No political party is monolithic. There are people who vote Democrat who actually value their gun rights. There are Republicans who want to restrict those rights. I mention that so that, going forward in this piece, when I speak in generalities, people know that I understand it’s not every member of a given party.
But man, is that hard to remember sometimes.
See, there’s a new speaker of the House. It took a while to get there, but they finally settled on someone and this one is apparently pretty pro-gun.
That’s good, at least from our perspective.
Yet he seems to already be ruffling some feathers in the House, particularly in the wake of Lewiston. He apparently made some comments that have some House Democrats really upset.
A large group of Democratic lawmakers have called out new House Speaker Mike Johnson’s remarks in the wake of the Maine mass shooting in which he placed blame on people, not firearms, for the country’s gun violence epidemic.
More than 100 Democrats — led by House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force Chair Rep Mike Thompson — signed a letter to Mr Johnson, expressing their “deep concerns about your troubling comments following the devastating mass shooting” in Lewiston, Maine.
The shooting, which was the deadliest of 2023, claimed 18 lives and left 13 others wounded.
“At the end of the day, the problem is the human heart. It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons,” Mr Johnson said after the violence and then advocated for the Second Amendment in the next breath.
Democrats slammed this perspective, calling it “factually wrong” and said it “paints a dark view of America and its people.” The lawmakers argued, “Gun violence in America is not inevitable, it is simply tolerated by Republican leadership,” and called for the passage of gun legislation as an actionable way to prevent these attacks.
Now, I don’t have an issue with Democrats challenging Johnson’s view here. Different people have different perspective, but holy crap did they lose the plot.
First, they call that “troubling?” There’s nothing troubling about saying that guns aren’t the problem, the problem is that people want to kill others.
It’s what we in the real world like to call “the truth.”
Nor do his comments paint a “dark view of America and its people.” That’s better done by Democrats who support the idea that our nation and the majority of its people are irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, and guilty of every other significant brand of hate you care to name simply because of the way they were born.
Somehow, though, I don’t see these Democrats lashing out at that.
Guns are not the issue. They’ve never been the issue. The issue is that Americans tend to be more violent than elsewhere. If it were the guns, then even our non-gun homicide rate wouldn’t be higher than other nations total homicide rate.
In other words, Johnson’s big sin with the Democrats is that he spit facts and not anti-gun rhetoric.
Then again, in the wake of a mass shooting, Democrats don’t seem to be interested in hearing anything other than their own talking points coming out of other people’s mouths and can’t fathom that people who disagree might actually dislike such events. They just don’t see gun control as a solution.
After all, as we wrap up 2023, let’s not forget that we essentially started the year with two mass shootings within two days in heavily gun-controlled California.
Honestly, if these Democrats are that troubled by Johnson’s comments, they need to wake the hell up.
