Want to Stop Gun Violence, Democrats? Give Up Your Guns
By Ben Shapiro
Breitbart.com
As the fallout from self-appointed victim Bryce
Williams’ cold-blooded, videoed gun murder of two
journalists at WDBJ continued, politicians of the
left pulled out their dogeared playbook and began
pushing gun control. Never mind that Williams bought
his gun legally and passed all requisite background
checks–and that Williams would have passed any
background check, given his lack of criminal history
or institutionalization. Never mind that Williams
fired eight shots, which would fit within the
boundaries of the magazine-shortening advocates.
Something–anything!–has to be done about guns, say
the left’s heroes.
On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest
explained:
The precise details of that incident continue to be
under investigation. But as you’ve heard me say in
the past: This is another example of gun violence
that has become all-too-common in communities large
and small. And while there is no piece of
legislation that can end all violence in this
country, there are some common sense things that
only Congress can do that we know will have a
tangible impact on reducing gun violence in this
country. And Congress could take those steps in a
way that will not infringe on the constitutional
rights of law-abiding Americans. And the President
has long advocated Congress taking those steps, and
the President continues to feel they should do so.
No specifics were offered.
President Obama followed up that vacuous statement
with an even more vacuous statement, explaining
(wrongly) that more people are killed in America by
gun violence than by terrorism anywhere in the
world: “It breaks my heart every time you read or
hear about these kinds of incidents. … What we know
is that the number of people who die from
gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any
deaths that happen through terrorism.”
Hillary Clinton joined in the fun, too, telling
reporters, “We have got to do something about gun
violence in America, and I will take it on.” Again,
she offered no specifics.
If Democrats and their supporters truly want to
fight gun crime, and they truly believe that less
guns directly correlates to less gun homicide, there
is a simple way they could do so: they could give up
their guns. Bryce Williams was a leftist who was
chastised by management for wearing a Barack Obama
sticker during on-air election coverage.
But he’s just one example of gun crime in the
Democrat-supporting world. From 2009-2010, according
to the Centers for Disease Control, 26,632
firearm-related homicides took place in the United
States. The CDC investigated the number of
firearm-related homicides in the 50 most populous
U.S. cities; all but six of those cities were
located in counties which would go on to vote for
Barack Obama in 2012. In those cities, 13,014
firearm-related homicides took place.
In other words, just by confiscating all the guns
from all the people in the most populous Democratic
cities–by following the Democratic theory that less
guns mean less gun crimes–the American gun murder
rate would drop by half. And that doesn’t even count
all murders from all Democrat-supporting areas in
the country.
Obviously, that wouldn’t work–virtually all the
major Democratic cities already have gun control,
and the Democratic-area murder spree continues. But
the media will never discuss where most murders
actually occur, or who actually commits them. That
would be inconvenient to the Democratic narrative
that gun crime does not center in any location–that
a gun is dangerous in and of itself, no matter who
wields it.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of
Breitbart News and The New York Times bestselling
author, most recently, of the book, The People vs.
Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama
Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014).
Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.