Gun Control
President Obama is big on collectives. He thinks that, since we didn’t pass his gun control legislation, we are “collectively responsible” for those shot and killed at a community college in Oregon. He’s getting pretty darned tired of having to point this out every time there’s a mass shooting. Jacob Sullum at Reason is getting pretty darned tired of explaining why this makes no sense.
Last weekend in Obama’s adopted hometown Chicago 14 people were shot, 6 were killed. Chicago has the gun control laws the president says we need.
“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue”
Yes, Obama was right. If you did not support gun legislation, you are indeed partly “collectively responsible” for those shot and killed. Of course, it’s not enough to just tighten access to guns in Chicago, but nationwide in the US, since otherwise criminals can easily get their guns from a different state.
No, Obama was wrong. Isn’t it interesting how shootings which capture the national interest, more often than not, occur in the same states which are considered by the grabber left to be models for the rest of the nation to follow? California is a prime example. If the grabber left theory of “more guns, more crime” held, the states with laws closer to our nation’f founding vision would see higher rates of gun-involved homicide, but they don’t. And if a grabber claims otherwise, parse their words very carefully. Most will use (unintentionally, because they are themselves gullible) the verbal slight of hand phrase “gun violence” as a proxy for homicide. This allows them to fold in suicide statistics to bolster their numbers. This is why they so often speak of Alaska, where seasonal affective disorder and physical isolation can lead to a higher rate of suicide.