UNC shooting used to argue for gun control :: 08/30/2023

The shooting at UNC was a simple homicide, not a mass shooting. For most on campus, that likely made little difference. How it directly impacted them was no different.

People tend to forget that on a large campus like UNC, most students wouldn’t actually be in danger even if it had been a mass shooting, so for them, it was much the same as if it had been.

Unsurprisingly, though, some are using this incident to push for gun control.

The problem is that the arguments are high on emotion and low on anything else. Take this one from the UNC student paper as an example:

On Monday, not even two full weeks into the fall semester, our University was put on lockdown under the threat of an active shooter. This tragedy, which ended with the death of a faculty member, is a sobering reminder of the prevalence of gun violence in our country.

Despite these alarming statistics and decades of harm, both federal and state regulations and gun laws remain stagnant. Earlier this year, North Carolina lawmakers debated over the N.C. Constitutional Carry Act, which would’ve allowed individuals to carry concealed weapons without a permit. Though it was removed by House Speaker Tim Moore, the fact that this legislation was introduced and supported demonstrates a dismissal of the continuous outcry for more strict gun control — including the student-led March For Our Lives movement on our campus.

And yet, there’s no mention of any laws that would have actually prevented the shooting from happening.

Now, part of that is because, as of this writing, there’s a lot we still don’t know. That includes how the alleged killer obtained the firearm in the first place.

But the author mentions campus carry, clearly in opposition to the measure. However, as she notes, the measure failed.

That didn’t stop the alleged killer from bringing a gun onto the campus and killing his faculty advisor.

Funny, that, ain’t it?

That’s because bad guys don’t follow the rules. That includes graduate students who apparently want to kill their faculty advisor. After all, if such people did follow the rules, they’d probably start with the laws against murder.

Just putting that out there.

It should also be noted that the killer apparently used a 9mm handgun, which isn’t exactly something covered by proposed assault weapon bans.

See, the issue here is that the author, like so many others, pounce on a tragedy to talk about how we need gun control but fail to even acknowledge that some gun control clearly failed even as we remain unaware of other specifics.

What happened at UNC is terrible. The loss of human life generally is.

The loss of someone who appears to have been a brilliant scientist will harm us beyond the gun debate as humanity will be robbed of the discoveries he won’t make.

But the issue here isn’t a lack of gun control. It’s a problem with people thinking violence is a solution to any kind of disagreement.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/08/30/unc-gun-control-n74308