The biggest reason that you usually here for people advocating for gun control is that they want to reduce violence and save lives.
Those are admirable aims, but even if that really is the motivation of anti-2A individuals, they are clearly going about reducing violence in an ineffective way.
To make my point, let’s talk about what happened in Colorado recently. By now, you’ve certainly heard about the guy who was in the U.S. on an expired visa who attacked (truly) peaceful advocates for the release of hostages held in the Gaza strip.
What you may not know is that the guy who is alleged to have initiated the violence in that situation has been planning that attack for a year and that he tried to obtain firearms. Candace Hathaway writes,
“Mohamed said he had to use Molotov cocktails after he was denied the purchase of a gun due to him not being a legal citizen. Mohamed said he took a concealed carry class where he learned to shoot a gun but that all changed after he was denied the purchase,” according to the warrant.
So, gun control worked. He was denied access to a firearm.
But he, then, (allegedly) found other ways to commit violence, so, the point of gun control (to reduce violence and save lives) was thwarted.
Gun control worked in this situation. And, at the same time, it failed.
To underscore how pointless gun control is, understand that the alleged attacker has a wife and five children that he was willing to abandon so that he could kill people.
Gun control laws obviously didn’t stop this guy from trying to do terrible things. He was, apparently, fanatical about committing violence. Why do anti-2A people think that getting rid of firearms will stop people with this kind of intention from doing terrible things?
Which brings us back to the basic, brutal fact that gun control doesn’t do anything except enable criminals and disarm the law-abiding, making it harder for the law-abiding to defend themselves.
And that is an evil outcome if I’ve ever heard one.
