Before you call him a liberal weenie, this is Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City calling for gun control!
Okay, I promised I’d not say anything more about
the Aurora shooting, but the pro-gun cult has been so vociferous they provoked me
into another rant. Let me take you back to 1993, folks, when the Brady Bill was
passed, a bill the NRA tried its best to sandbag, but couldn’t. Civics lesson:
The Brady Bill is a pathetic and mostly symbolic gun control bill named for
Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, who suffered permanent brain
damage when Reagan was shot in 1981. It’s the bill that requires a background
check before buying a gun. How horrible! Reality check: It’s way harder to
register to vote or get a Social Security card than it is to buy a gun in
America.
The Brady Bill was the last time Congress seriously
discussed gun control, but let’s put that aside for a math lesson. Can you add
these figures? Below is a list of mass killings since the passage of the Brady
Bill. The first figure beside each mass shooting is the number of dead, the
second the number of wounded. Can you add these figures?
1994 Fairchild
Air Force Base, Ark. 5/23
1994 Jonesboro,
Ark 5/20
1999 Columbine,
CO 13/21
2002 Beltway
sniper 11/6
2004 Columbus,
OH 4/7
2004 Fresno,
CA 9/0
2005 Red
Lake, MN 10/5
2006 Univ.
of Northern Illinois 6/21
2006 Amish
school, Lancaster Cty. 6/5
2006 Golita,
CA Post Office 5/23
2006 Seattle 7/12
2007 Salt
Lake City 6/4
2007 Crandon,
WI 6/11
2007 Westroads
Mall, Omaha 9/4
2007 Virginia
Tech 32/17
2008 Kirkwood,
MO 6/2
2008 Covina,
CA 10/3
2009 Binghamton,
NY 14/4
2009 Kinston,
AL 11/6
2009 Carthage,
NC 8/3
2009 Fort
Hood, TX 13/29
2010 Appomattox,
VA 8/0
2011 Carson
City, NV 5/7
2011 Tuscon,
AZ 6/13
2011 Cooley
Twp., OH 8/1
2012 Oikos
Univ. Oakland 7/3
2012 Aurora,
CO 12/58
While you’re punching numbers into your calculator, I’ll
save you some research. How many of the above incidents saw an alert NRA member
jump into the fray and take out the assassin, thereby averting greater carnage?
Answer: zero, as in not a damn one of them. If there is a bigger load of hooey
than the argument that a gun-packing citizenry making the streets safer, I’ll
be hornswoggled if I know what it is. As a historian, though, I recall that the
same argument was advanced long ago in places like Tombstone, Arizona and Dodge
City. I’ve yet to unearth a document proclaiming them as great places to raise
a family.
My take away message from the above list of blood and
tragedy is simple. The last time we tried gun control, there was a short period
(1995-99) where the mass murder rate declined. But now the NRA is back in the
saddle and the blood flows faster than Mitt Romney’s assets to the Cayman
Islands. Each time we bury the dead, the NRA tells us to resist gun control
because guns make us safer. How’s your math coming along? There’s more evidence
to support the theory that Casanova was a virgin than the NRA’s assertion that
guns protect us.
So why do we fall for this canard time and time again? What
about the old adage that if you keep trying the same old thing and getting the
same old result, there’s little likelihood that trying it again will yield a
different one? We’ve tried the NRA way and it yields death. If your math looks
anything like mine, you might conclude that taking away the guns can’t make it
much worse than it already is. The NRA says gun control doesn’t work. I call
that hypothetical BS because we’ve never seriously tried it. Fragmentary
evidence suggests than even minimal efforts, like the Brady Bill, make some
difference. Look, I can’t guarantee you that gun control would make Americans
safer, but isn’t it worth testing? If it fails, we can always go back to the
way it was and I’ll personally write an apology letter to the NRA and promise
never again to refer to it as the Nazi Rifle Association.
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