“No one wants to take your guns,” is a common refrain. It’s sometimes followed up with, “No one wants to stop you from having guns, either.”
It’s always right around the time the word “but” gets thrown in and we find out that there’s some regulation the individual favors that would, in fact, stop you from buying at least certain types of guns or someone being able to take your guns from you.
Funny how that often works out.
But even when you get something that on the surface seems minor, even common sense, it comes with massive caveats that somehow don’t enter into the argument.
Take this op-ed, for example.
I did not sleep well last Sunday night, worried about a shooting at my son’s school in South Jersey. That followed a restless night from the week before, worried about that school shooting in Georgia. As a college teacher and a parent in a country with no common-sense gun control, my anxious thoughts and sleepless nights are often.
… Every school shooting bothers me, but the Apalachee one was especially hard because it was only the first week and already the gun violence had begun. Like many parents, I make sure to kiss my youngest and tell him I love him before I drop him off at school.
This is not a way to live.
Lockdown drills are obviously needed. In 2024, there have already been 46 school shootings in the country, with 86 people killed or injured, according to CNN.
Those are shootings that happened on school property, not school shootings. I’ve looked at many of those. Some shootings weren’t even when students were there, only teachers. Other events were shootings at sporting events that are open to the public and lack most of the basic security measures you find in an average school.
Additionally, notice how she uses the phrase “injured or killed” there? That way she can lump all of it in together and make your imagination do the work without lying. However, that same report shows a whopping 24 people killed in those 46 incidents. While that’s still tragic, that’s over 250 days of 2024, not the first few weeks of this school year. In a nation of 330 million people, that’s not exactly a troubling number, really. Yes, it’s troubling for those who dealt with it, but statistically? More people get killed by vending machines each year/
So, let’s not get too worked up, shall we?
Anywho, moving on…
Or, we could be a country with common-sense gun control. A country in which teenagers with mental health issues do not get semiautomatic weapons as presents from their parents. I am not a gun control expert. But I do know the way we’ve been doing things is not working.
Oh, we can tell you’re not a gun control expert.
If you were, you’d have to realize the problems with what looks like a simple proposition, like a lot of gun control propositions.
Now, no one with functioning brain cells thinks it’s smart to give a gun to a mentally ill teenager. However, not everyone has functioning brain cells. That’s unfortunate and that typically prompts people like our author here to call for laws.
However, my question to her is, just how are we supposed to make that happen?
The father didn’t just give the kid money and tell him to go to the gun store. He had to physically walk in, fill out the paperwork, undergo the background check, pay the money, take it home, and then hand it to the kid.
How do you stop that without stopping anyone from buying such a gun? She’s not calling for an assault weapon ban here or a semi-auto ban. Not explicitly, anyway. So how are we supposed to accomplish any such thing? The Form 4473 already asks if you’re buying the gun for yourself or someone else. You can add another line to that asking if you’ll give it to your kid, but does anyone really think that’s going to do any good?
The only way to stop someone from giving a certain category of gun to their kid is to bar the parent from buying that gun in the first place. Yet that flies in the face of claims that no one is trying to stop me from buying guns.
For every off-hand gun control proposal from someone who is “not a gun control expert” comes a landslide of regulations that will do everything anti-gunners claim they’re not trying to do.
The issue is and has always been people. We need to start looking at what drives this and how we can address that. I’ve been trying. The author here isn’t. She’s just trying to punish us for the actions of others.
