Doing… Something

The Left wasted absolutely no time pouncing on the most recent mass shooting horror in its zeal to punish the law abiding and undo the Second Amendment. Before we knew anything beyond the fact of a mass shooting situation in progress, Obama declared:

there are some steps that we could take.

Hillary tweeted:

I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now.

The New York Daily News ran about as in-your-face a front page as one could imagine.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal Daily Kos website, tweeted:

Yo GOP, kinda hard to talk about “keeping people safe” when your peeps are shooting up America

Prominent liberals took to Twitter to denounce all those (and especially the GOP presidential candidates) who put forth statements about praying for the victims. There’s lots more, but it all boiled down to anti-gun people blaming pro-gun people for violence they did not commit and had nothing to do with.

By the way – all this rhetoric poured forth before there was a single concrete fact about who the shooters were, what their motives might have been, what sorts of firearms were used, and how those firearms were obtained.

This morning, we know a bit more. By the most recent reports I saw, there were at least two shooters (three were originally reported). 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik were killed by police after their SUV was chased down and surrounded. Reports are that they were husband and wife, that he Farook was American born of Pakistani heritage, that he traveled to Saudi Arabia earlier this year and returned with a wife (I presume this refers to Malik), that he recently grew out his beard, and recently returned from paternity leave. A third person is in custody, but there’s no word on whether he or she was also a shooter.

No motive has been declared, but there are some reports that suggest the shooting, which took place at a holiday work party that Farook was attending, might have been motivated by a dispute. So, “workplace violence.” Still, authorities haven’t yet ruled out terrorism. While I’m curious how the Left’s going to react to the revelations that the shooters were devout Muslims with ties to the Middle East, and what they might say if it turns out that there IS a terrorist connection, I won’t speculate as to that just yet.

The shootings had elements of method and planning to them. The shooters wore tactical clothing, may have had body armor, and carried extra magazines of ammunition. Some reports indicate they used AR-15-style rifles that would be considered “assault weapons.” Some reports said they also had handguns, some said they did not.

This suggests that this wasn’t just an escalation of an argument, but we don’t yet know why the shooting happened, we don’t fully know what firearms were used, and we don’t know how the shooters got their firearms. What we do know is that the usual suspects have politicized this incident despite all this ignorance. The message is loud – “something must be done!”

What is that something? Assault weapons bans? Universal background checks?

California already has those laws in place. If the shooters did use assault weapons, then those tighter restrictions failed.

If the goal is to improve safety and try to reduce the recurrence of such incidents, then actions taken should have some basis in reality. Until we know the particulars of this incident, proposing further gun restrictions is an exercise in grandstanding and nothing more. As we’ve seen in the wake of previous shootings, in the majority of cases, the shooters either passed our current background check system or obtained their firearms illegally.

There are some specific proposals out there, but they show us that the gun grabbers are more interested in their broad agenda than in taking actions targeted at reducing the incidence of mass shootings. One is so-called “universal” background checks (something already in place in California). Currently, anyone who purchases a firearm from a licensed dealer must clear a background check. The proposal would expand to cover transfers between private individuals, including family members. Another is expansion of the no-buy list to include the mentally ill.

Both are useless acts that will massively infringe on all our rights. First – any universal background check system would necessitate the formation of a universal registry. The latter is absolute anathema to gun rights, and the near-universal precursor to confiscation, as demonstrated by history. We’ve been promised by politicians all over the map that they don’t want a universal registry, and there are laws that prohibit one being formed because pols know it would spark an enormous political backlash. It would also result in overwhelming non-compliance, and would make felons of tens of millions of Americans who’ve done nothing wrong (as the enormous rates of non-compliance to assault weapons registration laws in CT and NY demonstrate). Second – the “mentally ill” shooters of the past were generally not diagnosed prior to their actions, so it wouldn’t have stopped them. Some have proposed that anyone who wants to buy a gun should pass some sort of psychological screening. This would not only flip the reality of the “right to bear arms” on its head by giving the government the power to set the rules by which someone can buy one, it would mean that tens of millions of gun owners would have to sit in front of psychiatrists for examination. The Orwellian horror of that idea is profound.

Obama noted that people who are on the TSA’s no-fly list are not automatically added to the National Instant Criminal Background Check list maintained by the FBI, suggesting that this is a measure that could be taken to improve safety. This is a baby-sized gesture that would likely accomplish nothing more than denying many innocent people the right to buy guns. The no-fly list itself is problematic. The process surrounding it is opaque and someone who feels he’s erroneously on it have little or no recourse to getting off it. There are huge due-process issues with it, and the only thing that I see as keeping it in place is the treatment of air travel as a privilege rather than as a right.

At the core, all the demands that something be done in response to mass shootings seem rooted in a desire to ban private ownership of firearms. Given the failures of past “common sense” gun restrictions, that’s the natural conclusion. We don’t hear how, perhaps, gun control is counterproductive. We don’t hear about the many times that armed citizens have stopped mass shootings (yes, many times). We don’t hear about the correlation between increases in gun ownership and carry rights and decreases in violent crime. We don’t hear about Chicago, where massive gun restrictions do not prevent dozens of shootings every week. We don’t hear about how this law or that law might have stopped the most recent shooting incident. Instead, we hear demands for broad-brush restrictions that have little relevance to the particulars of the incidents themselves.

So, a question for those who would impose more restrictions on our gun rights.

What, specifically, do you want done?

What laws do you want enacted in response to this incident? Would they have stopped this incident.

Do you expect compliance? If so, please justify.

Do you expect those laws to make a difference? If so, please justify.

Finally, do you want private ownership of firearms banned? Do you want the Second Amendment repealed? If so, please have the intellectual honesty to say so, rather than trying to inch the rest of us towards that goal.

And, if so, please explain how, in a nation with 350 million guns, with tens of millions of gun owners who won’t comply with your ban, and where we can’t even keep guns out of prisons, you’d make that ban work.

Doing something for the sake of doing something is just stupid.