More on mass shootings and debunking gun-nuttery
A realist's guide to confronting asinine arguments against gun control
The Uvalde school massacre was perfect in the sense that it exposed so many ridiculous arguments made by pro-gun advocates a.k.a. gun-nuts.
It’s a mental health issue - This response kind of got back-doored by blithering police incompetence. Apparantly, Mr. Ramos’ grandmother and grandfather were more than mildly concerned about young Salvador, but Texas does not have a red flag law, which might have enjoined their grandson from purchasing an AR-15; so the mentall illness point is to a degree pointless.
Of the 9 states with laws on the books which might stop a mentally ill person from buying a gun, only 1 state is reliably red (Indiana). Florida, which has a red flag law, is purple at best — the other 7 states with red flag laws run from Azure to Navy Blue politically. Oklahoma, the reddest state in the nation, actually has a law on the books that forbids county or municipal government entities from passing red-flaw laws.
If someone believes in right-wing conspiracy theories, QAnon insanity, astrology, or Tucker Carlson; it’s a rather hypocritical to cite those beliefs as evidence of mental illness after a mass shooting occurs, but would have concomitantly opposed any legal process to denied that person the ability to purchase or possess a gun.
The politics of delegitimization often comes into play here — the shooter is separated from the gun and the sytem is blamed for not stopping a killer. “Crazy”, “QAnon”, “racist”, “illegal immigrant”, “parole/probation violator”, or just about anything that makes out the shooter to be an outcast will do. The next step is always the same — the shooter was not a law abiding citizen thus should not have been allowed to have a gun. The system, not guns, failed to stop the shooting.
The “good guy with a gun” - The person who shot and killed Salvador Ramos was not a “good guy with a gun”, he was a law enforcement officer (US Customs and Border Protection) well within his jurisdictional power of arrest. The “good guy with a gun” is a civilian who’s carrying a firearm ostensibly to assist when police are unable to stop a shooter. Police have shot their own in plainclothes and undercover, so gun rights are neither enhanced or diminished by white people deciding to take out bad guys on their own, but public safety is. And, yeah, there are no people of color who are “good guys with a gun” even when they are in full uniform and clearly sworn police officers.
In 2019, a white security guard pulled a gun on a black police officer in full uniform in a federal building, so spare me1. We live in racist world, so it’s ridiculous to believe that anyone can tell who is a good guy and who is a bad guy with those kind of blinders on. The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police, all 6 of them, are persons of color. Do the math had any of them been on site at Robb Elementary in plainclothers when the shooting took place.
The “We don’t need more gun laws” argument — Most red states have gone out of their way to not simply stop gun control efforts, but to remove laws already on the books and make it easier to buy guns. It’s not lax gun laws, it’s the State of Texas, in the case of the Uvalde shooting, making it remarkably easy for an 18 year-old kid with a non-driver’s ID card and cash to buy an AR-15.
The gun control argument lives and dies on gun violence tragedies — it’s a rollercoaster. The gun lobby gets by by reminding people “it’s a bumpy ride”. For gun control advocates, it’s little more than demanding warning stickers instead saying the obvious “rollercoasters, in and of themselves, are dangerous”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/16/white-irs-security-guard-pulled-gun-an-armed-man-it-was-black-police-officer-uniform/