Ben Shapiro’s confident, fact-packed demolition of CNN’s Piers Morgan last night marks the turning point in the gun control debate. Ben showed that when they cannot exploit the deaths of children, gun control advocates are forced to defend their views, which are based on faulty premises. That timely reminder has given new energy and enthusiasm to defenders of the Second Amendment, who are preparing for the mother of all battles.
The Obama administration is using recent mass shootings–with the exception of Fort Hood, of course, which it does not want to acknowledge as an Islamist terror attack–to press a gun control agenda many decades in the making. They have not yet suggested a single policy proposal that would have prevented the horrific killings at Sandy Hook, and the task force chaired by Vice President Joe Biden is not likely to do so, either.
Their campaign depends on blaming Second Amendment advocates for Sandy Hook. They rely on the acquiescence of “me, too” pundits such as David Frum, who today blamed “the gun lobby” for “putting those children in their graves in the first place.” Remove that effort at inducing collective guilt, and they lose, because most fear to admit what they really want: to remove the Second Amendment from “your little book.”
There are some gun control advocates who actually want a sincere debate on that point, who disliked the Second Amendment even before Sandy Hook and will go on disliking it even if there is never another school shooting. That is partly why many on the left are applauding Ben’s performance on CNN: they want a no-holds-barred debate, and are frustrated that media gatekeepers like Morgan are standing in their way.
Ben put into practice something that Andrew Breitbart preached throughout his career of battling the mainstream media: Question the premise, whether it’s an assertion that you don’t care about the victims of Sandy Hook, or a faulty definition of Critical Race Theory, or that Barack Obama is a nice guy who only wants America to succeed. Ben destroyed the faulty premise of the gun control debate last night. And the debate is now changed.
That is why the Huffington Post has ignored the story. That is why the goons at Media Matters have not even tried to attack what Ben said or did on CNN. (They are resorting to tangential points on Twitter, such as asserting that CNN is more interested in having a debate than Fox News, or that Ben did not know Ronald Reagan had once backed an assault weapons ban. Ben’s classic Breitbart-esque response last night was: “So?”)
As Congress opens with a slew of Democrat-sponsored gun bills, and as the Obama administration mulls circumventing the legislative process entirely, Ben’s point bears repeating: they are “standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook” to push policies that would not have saved them. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell even said this morning that “the good thing about Newtown was it was so horrific.”
It was a good thing, he evidently believes, because it galvanized ideologically-driven Democrats to mobilize around the left’s long-standing ideological goals, to rally around the president after an empty and exhausting campaign, to seize this crisis to do what could not otherwise be done because reasonable Americans would resist it. After Ben’s performance, to quote one of the left’s biggest bullies, “Resist we much. And we will.”