Our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters keep telling us that if we lived in a world without guns, nobody would ever get shot. This is true, in the same sense that if we lived in a world without cars, nobody would ever get run over by a car. (You’d also have to get your pizza delivered on horseback, and the toppings would get stuck to the top of the box from all the jostling, but whatever.) If we want to stop gun crime, just get rid of guns, right? “Wave a magic wand and make all the guns in the world disappear” is a liberal’s idea of a policy prescription.
Unfortunately, Harry Potter can’t save us. We have to live in the world that is, not the world that we’d prefer. In this world, it’s inevitable that some people are going to abuse their right of self-defense. The answer isn’t to curtail the rights of law-abiding people.
And we can’t count on the cops to stop people from doing bad things, because they can’t or won’t. Just look at what happened at YouTube HQ yesterday.
Ethan Baron, Mercury News (San Jose):
The night before Nasim Aghdam opened fire in a courtyard at YouTube’s headquarters Tuesday afternoon, Mountain View police found the San Diego woman sleeping in her car.
She had been reported missing by her family in Southern California, and her father Ismail Aghdam told police she might be going to YouTube because she “hated” the company. Police called the family at 2 a.m. Tuesday to say she’d been found and that everything was “under control,” her father said.
As we now know, everything was not under control. Later that day, Nasim Aghdam shot three people at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno and then turned the gun on herself.
When I read this, my initial reaction was, “Nice job, pigs.” But after giving it a moment’s thought, I don’t know what else the police could’ve done. We don’t have a Pre-Crime division, like in Minority Report. We can’t have the cops hauling in every single person who’s found sleeping in a car. They did what they could.
If you agree, ask yourself this: Do you really want the police to be the only ones who can defend you when you’re attacked?
They’re still trying to figure out Aghdam’s motive, but apparently she had her own YouTube channel and was angry that the company was censoring and demonetizing her videos. So maybe it’s a variation on the old “disgruntled employee” motive?
YouTube has already taken down her channel, but some of her, um, work has been preserved:
Here is a snippet from one of the bizarre anti-meat videos posted by the YouTube shooter, Nasim Najafi Aghdam.
“They’ll tell you I’m insane ’cause you know I hate the meat.”
Watch full video here: https://t.co/CRmNNTdwli pic.twitter.com/Bh14Lt74RS
— Amber Athey (@amber_athey) April 4, 2018
If weird, crappy YouTube videos are outlawed, only outlaws will have weird, crappy YouTube videos.
One thing is for sure: Gun-grabbers are going to blame the NRA, of which Aghdam was not a member. And they won’t blame PETA, of which she was a member.
Youtube HQ shooter Nasim Aghdam was a animal rights activist, who dressed in a wig and jeans with large blood drops painted on them for a PETA protesthttps://t.co/xEQLaI7A19 #YouTubeHQ #YouTube pic.twitter.com/3NxIIiXxKV
— Alex Smith (@AshtonWayne1) April 4, 2018
She wasn’t a white male nationalist Trump voter waving a Gadsden flag, so she doesn’t fit the narrative. This has already led to some embarrassing oopsies:
Chapeau à la Mode it is, then.
In summary: A Persian vegan PETA activist shot up YouTube headquarters, possibly because they demonetized her channel, and that’s why you shouldn’t have the right to defend yourself with a gun.
Aghdam’s three victims have been hospitalized. Let’s hope they pull through. And let’s hope the left doesn’t exploit them for political purposes.
We can still hope, can’t we?
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