Police still haven’t released a motive in the Kansas City shooting that left one person dead and more than twenty others injured on Wednesday afternoon, and we know almost nothing about the three individuals taken into custody other than the police chief’s description of them as “bad actors“, but Democrats from Joe Biden on down are already proclaiming that the shooting should prompt Congress into immediately adopting new gun control legislation.
“It is time to act. That’s where I stand. And I ask the country to stand with me. To make your voice heard in Congress so we finally act to ban assault weapons, to limit high-capacity magazines, strengthen background checks, keep guns out of the hands of those who have no business owning them or handling them,” Biden said.
The president said the shooting at the victory parade “cuts deep in the American soul,” and claimed that “we know what we have to do, we just need the courage to do it.”
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who represents the Kansas City area in Congress, told reporters he’s not asking for prayers. He’s asking for more restrictions on lawful gun owners.
“This is ugly,” Cleaver told The Star. “It was supposed to be one of the happiest days in decades. And then people are running for their lives. I know that if the murder of children didn’t inspire Congress to act, then the murder of football fans won’t get a piece of consideration. So it goes on and on and on. I don’t know what to do.”
Well, the first thing to do would be to wait for the facts to emerge before deciding what the right response should be. Of course, for anti-gunners, any act of violence that involves a firearm is automatically cause to infringe on our Second Amendment rights. It won’t matter if any or all of the suspects in Wednesday’s shooting were already prohibited from possessing firearms or were the previous recipients of sweetheart plea deals that kicked them back onto the streets instead of keeping them behind bars. According to gun control activists and their political allies, the only way to make us safer is to deprive us of our ability to protect ourselves.
Ramming gun control legislation through Congress wouldn’t be an act of courage, as Biden claims. It would be a knee-jerk reaction to an awful tragedy; one that might make some people feel better but would have little effect on the people who commit these kinds of wanton crimes. It was just one week ago that a 15-year-old who’s only been in this country for a few months allegedly opened fire in a business in Times Square; a supposedly gun-free zone in one of the most gun-controlled cities in the country. New York already has an “assault weapons” ban on the books, as well as prohibitions on “high-capacity” magazines, “universal” background checks, and virtually every other gun control law that Biden has demanded since he took office; none of which were able to stop a teenager from illegally acquiring a gun and allegedly using it in the commission of multiple crimes (police believe the teen is also responsible for at least two robberies in the city in recent weeks). If someone can get ahold of a gun so easily in one of the most anti-2A states in the Union, then why should we think that adopting these same laws at the national level is going to have a greater impact?
The gunfire that turned what should have been a day of celebration into a day of tragedy for Kansas City residents didn’t come from firearms pulling their own triggers. There were human beings behind each and every round that was wantonly fired into the crowd of Chiefs fans who had turned out to cheer on their hometown team after their Super Bowl victory, and if we want to prevent acts like this from happening in the future we need to focus on the people behind this heinous crime instead of deluding ourselves into thinking we can ban our way to safety at the expense of our own right to self-defense.
It’s not guns that need to be controlled, it’s the people that need to be controlled. When are people going to understand that guns do not kill people? people kill people. My heart goes out to the people and the families that were caught up in this senseless shooting. But look at the people, not the guns.