Four Reasons More Gun Control Wouldn’t Have Stopped Recent Mass Shootings

1) We Don’t Even Know What Happened: What kind of gun was used? Where was it acquired? Did the shooters pass a background check? We still don’t have answers for some of the most basic questions surrounding these incidents, but that didn’t stop President Obama for calling for more gun control before the victims were even identified. Anyone who can tell you the right answer before they’re told the question is either clairvoyant or a bullshit artist.

2) Colorado Has Tough Gun Laws; California Has the Toughest: In response to the Aurora theater shooting, Colorado passed a series of tough gun laws in 2013, including laws to ban “high capacity” magazines, require universal background checks and improve reporting of mental health records to the FBI. None of these new laws have prevented the city of Colorado Springs from having two mass shootings in the last month. California has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation: mandatory background checks, bans on “assault weapons”, bans on “high capacity” magazines, waiting periods, mandatory safety tests for new gun owners and special laws designed to separate guns from those designated by the government to be mentally unstable. Yet these gun laws appear to have been impotent to stop the San Bernardino massacre.

3) This a Hate Problem, Not a Gun Problem: The country is nearly evenly split between conservatives and liberals and members of both factions can legally purchase a variety of firearms, yet we never hear about some liberal yahoo shooting-up Focus on the Family. Guns didn’t cause a man to shoot-up a women’s health clinic. Hate did.

4) Terrorists Don’t Obey Gun Laws: The guns used in the Paris terrorist attack were all illegal firearms. Here in America, our home-grown terrorists haven’t needed guns to inflict pain and death. Oklahoma City, Boston, Atlanta have all been devastated by ideological maniacs with homemade explosives. The largest terror attack in history was undertaken with box cutters. And guns laws haven’t prevented arsonists from targeting four Planned Parenthood clinics this year.

As a former lobbyist for a coalition of pro-choice advocates, I am saddened by the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs. As a former resident of San Bernardino County, I’m shocked by the violence that has touched so close to somewhere I used to call home. But as a gun owner, I’m disgusted by President Obama, who is exploiting this tragedy to further his gun control agenda rather than addressing the problems that actually contributed to this tragedy.

Instead of having the political courage to discuss the difficult issues of confronting a fringe subculture that continually stokes the fire of the Culture War with violent rhetoric and the importance of keeping reproductive freedom safe and accessible, President Obama has chosen to exploit this tragedy to try and further his gun control agenda. We don’t know the motivation of the people who slaughtered so many innocents in California; yet Obama already knows the next gun law he wants passed.

If the President was honest with the American people, he wouldn’t pretend these are just gun crimes, he’d call them for what they are: acts of domestic terrorism. Whether it’s Daesh or the Radical Right, telling Americans that new gun laws will stop terrorism is a lie.

Eric Wooten
Vice President
LGC California Chapter