Have you tried talking to gun control advocates about school shootings? Or the one down at the church near San Antonio, Texas?
It’s frustrating, because they are always singing the same song, from “we have too many guns” to “we should follow the example of Australia.”
Yes, we indeed have too many guns, but so what? We have a right to those guns. We also have too many cars, and no one wants to outlaw them when a drunk driver kills a family on the road. We also have a lot of residential swimming pool deaths, and no one is calling to outlaw them.
As for comparisons to Australia, let’s remember what John Lott recently wrote:
Gun control advocates like to note that there has been no mass public shooting in Australia since the buyback. But they are simply picking out a country that happens to “prove” what they want it to prove.European countries such as Belgium, France and the Netherlands have even stricter gun control laws than Australia does, but their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States.During the Obama administration, the per capita casualty rate from shootings in the European Union was actually 27 percent higher than the U.S. rate.
I tried to bring these numbers to the attention of a gun control advocate, and he told me to stop citing studies paid for by the NRA.
So how do you talk to an ideologue? You can’t!
President Trump may finally move the ball forward, because he is talking about school security, or the one issue that cuts through ideology.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.