Of what?
Several things, actually. That the “typical” shooter doesn’t exist because shootings are atypical behavior. That shooters are not always younger. That shooting motivations are not solely ‘hate’ or racially based, those are simply two powerful motives among the list. That violence within communities is the norm, not across communities.
Most succinctly, not a single one of California’s A+ rated gun control laws stopped this geriatric from shooting around 20 people in Monterey Park, killing 10 of them. Not. A. One.
The copium is already flowing from the usual sources, stating that ‘well.. the laws didn’t work in this instance, and they don’t stop all violence.. but we promise they ‘help’ guys, believe us please’. Instead of acknowledging that their random prohibitions on comfort features for firearms does nothing to police extreme manifestations of violence, they continue to insist that every hole within their logical consistency is ‘outside the norm’. The irony is so deep there.
Gun controllers have built their entire identities on the lie that partial random item prohibitions can curb human behaviors and motivations. We keep stacking events and locations that prove otherwise and the coping continues to get more and more absurd. We have states with very permissive firearms cultures with low violence. We have states with restrictive schemes with high violence, often more than their more permissive neighbors. We have two large states, our nation’s largest population wise, with very different firearm regulation outlooks and nearly identical rates of violence. That should be a clue.
“We don’t know if this is specifically a hate crime defined by law, but who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said.
That is a problem. The specific propensity for law enforcement in certain regions of this country to default to ‘Hate Crime’ as a motive instead of waiting until enough facts are in hand to say yes or no has lead to a further complication of mass shooting narratives. It’s easy to say hate crime when its a group event that gets targeted and its hard to recant that afterwards. We have serious issues with narrative honesty in this country’s media circus.
The facts at hand state the 72 year old shooter, who was first described as a 30 something male, used what the Sheriff described as “a magazine-fed semiautomatic assault pistol” that is probably not legal in California. His motives remain under investigation. He was known to at least the first location he attacked, a ballroom dance studio he apparently frequented on the regular.
“Gun violence needs to stop,” Luna said. “There’s too much of it.”
Thanks, Sheriff… very wise. Super helpful. How did that probably illegal ‘assault pistol’ get by all your gun violence laws? That can’t happen if its against the law, right? Or do we need to make it much more illegaler to murder folks with a gun. That strategy has never worked in the past, but that also hasn’t stopped you all from trying anyway.
“This kind of mass shooting has become tragically common in the U.S.; what would be a rare horror in any other developed country is typical here. Yet the cause is no mystery. America has an enormous amount of guns, making it easier for someone to carry out a deadly shooting.” – NYT.
Do we have to play this stupid game again? The US isn’t unique in the world for violence, we are for gun ownership and population. Only two nations have more people than us, both have more people murdered than us. Both have super stringent weapons ownership policies yet still have more people murdered than us. We have, by an order of magnitude, the most privately owned weapons and yet we seem to manage pretty well. If we were then to start hash out where in our society these violent incidents are occurring… well… assumptive conclusions like ‘math is racist’ start getting thrown around.
Weird.
Oh wait, both India and China are ‘uncivilized’ in this version of the gun control argument, nevermind. They can’t be expected to behave.
California’s political and legislative responses to these events should stop being used as an example to emulate.
