Another Mass Shooting, More Reminders Of Why The Anti-Gun Left Cannot Be Trusted

When there was a mass- shooting in Virginia Beach last week, I wondered if this time the determined gun-grabbers would pretty much leave it alone. After all, it was carried out with hand-guns, legally purchased. The perpetrator had no criminal record or psychiatric issues. None of the so-called “sensible gun regulations” that we are lectured about constantly would have stopped him.

My curiosity was quickly slaked when the sad, openly partisan shell of Dan Rather, who was once respected when he was able to pretend that he was an ethical, objective  journalist before the mask dropped, appeared  on “CNN Tonight,”  to accuse Second Amendment-respecting members of Congress who do not rush to disarm law-abiding Americans in the wake of every shooting as “bought and paid for by the gun lobby.” This, of course, is the present disgraceful ideological certitude of the Left: no one of good faith and virtuous objectives can possibly disagree with progressive cant, so dissenters must be evil or corrupt. But, to take an example I am extremely familiar with, if the trial lawyers spend millions to support mostly Democratic legislators who refuse to accept “sensible” reforms to the current civil justice system that makes plaintiffs’ attorneys millionaires, the representatives who vote their way have just been persuaded by the innate rightness of their arguments. The same is true of Democratic support of illegal immigration, abortion, climate change policies, legalizing pot, and on and on—but according to Rather, only gun supporting Congress members are “bought and paid for.”

Boy, do I feel like a chump! Here I am, thinking I was a non-gun owning ethicist who has studied our history, the law, the court cases and the statistics, and thought about the issue a great deal over many years.  I’ve concluded, without anyone paying me a cent, that the Second Amendment is the bulwark of the Bill of Rights, and one of an essential and indispensable defense against the desires of power-seeking politicians to reduce individual liberty in the U.S. to advance an agenda of suffocating government control. What’s the matter with me?

Then came another of the Democratic Presidential candidates, this time the slippery Cory Booker, who also addressed my internal curiosity.

Unable to avoid using a massacre to advance the cause, Sen. Booker (D-N.J.) pushed his plan for comprehensive gun control at the California Democratic Party convention over the weekend. Then he visited  CNN’s “State of the Union,” where intermittently (less and less, but still) ethical journalist  Jake Tapper rules.

“How would your plan have stopped this tragedy, if at all?” Tapper asked, reasonably.

“Well, Jake, again, this is a tragedy today, but you know that every single day in the United States of America, in the aggregate, we have mass shootings that go on in neighborhoods like mine,” Booker said. “We are not helpless to stop this. This is a uniquely American problem. We have carnage in our country at levels that no other nation sees, more people dying in my lifetime due to gun violence than all the Americans that died due to gun violence in every single war from the Revolutionary now — war until now.”


I must  point out that this is a fake statistic, a deceitful statistic designed to deceive. It’s been examined and found “true” by fact-checking services, but deceitful statements are always technically true by definition: deceit is the use of a true but matrially incomplete statement to mislead.  About 63% of all the “gun violence” Booker compares to gun deaths in American wars have been suicides. If the statistic was stated honestly, as in  “Since 1968 people shooting and killing other Americans in this country has taken 37%  as many lives as all the Americans that died due to gun violence in every single war from the Revolutionary war until now,” it would be nowhere near as frightening. However, it would be true and  honest: none of those wartime gun deaths (that we know of) were suicides. Nor have any convincing studies indicated that the unavailability of guns would significantly lessen the frequency of suicides, in which you only have to kill one person, he or she isn’t going to run away or fight, and you can keep trying if at first you don’t succeed.

In my book, this makes Cory Booker a liar. But I digress.

While he did not point out that Booker was cooking the anti-gun, fearmongering books, Tapper did stop the Senator’s monologue. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but … what would have prevented this tragedy?” Tapper asked. “What steps specifically would have stopped the massacre in Virginia Beach?”

Again, Booker refused to answer the question, and blathered on in familiar general rhetoric, so Tapper interjected again, saying,  “I hear you not talking about this specific massacre, but talking about gun violence in general.”

Whereupon, Jake gave up, and changed the subject.

I was just debating the gun control issue with a Democrat friend, who asserted that her Party should make the upcoming election about just three issues: abortion, climate change, and guns. My response was that this would be a gift to Republicans, if they could get their arguments perfected. On the matter of guns, I said that it has been clear to me for a long time that the Left’s gun control strategy is aimed at long term elimination of the right to own guns, and the gutting of the Second Amendment. No measure being recommended short of gun confiscation  (or pre-crime laws, which I will address in another post) will stop shootings and mass shootings, I said, and Democrats know it. So each new shooting, like the one in Virginia Beach, where none of the current “sensible” measures would have stopped the carnage, will  spark those who fear guns, hate guns, don’t understand guns, and think nobody “needs” guns,  to again cry pitifully  that we have to “do something,” and that only those who are evil or corrupt oppose the kinds of measures that would prevent the latest shooting. That road inevitably leads to gun banning and (attempted) confiscation.

“That’s ridiculous,” she replied.

She also admitted, after she referenced those dangerous semi-automatic weapons, that she had no idea what such a gun was.

This is the song that never ends, until Americans are disarmed and at the mercy of the whims of our wise elected masters, or until we forcibly tell those would-be masters to stop singing.

Post script: And the song will be accompanied by the usual melody of lies. Here’s Barack Obama, who doesn’t lie like the current President, speaking last week at an event in Brazil. He said,

“Our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon, any time, without much, if any, regulation. They can buy [guns] over the internet, they can buy machine guns.”

Outside of the first sentence, the rest is one lie and deceitful statement after another.

59 thoughts on “Another Mass Shooting, More Reminders Of Why The Anti-Gun Left Cannot Be Trusted

  1. Ah, I love precrime discussions! I just backspaced a paragraph about my intense hatred for laws criminalizing acts that could potentially precede more serious criminal acts. Stealing your thunder would be a fine “thank you”, wouldn’t it?

    But about the ultimate result of Democrats’ gun crusade being absolute criminalization: Fools and liars call any argument starting from a description of a current state and ending at a later, more severe state a “slippery slope”. In fact, the slippery slope fallacy only obtains when the logical progression from the initial state to the later one is omitted. I don’t doubt that you already know this, but I had to preemptively jam my thumb in the eye of anyone reading this and thinking the obvious, bad retort before he has the chance to use it.

    They call that “poisoning the well”.

    I’m here all night. Tip your waiters.

    • You’d think at some point democrats would notice what they have actually accomplished in the last 20 years, and in particular since Obama’s election.
      Talk of banning guns but not actually being able to follow through with any results has driven gun and ammunition sales through the roof. What’s further, it’s driven the sales of “icky” guns and made the AR-15 one of the most popularly pissed firearms.
      The actual results are exactly the opposite of their goals.
      I like pointing this out to progressives, particularly that Obama is guns salesman of the century.

      • The most counterproductive (from a gun-banner’s point of view) part of it all is that the increased demand they’re creating has driven the price of a basic AR-15 to a ridiculous low, as every gun maker in the country has started to make them and flooded the market. In semi-automatic rifles, the AR-15 is the best bargain out there. Decent entry-level rifles can be had for around $400 (closer to $300 if you don’t mind assembling it yourself!), where the same rifle would have been nearly twice that price 15 years ago. Yet another example of the many ways that leftists fail to understand basic economics, I guess.

  2. If the U.S. is the most dangerous land in the world because we have so many guns why are all those people showing up at our border looking for asylum?

    • If we are going to use bad cause and effect analysis the rise of mass shootings correlates highly positively to recent increases in number of illegal bordee crossers.

      • Bad cause and effect analogies are only valid if they support a leftist lie. I’d have figured you knew the rules by now.

        • Perhaps I need to leave out the “bad cause and effect” statement.

          I wonder what will happen when white supremacists figure out that being pro abortion would help them in the intersectionality arena.

  3. Obama is on foreign soil and lying about America and the commerce of guns? Shocking news. His party is currently founded almost entirely on deceit as your post correctly demonstrates.

    • Yet only a week ago we were listening to the pundits talking about Trump violating norms by talking about politics in a foreign country.

  4. No one wants an actual analysis of shooting numbers. This post will make it clear why. Please note that these numbers are rounded for simplicity and approximations have been made because the actual data is fuzzy. This analysis is to show magnitudes only, not exact numbers.

    There are about 10,000 murders with firearms each year.
    About 80% (or 8000) are gang-related.

    The breakdown by race:
    About 52% of these murders are by blacks (~5200).
    Blacks are ~45% of gang members, so ~ 3600 here and ~1600 by non-gang related blacks.

    Hispanics are about 45% of gang members, so ~3600 murders here

    Whites make up ~10% of gang membership, so ~800 murders here

    10,000 total – 8000 gang related – 1600 black non-gang related = ~400 murders

    Those 400 murders are left to disperse between white, hispanic, asian, and American Indian non-gang related murders.

    These numbers get skewed because the gang-related shooting numbers are so high (small approximations in those lead to big changes in the ones left over) and I have assumed that white, hispanic, and black gang members are equally murderous. This analysis is made by more difficult because the US government does not record hispanics (they are considered white or black).

    If we take out the gang-related murders, the US is a very safe country. We are one of the few industrialized countries until recently to have large numbers of gang murders (thank you England and Sweden for introducing more gang-related crime recently). Without the gang-related murders, the US murder rate is very similar to the most peaceful European nations.

    The gang murders are mostly located in Democrat-controlled cities. These cities have tried to reduce the number of gang-related murders by deleting their gang database and gang surveillance data.

    Almost all murders in the US are intra-racial. This means that blacks and hispanics bear a substantially higher murder rate than whites. If we simplify this by assuming ALL murders are intra-racial, the following results:

    Whites (61% of the population) only contribute about 1100 murders, giving them a rate of murder victimization of 1 on this relative scale (the actual murder rate for whites is about 0.5 per 100,000, less than all but the safest European countries).

    Hispanics (18% of the population) contribute about 3700 murders, giving them a relative murder victimization rate of 11.

    Blacks (12% of the population) contribute 5200 murders, giving them a relative murder victimization rate of 24 (giving a rate of 12 per 100,000, similar to war-torn countries).

    Almost all gun-control legislation focuses on white, legal gun owners (76% of legal gun owners in the US are white), while almost all the murders are committed by gang members (who don’t own guns legally). If gun control succeeds completely, it can only reduce the murder rate by less than 10% of the current rate. Let me repeat, almost ALL the gun-control legislation in the US, current or proposed, only affects 10% or less of the shootings in the US. No current or proposed legislation deals with the other 90%. For perspective, the US murder rate has declined 50% over the last 30 years while the assault-weapons ban was lifted and concealed carry laws have increased the number of legal concealed carry by over 800%.

    Note that the murder rate for blacks is astronomically higher than white but almost no legislation or programs are aimed at reducing this massive murder rate even though it is contained in relatively small areas, geographically. Despite almost all blacks voting Democrat, Democrats have almost no interest in protecting black Americans from this murder wave.

    Now you see why politicians would rather say ‘Guns bad!’.

    • Imagine turning this into a “the more you know”-type infomertial on prime-time TV. Even though it is just a list
      of very relevant facts, the hue and cry of “racism!” would be deafening! America doesn’t want any kind of dispassionate assessment of this issue; the left wants guns gone. When they say “common-sense” in relation to gun laws, don’t take that to mean they want to utilize logic and reason. If they actually cared about gun deaths, these facts would offer hope of a multi-tiered approach to reducing them. That’s why this would be immediately denounced as “hate-speech”.
      An armed populace stands squarely in the way of their “great leap forward”. That’s the long and short of it.


      Given racial bias in law enforcement, I wonder what makes people think that these laws will be enforced against whites.

    • “Note that the murder rate for blacks is astronomically higher than white but almost no legislation or programs are aimed at reducing this massive murder rate…”

      Actually, there is a democrat program whose original intent was to do just that: Abortion.

  5. I used to consider myself moderately pro control, but the gun control people have gone bat crazy. I still feel no need for one, but I do not like being told I cannot get one if I feel the need.

    • Next time someone says to you “You don’t need a gun!”, say “well, I don’t need a whiny little bitch either, but here you are!”

      • I do not ‘need’ a gun. I ‘want’ a gun, and that is enough as described by the Constitution. Any argument disagreeing with that God given right is increasingly going to have to be answered with ‘Bite me’ and ‘come and take it.’

        PS: I don’t ‘need’ a machine gun, either. Show me where the Constitution says I cannot have one if I want it.

  6. It is *AMAZING* to me how ignorant the left is on the topic of guns. I mean, when you talk about damn near any serious issue, there’s a certain amount of ignorance, but on the topic of gun control in particular, it seems there’s nothing else. I’m not talking about semantics like what “AR” stands for, but in things like “What is a Semi-Automatic weapon?” Well, little Johnny, a semi-automatic weapon fires one bullet per pull of the trigger, and has an automatic reload function, which makes basically every handgun, including revolvers, semi-automatic.

    These people have cocooned themselves in the righteous indignation of their ignorance and wield it like a cudgel. They are afraid of things they don’t understand, and don’t want to understand… The irony is a little delicious.

    • While revolvers function like Semi-Automatic, they are not classified as such because the manual action of pulling the trigger is what advances the cylinder, not the energy of the preceding shot.

      • Embarrassing. I should have thought of that. It seems a little semantic, and there’s no chance in hell your average lefty activist could make that differentiation, but if I’m going to call them out, I should do better. Mea culpa.

      • Still, their performance is not significantly different, in any practical sense, from a DA only semi-auto, except, in most cases, magazine capacity.

        As an aside, I read one account of a black powder revolver unexpectedly going full-auto, thru all 6 cylinders. Larger percussion cap nipples were installed in error, and allowed enough blowback to reset the hammer, advance the cylinder, and fire the next round before the surprised shooter released the trigger.

        • Such an occurrence would be…energetic. Resetting the hammer in such a gun requires leverage that is not possible from the direction of the chamber, so would be a LARGE amount of force. The possibility of injury would thus also be great.

          I am not sure this would work, either. The revolver would have to be a very old design in the first place, with not hammer guard devices designed to prevent just such a problem.

          But it could happen, I suppose.

          • I can’t confirm the veracity of the story, but the mechanics seem at least feasible.

            Of course, many autoloaders do function through the bleed-off of a small amount of the propellant gases to power the action. A tiny hole in the barrel of an AR supplies enough to force back a fairly heavy bolt carrier group, a heavy buffer, and the fairly stiff spring that returns them, while also resetting the hammer against the tension of its spring. I would think a larger than usual hole in the percussion nipple could conceivably deliver enough to blow back the revolver’s hammer. Maybe even a larger percussion cap itself could do it, particularly if the hammer spring were a bit weak. Since many old-style single-action black powder revolvers can be “fanned”, the trigger doesn’t have to be released between shots.


              And there lies the difference. You are right that old single action revolvers (“six shooters”) could be fanned. Modern revolvers usually require the trigger to be reset before the hammer will fall, a safety feature.

              AR rifles have this feature: a sear prevents the next round from going off. Modification of that sear will allow the semi-auto become full auto.

              So my objection was incorrect in the case you describe: it could happen if several circumstances go wrong.


              • That’s a common misconception about the AR-15. It takes a great deal more to make an AR fully automatic. The bolt, bolt carrier, selector switch from the various M-16s are needed, as well as a highly-elaborate “auto-sear” and a disconnector. This is because both models fire from a closed bolt and have floating, hammer-struck firing pins, and these parts are set up to allow for a fairly complex firing cycle; complex compared to an open-bolt gun, which can be made even simpler by using a fixed firing pin. This really applies to all closed-bolt, hammer-struck weapons.

  7. Here is an example of the dishonesty of the anti-gun cult.

    I don’t think you know the first thing about statistics, but that’s OK
    because most people don’t. They’re not going to read our tables and
    discussions of standard deviations, cause VS effect, or pH factors
    (whatever they are). Here’s the statistics most people will read:

    Those, they’ll remember. Those are the ones we need to keep in the
    news… on the lead of the nightly newscast. You see, sir, whether
    crime is up or down depends entirely on people’s perceptions and,
    right now, they see lots of body bags.

    Good luck with your statistics. All you have is bullshit, but it
    won’t make any difference because those pictures pack a punch… if I
    went into a long refutation of your numbers, all I’d accomplish is to
    bore the tits offa everybody.

  8. In response to the Virginia Beach shooting incident, Disgraced Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is calling a special legislative session to push for more gun control. Here are his “common sense” proposals:

    –Universal background checks
    –Child access prevention
    –One gun a month limits
    –Banning assault weapons, including bump stocks
    –Requirement to report lost or stolen guns
    –Allowing localities to ban guns from municipal buildings
    –Red flag laws

    It is not immediately apparent how any of these ideas would have prevented what occurred in VA Beach. That’s “common sense”?

    • I’ll agree to these “common-sense” laws, right after a law is passed mandating the sterilization of all leftists. All have about as much constitutional validity, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

        • I am thinking that red flag laws do not go far enough.

          Here is what we need in addition to firearm confiscation:

          – Any license to practice law or medicine that a person subject to a red flag order has should be suspended.
          – Police should be able to search the persons and property of those subject to an red flag order.
          – Persons subject to a red flag order should be required to wear a distinctive badge on the left sleeve when out in public. Failure to do so should be a capital offense.
          – A public database of all persons who are subject, or have ever been subject, to a red flag order should be maintained.

          These proposals should not be controversial; it is just pure common sense.

          • I think that anyone subject to a red flag order should be summarily executed, along with their parents and any rother living relative. You simply can’t be too cautious, and these aren’t ordinary times. Call them late, late term abortions.

      • Silly, anti-gun arguments are not required to exhibit any reasonable expectations of actual crime reduction.

  9. The new shiny object, Pete Buttigieg, opined in a town hall that you should be required to have a license to own a gun because “If you have to have a license to have a car, it doesn’t seem that unreasonable that for deadly weaponry we would do the same.”

    No one pointed out to him that, actually, you don’t have to have a license to buy or own a car.

      • The “treat them like cars” argument inevitably crops up in any gun control discussion, and only serves to illustrate the ignorance and naivete’ of the control proponents, as there are numerous holes in that comparison that would actually favor the gun-rights side. For example, besides the issues you and Michael note, there is no age limit for owning a car or the number you can buy, no background check, no limit on style, power, or modifications, buying out of state, or by mail…etc., etc.

  10. The Trace is a website that wants you to “Help us tell the story of America’s gun violence crisis. Ironically, in this article ( ), they seem to unwittingly highlight the futility of enacting ever more laws that are honored by only the sane and law-abiding.

    Surprise!…Criminals can actually make and distribute firearms!…And to other criminals! Who knew?

  11. It seems that many Democrats are turning against the 1994 Crime Bill.

    The reason this is relevant today is because the Crime Bill was passed in response to calls about “doing something” about violent crime. Children were being shot to death for the shoes that they wore, or for wearing the wrong color clothes, or even taking a wrong turn somewhere. The carnage had to stop.

    This crime bill resulted in mass incarceration. That is what we had to show for it, and why many Democratic nominees are denouncing the crime bill.

    and yet, they fail to see that adopting “common sense”, “sensible” gun legislation will continue the consequences as the 1994 Crime Bill.

    There is one important difference. At the time the Crime Bill was signed into law, the nation recently experienced an all-time high in criminal homicide rates. Today, criminal homicide rates are near an all-time low.

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