Richard Martinez: Public Gun Crimes ‘Don’t Happen In Other Countries’

On the one year anniversary of Elliot Rodger’s May 23 Santa Barbara attack, Richard Martinez said he will continue to push gun control in the United States because attacks like Rodger’s “don’t happen in other countries.”

Martinez son, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, was one of three shot and killed by Rodger.

According to the Associated Press, Martinez said, “I’m not anti-gun, I’m anti-gun violence.” And while he has dedicated his life to gun control, he says he “still supports the rights of hunters and target-shooters.”

The problem with Martinez’s position is that the Second Amendment was not put in place to protect a hunters and target shooters, per se, but to protect the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of one’s self and one’s country. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito highlighted this in the majority opinion for McDonald v. Chicago (2010) by writing, “Individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the 2nd Amendment right.”

But Martinez has another problem with his gun control push in that he seeks to justify it by claiming attacks like the one in Santa Barbara “don’t happen in other countries.”

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 8 people with a bomb in Oslo, Norway, then shot and killed 69 people at a youth camp in Utoya. Shot and killed 69.

CBSNews reported that Breivik’s goal had been to “kill all 600” people attending the camp.

More recently, in France on January 7, gunmen killed 12 at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris headquarters and that was followed by a February 14 attack in Copenhagen, where a gunman shot and killed two civilians and wounded five others.

The tie that binds Norway, France, and Denmark together? All have “restrictive” gun control which requires the passage of extensive criminal and mental background checks before possession of a firearm is legal.

Yet Martinez says that attacks with guns “don’t happen in other countries” and he has dedicated himself to pursuing restrictive gun control in the US to prevent them from happening here.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.