A horrific mass murder at Sandy Point in Newtown, Connecticut and right on cue and guite predictably the media goes stupid, from Thomas Sowell, American Spectator:
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
More media stupidity in general from John Hinderacker, Powrlinoe:
In the wake of Sandy Hook, much attention, all of it negative, has been focused on the Bushmaster rifle that Adam Lanza apparently used to commit his murders (news accounts on this point have varied over time). The rifle is commonly, if meaninglessly, referred to as an “assault weapon.” But homicides using rifles of any sort are rare, as well as declining. In 2010 there were only 358 homicides involving rifles, compared with 1,704 in which knives were used, 540 that involved blunt objects, and 745 in which the victims were simply beaten to death. So the idea that there is some kind of epidemic of violence involving semiautomatic rifles, or any other sort of rifle, is nonsense.
And for one particularly stupid writer in George Zornick Nation:
How Walmart Helped Make Newtown Shooter’s AR-15 the Most Popular Assault Weapon in America
When Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, December 14, inexplicably bent on ending as many lives as possible, he was carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle and several high-capacity magazines. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the country has had to deal with the aftermath of a horrific shooting spree, nor is it the first time we’ve encountered an AR-15 in this context: only days earlier, it was the weapon of choice for a shooting at an Oregon mall that killed two people. Five months earlier, it was used by James Holmes in an attack that wounded fifty-eight people and killed twelve in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. And several years before that, a man and his teenage accomplice used a Bushmaster AR-15 to terrorize the Washington, DC, area with a series of random shootings.
As homicides, rifles are not all that significant. Since 1999, the year of the Columbine shootings,we have had more people murdered in the gun free parricide called the People’s Republic of Chicago, about five thousand, than were murdered by long guns. So why does Zornick have his knickers in a twist over a varmint rifle which only resembles a military grade weapon
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