On Wednesday, gun control advocate Gabby Giffords stood with Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill to demand that everyone buying a gun be required to undergo the same background check Jared Loughner underwent to acquire the Glock he used to shoot her in 2011.
Yes, Loughner acquired his firearm via a background check, as did Jerad and Amanda Miller (Las Vegas), Elliot Rodger (Santa Barbara), Ivan Lopez (Fort Hood 2014), Darion Marcus Aguilar (Maryland mall), Karl Halverson Pierson (Arapahoe High School), Paul Ciancia (LAX), Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), James Holmes (Aurora theater), Nidal Hasan (Fort Hood 2009), among others.
But Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, stood with Democrat lawmakers to argue that expanding background checks to include gun show sales is a way of “stopping violence.”
The most prominent firearm-related public violence events of the last few years were carried out by men and women who passed background checks to get their firearms. So can someone explain again how applying background checks to more sales will reduce violence, much less stop it?
This is just one more reason why the new gun control push faces a even steeper climb than the one Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) undertook in 2013. Or, to put as The Washington Post did, “The latest Gabby Giffords push for… gun controls is new. The outlook isn’t.”
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.