As the fallout from self-appointed victim Bryce Williams’ cold-blooded, videoed gun murder of two journalists at WDBJ continued, politicians of the left pulled out their dogeared playbook and began pushing gun control. Never mind that Williams bought his gun legally and passed all requisite background checks–and that Williams would have passed any background check, given his lack of criminal history or institutionalization. Never mind that Williams fired eight shots, which would fit within the boundaries of the magazine-shortening advocates. Something–anything!–has to be done about guns, say the left’s heroes.
On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest explained:
The precise details of that incident continue to be under investigation. But as you’ve heard me say in the past: This is another example of gun violence that has become all-too-common in communities large and small. And while there is no piece of legislation that can end all violence in this country, there are some common sense things that only Congress can do that we know will have a tangible impact on reducing gun violence in this country. And Congress could take those steps in a way that will not infringe on the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. And the President has long advocated Congress taking those steps, and the President continues to feel they should do so.
No specifics were offered.
President Obama followed up that vacuous statement with an even more vacuous statement, explaining (wrongly) that more people are killed in America by gun violence than by terrorism anywhere in the world: “It breaks my heart every time you read or hear about these kinds of incidents. … What we know is that the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism.”
Hillary Clinton joined in the fun, too, telling reporters, “We have got to do something about gun violence in America, and I will take it on.” Again, she offered no specifics.
If Democrats and their supporters truly want to fight gun crime, and they truly believe that less guns directly correlates to less gun homicide, there is a simple way they could do so: they could give up their guns. Bryce Williams was a leftist who was chastised by management for wearing a Barack Obama sticker during on-air election coverage.
But he’s just one example of gun crime in the Democrat-supporting world. From 2009-2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 26,632 firearm-related homicides took place in the United States. The CDC investigated the number of firearm-related homicides in the 50 most populous U.S. cities; all but six of those cities were located in counties which would go on to vote for Barack Obama in 2012. In those cities, 13,014 firearm-related homicides took place.
In other words, just by confiscating all the guns from all the people in the most populous Democratic cities–by following the Democratic theory that less guns mean less gun crimes–the American gun murder rate would drop by half. And that doesn’t even count all murders from all Democrat-supporting areas in the country.
Obviously, that wouldn’t work–virtually all the major Democratic cities already have gun control, and the Democratic-area murder spree continues. But the media will never discuss where most murders actually occur, or who actually commits them. That would be inconvenient to the Democratic narrative that gun crime does not center in any location–that a gun is dangerous in and of itself, no matter who wields it.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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