Hillary Clinton has been giving “a lot of thought” to the church massacre that tragically claimed the lives of 26 people at Sutherland Springs, Texas.
The mass murder was carried out by lone gunman Devin Kelley, who conducted a mortifying assault on the innocent victims, who ranged in age from 18 months to 77 years old.
On Friday evening, Mrs. Clinton shared her reflections on the heartbreaking case.
I’ve thought a lot about the church massacre last Sunday. What can anyone say equal to the horror & grief?
We should act to prevent future killings by expanding & fully funding background checks.
94% of Americans support them, it should be the law.https://t.co/UDKnRWMumN
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 10, 2017
Her conclusion was not that there should be more citizens like NRA instructor Stephen Willeford, the “good man with a gun” who rushed barefoot and armed into the chaotic fray at the First Baptist Church to take on the mass murderer. Nor did her sober reflection lead her to be grateful that the heroic man shot and chased Kelley until his ignoble end.
“I’m not a hero. I am not,” Willeford said after ending the rampage, while displaying a virtue foreign to Mrs. Clinton called “humility.”
“I think my God, my Lord protected me and gave me the skills to do what needed to be done,” he said, “and I just wish I could have gotten there faster, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was happening.”
Willeford would fire two of the three shots that ultimately ended Kelley from committing further atrocities. But you won’t hear any thanks, any accolades, or any praise of men like Willeford from the likes of Mrs. Clinton. It doesn’t fit the agenda, you see.
What does fit the agenda is gun control. More of it. Always more of it, because the entire project of regulating, and then, foreseeably, depriving tens of millions of law-abiding citizens from owning guns is a quixotic one. Crime only seems to be a pretext in this regard.
Why? Because crime rates have been plummeting alongside rising gun sales and more armed Americans for decades.
The trend is well-established, despite the left clinging to every anecdotal atrocity. In fact, there is no correlation internationally between gun ownership and gun homicide rates either, whether we are talking about all nations:
Or just “developed” nations:
That brings us to the background checks issue. While there could be some variance in responses depending on survey question wording, we’ll take the 94% background check at face value for the sake of argument.
Let’s not overlook the fact that Hillary Clinton is making this argument, again, after giving it “a lot of thought,” precisely after the Texas church massacre.
If there is anything that is evident after examining precisely this case, it’s that the background check argument doesn’t wash. It wouldn’t have prevented the atrocity because government bureaucrats failed to do their jobs.
Kelley would have failed a background check, due to his domestic abuse incident while in the U.S. military. In 2012, Kelley broke the skull of his infant stepson, and was subsequently discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct.
The law demands that such domestic assault convictions be reported to the federal database for background checks. Yet, due to human error, the law was not being implemented correctly in the U.S. government. The Air Force admitted fault in the case.
Thus, the progressive ‘god’ of government failed to report his domestic abuse crime. Also, nearly all gun sales nowadays have to go through a background check, anyway. Even if we went from 4 in 5 gun purchases completed with background checks to 95%, that would still not be enough to prevent lunatics like Kelley from committing mass shootings.
Why? Because there will always be some criminals who will get guns without a background check anyway. If the government cracked down, then it would just lead to a black market. The sickest, and most determined, of mass shooting criminals will find the path of least resistance.
Even if the guns are obtained legally, as 80% of the guns are in “mass shootings,” there is no way to predict that a handful of millions of American citizens won’t snap and misuse them. Just like we can’t predict drivers we issue licenses to won’t get drunk and kill other drivers, the law isn’t always a guarantee of protection.
In fact, and this may come as a shock to “progressives,” but the law can be abused by the government. Progressives may not fear this aggregation of power in the government, for some reason baffling to sensible observers of history, but the “solution” may very well be more of a risk to the citizenry than even the grave problem of mass shootings. That is, if you consider governments committing “mass shootings” of citizens in the tens of millions since the turn of the 20th century to be a serious issue.
The drive to expand background checks and to tighten gun control doesn’t address the reality that gun violence is decreasing despite more armed citizens and doesn’t explain how it would make a significant dent in mass shootings. The left’s ultimate solution to preventing any and all violence among citizens has to tend towards complete disarmament; but this says nothing about how a government with total control over the populace would itself behave over time.
If we can trust the track record of history: Nothing good.
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