On Dec. 16, 2024, a 15-year-old female shot and killed a teacher and a student at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. The murderer ended up taking her life after wounding six other people.
According to media reports, the gunman has two firearms on her person, with at least one being a 9mm handgun.
Because of her age, the assailant was too young to purchase a firearm. In turn, she was too young for any background check to have an effect on her ability to acquire a firearm. Moreover, because of her alleged use of a handgun, a so-called “assault weapons” ban would not have stopped her.
Despite these inconvenient facts, gun controllers have not relented in their push for civilian disarmament. Democrats at the federal level, regardless of the electoral thumping they took this election cycle, still abide by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s dictum of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Like clockwork, President Joe Biden pushed for Congress to pass an “assault weapons” ban a few hours after the school shooting. In a statement he released on the heels of the shooting, Biden complained, “From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison, to so many other shootings that don’t receive attention – it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal.”
The president boasted about his anti-gun track record underscoring, “My administration has taken aggressive action to combat the gun violence epidemic. We passed the most significant gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years, I have taken more executive action to reduce gun violence than any other President in history, and I created the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.”
However, the anti-gun accomplishments of Biden’s administration was not enough for the president. He demanded more encroachments against the right to bear arms.
He demanded, “Congress must pass commonsense gun safety laws: Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
None of the gun grabs Biden called for Congress to implement will do much to curb school shootings. In fact, the U.S. already had a federal “assault weapons” ban on the books from 1994 to 2004. The 1994 assault weapons prohibition was part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton on Sept. 13, 1994.
However, pro-Second Amendment researchers have contended that the Clinton-era assault weapons ban had a negligible impact on crime. Per the
analysis of economist John Lott, “there was no drop in the number of attacks with assault weapons during the 1994 to 2004 ban. There was an increase after the ban sunset, but the change is not statistically significant.”
No amount of gun control will prevent the horrific tragedy that transpired on Dec. 16. Schools are notorious for being gun-free zones aka criminal safe spaces. Lott, himself, has found that 94% of mass shootings took place in gun-free zones since 1950. If anything, the debate should be focused on how to build more effective security policies at schools, such as having armed staff or private security. Moreover, the U.S. has a widespread mental health crisis where many people should be subject to interventions or committed to mental institutions for the sake of public safety. These are the tough debates legacy institutions don’t want us to have.
Let’s face it, schools are the prime targets for deranged lunatics who want a nasty kill count. Putting gun-free zone signs will do nothing to stop these crimes. As cliche as it may sound, but a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. At some point, we have to concede that the ruling class’s approach to public safety has been a categorical failure and a new approach that champions the right to self-defense must be embraced instead.
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