City Paper: Gun Control Fundamentalists
Liberals love to laugh at evangelicals who question evolution. Yet the Left’s faith in gun control remains their most fundamentalist dogma. It is an abiding doctrine completely void of empirical reality.
Let’s be perfectly clear: There is one thing, and one thing only, that could have stopped the shooter who murdered 12 innocent people and wounded 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., earlier this month — another person with a gun. Liberals can scoff at this. They can be outraged when a politician or a public figure makes the same point, yet it remains undeniably true.
In the days following the Colorado shooting tragedy, I read many columns advocating for more gun control. With each, I would fast forward to the part where the liberal writer was going to explain to me why the absence of another armed person in that movie theater was somehow a good thing. The argument is so patently stupid that I was fascinated anyone would dare make it.
Most liberals don’t make this argument. They just cite some statistics about how many incidents of gun violence occur each year, with no mention of how many of these instances involved unregistered guns and convicted felons or were part of a crime.
Cenk Uygur, of the online news site Young Turks, actually goes there. Though we often disagree, I am a fan of Uygur because he has integrity and is willing to criticize his own side. That’s rare in the often mindlessly partisan world of politics. Still, when it comes to guns, Uygur himself is mindless. In a column for the Huffington Post, he writes:
“They send out their Republican minions to say that the answer is more guns. If only other people in the crowd had guns, then everything would have been all right. Yes, because in that dark, smoke-filled theater if there were more than two or three shooters, everyone would have known who was the original shooter and less people would have been shot, right?
How would the third gunman know if the second gunman was part of the team that was shooting the place up (like Klebold and Harris at Columbine) or one of the guys trying to prevent it? Let alone the fourth or the fifth gunman, let alone the cops who show up.”
Hmm. How do I put this? Mr. Uygur, you see that guy who is walking around and firing upon unarmed people who are screaming in terror? You shoot him. He’s bad. What if there are two, three, or eight people doing the same thing? You shoot them too. They are also bad.
