The incessant cries for new gun control laws after shootings continue to run into the reality that gun laws already on the books were violated leading up to those shootings. But Democrats and activists don’t care because their goal is to crack down on law-abiding gun owners.
The Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shooting spawned the same gun control talking points from politicians and left-wing pundits alike. Despite knowing nothing about any of the details of the shooting, we were told that now was the time for gun control or, as President Joe Biden put it, “Today’s events should move us, shock us, shame us into acting.”
The problem with this is that we now know that the only two people charged in the shooting were minors. That means they are below the age of 18 and, of course, are already unable to possess firearms. An “assault weapons” ban or “expanded” background checks would do nothing because there already is no possible way that the two minors could have acquired the guns legally.
The same is true in another prominent shooting in the news. A man in Minnesota who shot and killed two police officers and a firefighter was legally barred from possessing firearms. In 2008, he pleaded guilty to second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon after pulling a knife on a man in a parking lot. Like the Kansas City shooting suspects, increased gun control would do nothing to stop him because there was no possible way he could have acquired his gun legally.
The cries of “do something” flood the discourse regularly, and yet nearly every prominent shooting would not have been prevented by popular gun control proposals. These two examples are no different. Every gun control lecture inspired by either of these cases is only meant to take guns away from people who have not and will not commit crimes because they are law-abiding gun owners.
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Declared or not, that appears to be the entire point. That was evidenced when Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who immediately jumped on the gun control train, shamed people for daring to refer to the two suspected shooters who killed one person and injured 22 others as “thugs.” We need more gun control immediately even though the two suspects aren’t allowed to own guns, according to Lucas, but don’t you dare hurt the feelings of the two suspects behind the shooting.
This is how every gun control debate goes with the Democratic Party and its gun-grabbing activists. The priority is placed on making things harder for people who actually abide by the law, while criminals are already given a pass in Democratic-run cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and, yes, Kansas City. The gun control debate is once again a distraction from the failures of politicians such as Lucas, full of “solutions” that won’t work for problems that they don’t address.