By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Buried in the third paragraph of an Associated Press report about mass shootings and gun control is an acknowledgement which essentially explains the difference between political parties and their approach to crime prevention and constitutional rights.
“More than half the states have enacted substantive new laws this year regarding gun policies or school safety measures,” the AP report says, “most often tightening firearm restrictions in Democratic-led states and loosening them in Republican-led ones.”
The statement underscores why the Second Amendment community regards Democrats as “the party of gun control/confiscation,” and increasingly throws its weight behind GOP candidates and incumbents. In their view, Republicans are at least trying to protect the right to keep and bear arms while Democrats want to destroy it, or erode it to the point that having a firearm is a government-regulated privilege, not a fundamental right protected by the Second Amendment.
Ironically, the media allows anti-gunners to call their initiatives “gun safety measures,” when they clearly are something else, say gun rights activists.
For example, in St. Louis, Missouri, Mayor Tishaura Jones just announced “a series of gun control measures that she hopes will help prevent gun violence in the region,” according to KMOV News. Her proposals are pretty much a carbon copy of the currently prevailing gun control agenda promoted across the country by the gun prohibition lobby and their allies in Congress and state legislatures.
She wants to ban “military-style weapons…as well as prevent youth from obtaining firearms and banning ghost guns.”
In Tennessee this week, Republicans in the Legislature are holding firm against proposals to tighten restrictions on gun owners in reaction to the mass shooting earlier this year at The Covenant School in Nashville. The killer in that incident, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, identified as a transgender man and former student of the school by Wikipedia, was fatally shot by responding police officers who wasted no time entering the building and locating Hale on the second floor of the school.
As noted by the AP story, several Democrat-dominated states have adopted stricter gun control laws this year, most recently in Delaware. Last Friday, Gov. John Carney signed legislation restricting guns on school property and at election polling places; restrictions which never seem to deter people with criminal intent.
Michigan and Minnesota both adopted so-called “red flag” laws this year, and Washington banned so-called “assault weapons” and added waiting periods on all gun sales.
But are these gun control working to reduce violent crime in which guns are involved? Proponents say “yes” but the data may not.
Case in point is Seattle, Washington, where the far-left City Council eight years ago adopted a special tax on gun and ammunition sales, ostensibly to raise revenue to fund “anti-violence” projects. The projected revenue has never fully materialized, and in the years since the tax was adopted, the number of murders in the city has doubled.
Yet, instead of acknowledging their tax didn’t work, the city is still determined to undo the state’s model preemption law so it can adopt even more restrictions. There are no moderates or conservatives on the council and the mayor is a Democrat.
