Disarming America is never going to happen, like it or not

Guest Commentary:

“Somehow this has become routine.” That’s what president Barack Obama said after a gunman killed 10 people before police shot him to death at Umpqua Community College in Rosebud, Ore. on Oct. 1.

Obama said a mouthful there; more than he knew.

Mass shootings ¬– gun homicides with four or more victims – are indeed routine. That is, they are stable. There’s been no discernible upward trend in the number of incidents or victims over the last 40 years, contra scaremongers who pretend this is a new or growing phenomenon.

It’s also routine for victim disarmament, or gun control, advocates to begin dancing on the graves of those killed in mass shootings before the bodies have had time to cool, demanding more, and more draconian, laws of a type which are not only patently evil and irrefutably unconstitutional, but which have never produced the results their supporters claim to want. The main centers of American gun violence are, and always have been, areas where corrupt legislators or naive voters adopt the victim disarmers’ schemes.

Obama happens to be grave-dancing Ghoul in Chief at the moment, but would-be Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wasted no time hitting the dance floor either, hoping to gain back some ground on opponent Bernie Sanders by grandstanding on the fact that Sanders hasn’t historically been quite as stark-raving nutzoid on the topic of guns and self-defense as the Democrat mainstream.

Clinton focused on the victim disarmament lobby’s bete noire, the National Rifle Association. “What’s wrong with us that we can’t stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby?” she asked.

A better question might be “with friends like the NRA, what do gun owners need enemies for?” The NRA has either overtly backed, or at best grudgingly compromised on, every major piece of American victim disarmament legislation since the 1930s. At their very best, they’re weak-kneed moderates who can’t be trusted to show any backbone in defense of human rights. At their worst, well, Benedict Arnold doesn’t lack for modern imitators.

For those politicians and activists silly enough to think gun control is a winning issue in 2016, one thing to keep in mind:

There are somewhere between 270 million and 350 million guns in the hands of between 70 million and 100 million Americans.

You can’t have them.

You don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether you like it or not.

– Tom Knapp is director of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism