The WSJ has an interesting interview with Mark Glaze. He has been the leader of Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. Glaze is leaving the group. Everytown was caught lying about the number of school shootings since Newtown last week.
Glaze offers up some interesting reasons why he believes the gun control movement continues to fail to get its gun policies passed into law.
Obamacare hurt the government’s credibility.
“There’s an almost perfect overlap, I think, between the people who are the most active and radicalized gun voters and people who just don’t like and trust the government very much. When you take on the gun issue, you’re forced to take on by proxy a much bigger issue in this country, which is a deeply ingrained distrust of government that gets worse every time the government can’t get a healthcare website off the ground or can’t get it’s act together to pass a farm bill.”
Edward Snowden’s revelations about domestic government surveillance also hurt the cause.
“The fact that people have learned that the government has taken for itself the right to listen in on our most private conversations has done nothing to inspire faith in government restraint. It’s that lack of faith in government restraint that makes it difficult to do things like ask everybody to take a background check.”
The government spies on you on the one hand, and wants to disarm you with the other. You don’t have to be paranoid to have a problem with this.
Glaze also admits that his own movement pushes policies that wouldn’t stop the next Newtown. That’s a problem.
“Because people perceive a mismatch in the policy solutions that we have to offer and the way some of these mass shootings happened, you know, it is a messaging problem for us, I think. … Is it a messaging problem when a mass shooting happens and nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting? Sure it’s a challenge in this issue.”
That deserves a resounding “Duh!”
It exposes the gun control movement for what it is: A collection of opportunistic ghouls.
Gun controllers would be wise to examine the possible link between strong behavior-modifying drugs and mass shootings. But doing that would not take a single gun off the streets. They could also admit that despite their claims, violent crime has been going down for years. That also won’t take any guns off the streets. They could admit the reasons for the drop in violent crimes, of which there are two main ones — mandatory minimum sentencing keeps violent offenders off the streets longer; and the rise in the number of legal concealed firearm carriers means criminals are less certain than they once were that they’re engaging unarmed victims rather than armed citizens when committing crimes.
The gun grabbers aren’t giving up. They will double down, spend more money, make more outlandish claims, propose more restrictions that will not actually prevent the heinous shootings that they cynically and opportunistically use to push new and unnecessary laws.
And every time they do, more Americans will arm themselves and stock up on ammo.
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