to reduce “the total number of guns” owned by Americans.
“The only way”
Brooks’ remarks on the hot political topic of the day came during a recent appearance on PBS’s “NewsHour.”
“[T]he more I look at it, and I’m not alone in this, the more you conclude that the simple problem is we have too many guns in America,” Brook said. “There’s upwards of, some estimates, 350 million guns in this country. And so, when you get a lonely young man who’s detached and sociopathic, getting a gun for that person is not hard.”
Brooks continued by suggesting that background checks and “assault weapon” bans are simply not enough to control gun violence, claiming that a more radical solution is necessary in order to stop the violence.
“And so, we spend a lot of time on these things like background checks and assault weapon bans, and that’s fine,” Brooks said. “But a lot of effort has been put into things that aren’t that effective. We just have to have a debate on how do we reduce the total number of guns in [the] country?”
Brooks added that “other countries have done this, Australia and others, through buybacks and other things. It’s obviously super difficult politically. But, to me, it’s the only way to have a meaningful difference.”
Narrative check
Brooks’ remarks follow the recent mass shooting that took place in Boulder, Colorado. A 21-year-old man named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa allegedly opened fire in a grocery store, claiming multiple lives, including the life of a local police officer. A week before that tragic event, a mass shooting in the Atlanta, Georgia area claimed eight lives, according to the New York Times.
Democrats typically use mass shootings to renew calls for various kinds of gun control that are currently on the table in the halls of Congress. Right now, several gun control bills await a U.S. Senate vote, including a measure that would require universal background checks. One of the problems with the most recent shooting, however, is that it doesn’t exactly line up with the Democrats’ narrative.
Breitbart recently reported that Alissa passed a federal background check before purchasing the gun that he allegedly used in the Boulder grocery store shooting spree.
The outlet included in its report a rather long list of mass shootings in which the shooters obtained their weapons legitimately following all of the necessary background checks.
It is for that reason that some, like Brooks, are seemingly using the current opportunity to push more extremist ideas that fly directly in the face of the rights afforded to American citizens by the Second Amendment, like confiscating the guns of law-abiding citizens through politically acceptable means such as buy-back programs.
The post New York Times columnist calls for reduction in ‘total number of guns’ in America first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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