There are an estimated 400 million firearms in the U.S., at least 200 million in the hands of people who take gun rights seriously. Politicians and pundits will flap their gums after each new tragedy, but much as they’d like to, they’re not going to take away Americans’ guns. From William L. Anderson at mises.org:
American life is thoroughly politicized, to the point where there seems to be a talking points template to discuss anything that occurs. Thus, in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the same script is replayed in the media that was replayed from the shooting in Buffalo, which was replayed from the shooting in …
Each political tribe has its own script, with the assumption being that because these awful events are being politicized, a political solution exists (along with a political cause). For example, in Texas, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke crashed a press conference on the Uvalde shooting led by Republican governor of Texas Greg Abbott, for example.
At one level, we can dismiss the actions of both men, as each was trying to score political points. However, we cannot dismiss the accusation O’Rourke levied at Abbott: “This one’s on you.” He added:
The time to stop the next shooting is right now and you are doing nothing. You said this is not predictable. This is totally predictable. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed, just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.
O’Rourke’s self-style “solution” is to ban the AR-15, the semiautomatic rifle that often has been used in mass killings, such as Uvalde, Buffalo, and the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, with the assumption, one supposes, that once that particular semiautomatic rifle no longer is commercially available, no mass shootings will occur, a heroic assumption at best.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 