Gabby Giffords in Newtown Supporting Same Background Check Her Attacker Passed

On October 15, gun control proponent Gabby Giffords was in Newtown, Connecticut, pushing the same background check her attacker passed to acquire his handgun.

The Hartford Courant reports that Gabby Giffords was in Newtown to support Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Representative Elizabeth Etsy (D-CT-5), both of whom are pushing to expand retail background checks to include private sales. Giffords spoke to “a small group of supporters,” saying, “Stopping gun violence takes courage, the courage to do what’s right. I’ve seen great courage when my life was on the line. Now is the time to come together, be responsible, Democrats, Republicans, everyone. We must never stop fighting.”

Breitbart News previously reported that Giffords’s attempted assassin — Jared Loughner — passed a background check to acquire the Glock he used to shoot her on January 8, 2011.

Although Loughner passed a background check — just like the Orlando Pulse gunman, the San Bernardino attackers, the Umpqua Community College gunman, the alleged Lafayette theater gunman, the Chattanooga attacker, the DC Navy Yard gunman, the Aurora movie theater gunman, both Fort Hood attackers, and the Virginia Tech gunman — Giffords, Blumenthal, and Etsy continue pushing background checks as a way to make Americans safer.

Representative Etsy made sure to invoke Giffords’s name during her gun control push, although Giffords’s attacker passed a background check to get his gun. Etsy said, “Gabby didn’t choose this as her mission. Gabby is with us today because a gun found her.”

The simple truth is this — guns find people because background checks do not stop latent criminals, they only stop actual ones. In other words, background checks look backward, not forward. So people who have criminal intent but no criminal record will never be prohibited from getting the gun they need to commit their treachery.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.