By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
From Joe Biden down to local officials, the mass shooting incidents in California that together have claimed 18 lives since the weekend have provided anti-gunners with grist for more demands for additional gun control laws.
But would any of those measures have prevented the carnage in Monterey Park or Half Moon Bay?
The National Review on Wednesday blistered Biden, noting he “did Tuesday morning what he often does when faced with a complex societal problem: He talked confidently about something else. In a hastily released statement on the topic, Biden urged ‘both chambers of Congress to act quickly’ and send an ‘Assault Weapons Ban to my desk.’ Tragedy, meet non sequitur.
“The notion that the ambitions of nihilist mass murderers are likely to be meaningfully constrained by arbitrary limitations on the way that certain legally available firearms look is fanciful and unsubstantiated at the best of times,” the National Review observed. “Here, though, the claim does not even intersect with the incidents on which Biden has predicated his call. California already has all of the gun-control laws that the Democrats wish to add federally — including a strict ban on so-called “assault weapons” — and those laws made no difference whatsoever.”
Biden is hardly in a solo position when it comes to calling for actions that already haven’t worked.
Indeed, California Congresswoman Judy Chu, whose 28th Congressional District encompasses Monterey Park—where she once served as mayor—was quoted by CBS saying universal background checks would “take guns out of dangerous people’s hands.”
But the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms chided her in a statement noting how “universal background checks” have been the law in California for several years. All firearms transfers must be done through a licensed gun dealer so they include a background check.
The revelation that the Monterey Park killer, who took his own life, was a 72-year-old man of Asian descent quickly muted any suggestion the Saturday shooting was the act of a white supremacist. When additional details emerged the gun he used was a 9mm pistol banned in the Golden State, CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb observed, “If this crime demonstrates anything, it’s not that the Golden State needs another restrictive gun control law, but instead needs to take a hard look at the laws already in place to determine why anyone would think any of those laws would prevent a determined individual from committing mass mayhem.”
According to The National News, the California shootings have spurred some Democrat U.S. senators to push for adoption of new gun control measures that seem like the old gun control measures that didn’t prevent either crime. They are calling for an “assault weapons” ban, while apparently overlooking the fact that the gun apparently used in the Monterey Park attack is already banned in California. So was the magazine. A companion measure, dubbed the Age 21 Act, would have no relevance since the alleged killers in both shootings are well over that age. The suspect in the Half Moon Bay shooting reportedly is 67 years old.
Meanwhile, anti-gun California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has insisted the state’s gun control laws are working, while unintentionally acknowledging that people intent on committing crimes simply ignore the law. According to the Los Angeles Times, Newsom told reporters that people are getting around the law by going to other states, getting firearms there and bringing them back. That was the case with the killer at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in 2019.
The dilemma was clearly explained in in the final paragraph of the National Review’s rebuke of Biden’s gun control rhetoric.
“Leaving aside the constitutional and political problems that such a move would present,” the editorial stated, “it remains the case that there is no clear statistical link between the prohibition of so-called ‘assault weapons’ and the rate of mass shootings — let alone the three-fold decrease that Biden has promised…Biden has taken what was already a false promise and turned it into an epicene fantasy. We have a word for that sort of behavior, but it’s not ‘leadership.’”
