The Patriot Post® · Predictably and Despicably, Dems Exploit Vegas to Push Gun Control

The nation’s worst shooting massacre happened Sunday night in Las Vegas, where 58 people attending a country music concert were murdered and more than 500 wounded. Jason Aldean was performing when the assailant opened fire from his 32nd floor hotel room. This was a horrendous act of mass murder — what President Donald Trump correctly called “pure evil.” It’s a grim reminder that evil human beings will go to extreme measures to inflict pain and suffering on others.

As evil as this massacre was, gun controllers took to the microphone before any facts surrounding this atrocity were unveiled. Leftists immediately screamed about how their preferred policies would have prevented this tragedy without presenting any facts to back up their claim.

What follows is a litany of lies from many leftists using this tragedy to advance their agenda to strip Liberty from law-abiding citizens.

After trotting out a series of completely bogus statistics, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pontificated in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, “Congress has a moral duty to address this horrific and heartbreaking epidemic. Charged with the solemn duty to protect and defend the American people, we must respond to these tragedies with courage, unity and decisive action.” By which she means to pass left-wing anti-gun legislation curtailing the Second Amendment.

Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy from Connecticut insisted, “This must stop. … It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic.” He added, “The thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its a— and do something.”

Connecticut’s other Democrat senator, Richard Blumenthal, added, “It has been barely a year since what was previously the largest mass shooting in American history — the deadly attack at Pulse nightclub. … In the interim, thousands more have been lost to the daily, ruthless toll of gun violence. Still, Congress refuses to act. I am more than frustrated. I am furious!”

Joe “Double Barrel Shotgun” Biden posted on Twitter, “How long do we let gun violence tear families apart? Enough. Congress & the WH should act now to save lives. There’s no excuse for inaction.”

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) argued, “The problem is that ‘enough’ was many, many years and many, many brutal deaths ago.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted, “Thoughts & prayers are NOT enough. … We need to have the conversation about how to stop gun violence. We need it NOW.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) added, “How many lives must be lost before we act?”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) commented, “We suffer these horrific events repeatedly and do nothing to stop them. We must do better.”

“Enough is enough,” Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) tweeted. “Congress should come together and establish a Select Committee to end gun violence.” While they’re at it, maybe they could end world hunger and poverty.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and perennial leading advocate for gun control, opined that leaders should “resolve to stop mass shootings in America — and back up our words with actions.”

And of course, Hillary Clinton, the defeated presidential candidate who should be in jail instead of making public comments, urged the public to not politicize this mass murder — but then immediately politicized it. “Our grief isn’t enough,” she lectured. “We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.” In other words, defenders of the Second Amendment must put our politics aside to follow her politics.

Clinton also launched into factually challenged nonsense: “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.”

Which brings us to several facts that these cynical exploiters conveniently leave out.

It is true that the NRA has been pushing for years to have Congress allow “silencers” to be less regulated. But there is a huge misconception about these tools that Clinton and many others exploit. A “silencer” is more accurately called a suppressor. It reduces the loudness and flash of a firearm but it does not completely silence it. In other words, a silencer makes a gun slightly less loud (though it’s still roughly the decibel level of a jackhammer), and it was invented to protect hearing for those who regularly practice shooting. It does not, as Hollywood imagines, allow someone to fire a weapon that cannot be heard by others in the next room.

Another consideration is whether the killer used a fully automatic weapon to carry out this attack on innocent people as early reports speculated. It’s more likely that the killer used a “bump fire” stock attachment that allows a semiautomatic rifle to simulate automatic fire. If that’s the case, Democrats will go after such accessories and Republicans will have a difficult time playing defense.

Either way, the truth is, as Charles C.W. Cooke points out, “He had so many weapons that it’ll be a while before we know which ones he chose."
 Nevertheless, the media is quick to blame Republicans for failing to renew the Clinton administration’s 1994 "assault weapons” ban. That ban applied to semiautomatic rifles, not fully automatic ones.

Fully automatic weapons already have the severest restrictions of any firearm. It is illegal to sell or buy a new one. Fully automatic weapons that were made and owned before 1986 are still in circulation but they are extremely expensive, are very difficult to acquire and have very strict rules that come with them. In order to own a fully automatic weapon, a $200 tax must be paid along with a lengthy application form to the ATF. If, after a lengthy background check, someone is approved to own a fully automatic weapon, then the ATF enters that individual’s information into a registry and the local law enforcement within that jurisdiction is notified. Fully automatic weapons are also almost never used in homicides — just three times since 1934, and two of those were by police.

The Democrat talking points about gun control are completely blown out of the water with these facts, but the Leftmedia come to their aid.

Yet, as they do with every heinous shooting, Democrats continue to use the blood of innocents to push for more restrictions and even to completely outlaw firearm ownership. They call for more controls despite the fact that there are already 20,000 laws on the books to restrict firearm use. Chicago, a city leftists love to tout as an example of why we need more firearm regulations, already has the most stringent gun laws to go with the highest crime rate of any city in the U.S.

Moreover, a gun is an object, a tool. Monstrous murder sprees using those tools are committed only by evil or mentally deranged people. The argument from the Left goes something like this: “Well, if there were no guns, then evil people could not inflict such great harm.” Wrong! Evil people will use any means to inflict harm; knives, baseball bats, explosives, vehicles (as when 84 people were slaughtered in Nice, France) and many other objects could be used. Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin perhaps said it best: “You can’t regulate evil.”

We also need to be reminded of the reason that our Founding Fathers were so adamant about protecting We the People from government encroachment on the natural right to defend oneself with a firearm. Our right to keep and bear arms is the greatest deterrent to a tyrannical government that would want to enslave its people. Without gun ownership, there is no defense of Liberty. That doesn’t change even in the face of the horrific violence in Las Vegas.