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Friday, October 6, 2017

Dems use Vegas shooting to push gun agenda

A Massacre Is Not an Argument - Reason.com - Jacob Sullum:

October 4, 2017 - "The morning after a gunman murdered nearly 60 people in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton tweeted that 'we can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.' The former Democratic presidential nominee's commitment to putting politics aside disappeared in the middle of that sentence, and her implicit claim that she knows how to 'stop this from happening again' was equally empty.

"Gun controllers like Clinton habitually seize upon mass shootings as evidence in favor of the policies they have always supported.... Clinton, for example, argued that the Las Vegas attack demonstrated the folly of the NRA-backed Hearing Protection Act, which would loosen federal restrictions on suppressors, a.k.a. silencers. She suggested the death toll in Las Vegas could have been higher "if the shooter had a silencer'.... But as firearms experts immediately pointed out, so-called silencers do not actually eliminate the sound of gunfire.... Even with a suppressor, the hundreds of shots fired from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Resort and Casino would have been clearly audible....

"New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had already published a column in which he listed eight gun control proposals, all supposedly aimed at 'preventing mass shootings like the Vegas Strip attack.' Most of them ... plainly had nothing to do with mass shootings like the Vegas Strip attack. Even the most plausible-sounding of Kristof's ideas, 'universal background checks,' would have made no difference in this case, since the Las Vegas shooter ... was repeatedly cleared by the FBI when he bought his guns. As is typical of mass shooters, Paddock did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record.

"After presenting his list of new gun controls ... Kristof conceded that 'it's too soon to know what, if anything, might have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas, and it may be that nothing could have prevented it'.... That's par for the course in the wake of mass shootings, which gun controllers use to create a sense of urgency they hope will translate into new restrictions....

"'It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something,' Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) declared on Monday. 'There's no excuse for inaction,' tweeted former Vice President Joe Biden. As CNN observed, 'Democrats are desperate to do something — anything — on gun control'....

"Contrary to what Joe Biden seems to think, having no idea what you're doing or whether it makes sense is an excellent excuse for inaction."

Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/04/a-massacre-is-not-an-argument?utm_medium=email
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