Hawkins: Bloomberg Uses Gun Control Failure to Push More Gun Control

Democrat presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg is running ads that use incidents in which gun control failed to bolster calls for mandating more gun control.

The ads do not mention gun control failures, rather, they simply point to incidents in which guns were used criminally and point to the resulting harm as justification for more gun laws.

For example, Bloomberg is running an ad that uses the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech attack to push more gun control now. The ad mentions the fact that 32 innocents were killed in the firearm-based attack but says nothing about the fact that the attack occurred in a gun-free zone. In other words, that attack occurred in an area with 100 percent gun control.

Moreover, the ad says nothing about the fact that the attacker used handguns, not an “assault weapon.” And the ad does not inform viewers that the attacker passed a background check to acquire the guns.

None of these failures are evident in Bloomberg’s ad. Instead, the focus is on how much gun control would supposedly make us safer:

Ironically, bans on “high-capacity” magazines are part of the Bloomberg campaign’s gun control push, yet a Virginia Tech review board found that such a ban would have had a negligible impact on the results of the 2007 attack.

On December 30, 2012, Breitbart News reported the review board’s finding that a ban forcing the attacker to use ten-round magazines instead of those that hold 15 rounds “would have not made that much difference in the incident.”

Such a ban would have been of little impact because the key element in such mass attacks is time, and the Virginia Tech attacker had all the time in the world because his targets could not shoot back; they were in a gun-free zone. In this sense, gun control actually contributed to the severity of the attack results.

But Bloomberg is pushing more gun control.