Beto… Beto… Beto… I’m… confused. I really am. Either you are untruthfully or shamelessly trolling for the hard anti-gun vote. Or you really are this… dense.
CNN: “How do you plan to get assault weapons away from people who don’t want to give them up?”
O’Rourke: “It’s pretty simple. Um, as with any law in this country, we would expect our fellow Americans to follow the law. It’s one of those things that distinguishes us from so much of the rest of the world, we’re a nation of laws and no person is above the law no matter how much they may disagree with a given law.”
So no other nation is a nation of laws? Not Great Britain? Not France? Not Mexico or Brazil? Not even Canada or Australia? Only we, the US, are a nation of laws and that apparently means perfect 100% compliance. Nobody sped today, not a single substance was used in an illegal fashion, murders and assaults did not occur, and not a single individual took or damaged property that was not their own.
O’Rourke then rolls into arguing that Australia’s buyback was a perfect example of removing weapons of war from our streets. Because of course the AR-15 has no place as a tool of self defense, in his considered opinion. I’m glad we have such expertise to temper the wild assumptions of folks like myself and others who make defensive science and technology our lives.
Then the blow came that really stunned him.
CNN: “You expect mass shooters to follow the law?”
O’Rourke: *long pause* “I expect our fellow Americans to follow the law, yes.”
This nearly causes the CNN anchor to spit take. She is floored by blind stupidity of the answer. Beto then goes onto vaguely claim that if X, Y, or Z law had been in place “some” shootings would surely have been stopped, despite incredible evidence in opposition to that point. Any shooter who used a handgun or shotgun, any shooter with a clean background, any shooter where the background check failed because of an improperly kept record, etc.
CNN pushes, Beto deflects, he won’t come out and say that enforcing this law would require seizure by force from a population that will assuredly refuse with force. He just expects Americans to “follow the law” because “we’ve seen other countries do this”.
Yes Beto, yes we have, and we’ve seen how well that worked out for them. Or rather hasn’t. The UK is having a rough go of it and the Bataclan and Bridge attacks in France are highly illustrative that people do in fact possess the ability to pull off mass casualty attacks regardless of what any law says.
Laws, Mr. O’Rourke, are broken at will by any who choose to. You should know, you’ve done it. The law just imposes a consequence if you are prosecuted for the infraction. The blind faith you have in this is naive beyond anything to be respected in a leader.
He goes onto berate the anchor and use the tried and true, “well then we wouldn’t pass any laws if we were afraid people would break them.” Another deflection from calling into question the effectiveness of the law with the expected non-compliance ratio. The fear isn’t that someone doesn’t follow the law, that is the given. What CNN is trying to point out is the asinine assumption that this legislation could possibly have the desired effect.
Remember, even if it worked perfectly we are talking about a fraction of 300-500 (on average) deaths in the span of a year. We are also not talking about solving the problem of a mass killing at all, but ineffectively removing one method of causing a mass casualty incident.
The math and methods available leave only one conclusion. It cannot work. And no, Beto, that doesn’t mean we should try anyway and “do something” it means exactly the opposite. Why would we waste the effort?
In what world does a 1% perfect reduction in deaths by a single method, with a realistic estimate of 0%, all of which could be made moot by year over year fluctuation, be worth gutting the second amendment? I could hear an argument for 50%, 20%, maybe even 10%… but this is zero, nothing, nada. It is a fanciful extension of ‘if everyone were just nice there wouldn’t be murder so we wouldn’t need guns’
Well if everyone were just nice and didn’t murder it wouldn’t matter if we had nukes. It wouldn’t matter. Trying to modify extreme outlier behavior through prohibition on possession to the masses instead of consequence of behavior seems like a lose/lose every time.
End Game
CNN appears to be setting themselves up to knock O’Rourke into the clown pile. Use him to moderate the front runner and make them look more reasonable. The likely recipient of this moderation at this juncture is Warren.
In my opinion however the DNC has played to strongly to the base already and distanced themselves from the moderates. Every candidate is so far left of where President Obama acted and campaigned it’s truly a sight to behold.
