Monday marked the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre by evil psychotic Adam Lanza. This, of course, was just another opportunity for members of the left to stand on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, claiming that their deaths could only be justified with a mass gun-grab.
Speakers including Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) showed up outside the headquarters of the National Rifle Association to suggest that the NRA was somehow responsible for the killings, not the left’s idiotic “gun free zones” or their ridiculous insistence on non-existent standards for involuntary commitment of the mentally ill. “It was a scene that has been repeated too often in the United States, and just as often, the response to these senseless killings has been inaction on the issue of gun control,” Connolly said.
Now, the left continues to suggest that all they want are “common sense gun measures.” Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), who was shot by madman Jared Lee Loughner, writes today that “Americans continue to support and call for commonsense action….In my experience, pessimism has never solved a single problem. But as Americans we know that action does.” Then she, too, stands on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook: “They have every right to expect us to honor their legacy by refusing to give into pessimism.”
But Giffords never explains how her proposed gun control measures would actually prevent shootings like Sandy Hook, or San Bernardino, or Umpqua Community College, or her own shooting for that matter.
Truthfully, the left would like a full-scale gun confiscation. That’s why Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both suggested that the solution to gun violence would be a regime like Australia’s or Great Britain’s – both countries that seized large numbers of weapons from private owners.
But one thing is guaranteed: if the government wants a lot of people to get shot, all they’ll have to do is try a mass gun-confiscation.
According to the Congressional Research Service, as of 2013, there were 357 million guns in private hands. That’s 1.45 guns for every American. According to a Pew Research poll that same year, 37 percent of Americans say they or someone else in their home owns a gun. Gallup says that 43 percent of Americans say they have a gun in their home. Even if we take the lower number, that’s well over 100 million Americans with a gun in the home. So what sort of bureaucratic monster would be necessary just to identify gunowners and confiscate guns from a hundred million people?
And seizing those guns won’t just be a matter of asking politely. Americans have a longstanding opposition to government tyranny embodied in the Second Amendment; as the text suggests, gun ownership was meant to be an obstacle to those who would encroach upon the “security of a free State.” That includes members of the government. In fact, Americans widely believe that seizure of guns would be the ultimate manifestation of an attempted government tyranny.
Unlike Australia or Britain, where heavy percentages of gun owners were clustered in big cities, America’s gun ownership spreads far and wide. According to a Wenzel Strategies survey from 2013, nearly two in three gunowners said they wouldn’t hand in their guns to the government with another 20 percent saying they would. A full 65 percent of conservatives said they wouldn’t hand in their guns; 41 percent of independents said they wouldn’t either, and even 12 percent of self-identified liberals said they wouldn’t give up their firearms. A Rasmussen poll from 2013 showed similar results: 65 percent of Americans said that the Second Amendment was designed to “make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.” Even a majority of non-gun owners believed that; even a majority of Democrats believe that.
Try telling those people that it isn’t tyranny to have a man with a gun come to their house and demand they turn over their weapons.
Try to imagine the carnage that would ensue, not in Connecticut or Washington, D.C., but in Texas or Arizona or Oklahoma. How many people would die for the government to prove its ability to save one life by seizing weapons from law-abiding citizens?
The left doesn’t care about those people, however. If Americans had to die in order to prove the superiority of the federal government, the left wouldn’t shudder. That merely demonstrates just how little the “save one life” argument actually matters to them. It’s merely a ruse for another power grab. As always.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, 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.