Why focusing on AR-15s for mass shootings is dumb :: 04/17/2023

In the wake of Louisville, we are once against finding ourselves having to talk about the AR-15. Once again, anti-gun forces are focusing on this particular rifle to advance their gun control agenda. In their minds, if we banned this gun, mass shootings will just…I don’t know, evaporate away.

Yet as the Heritage Foundation’s Amy Swearer noted on Twitter earlier this week, mass shootings don’t need a so-called assault weapon, just someone interested in killing people.

In 1903, in Winfield, KS, a man opened fire on a weekly outdoor music concert attended by thousands of people. He killed 8 and wounded 25 more before either taking his own life or being killed by the night watchman. He used a double-barrel shotgun.https://t.co/D10Dt8QuIS

— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) April 14, 2023

In 1915, in Brunswick, GA, another "aggrieved" man loaded another double-barrel shotgun and took it with him to a law office in the crowded downtown area. He fatally shot a judge. And then he just kept shooting random people. https://t.co/SpWWJZszbU

— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) April 14, 2023

So who ended it? Armed civilians. Two of them, to be precise. The first one had a 5-shot revolver and ran out of ammo whilst only managing to strike the gunman once. He likely would've died had another civilian not, just seconds later, killed the gunman.https://t.co/nncIeBu6ly

— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) April 14, 2023

I always bring up "you can give a mass shooter a lever-action rifle and lots of people still die" and historically it's more true than you realize. In 1928, a drugged-out Chinese cook killed 11 Chinese immigrants in California using a Winchester rifle.https://t.co/6KsMkUs5ly

— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) April 14, 2023

I suggest you go and look at the whole thread because as Swearer notes, there are a lot of mass murders where the killers didn’t use an AR-15 or even something that required a “high-capacity” magazine. Kind of like this one:

And then there's the man who, in 1949, killed 13 and wounded 3 more during a mass public shooting in Camden, NJ. He used a single 9 mm Luger handgun which, at the time, would've had a factory standard 8-round box magazine. https://t.co/ThYs5rGgEo

— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) April 14, 2023

Yet no Twitter thread would be comprehensive.

For example, Louisville is basically a workplace shooting. It’s a problem, we’re told, because the killer had an AR-15.

However, the worst workplace shooting in US history claimed 14 lives back in 1986 with a killer who used two handguns.

Nashville, a school shooting, was undeniably an awful tragedy. However, the worst school shooting in American history remains Virginia Tech where, again, the killer used two handguns.

All this focus on the AR-15 isn’t because there’s something especially demonic about that firearm. As Swearer points out, we’ve had mass shootings for ages before the AR-15 was even invented. Many of which had a body count higher than some of those using modern sporting rifles.

So what’s really the common denominator? People.

At the heart of things is always a broken person, someone who seems to believe their despair and rage should result in them taking as many human lives as they can, all in some bizarre and evil cry for attention.

No matter what weapons you restrict, you cannot and will not prevent these horrific acts from happening. New York’s SAFE Act which restricted AR-15s, for example, failed to prevent the Buffalo killer from killing innocent people just trying to do some grocery shopping.

These incidents of the past need to be brought up and they need to be harped on repeatedly. People need to understand that it’s not the tool but the tool using it. It’s always been about the person pulling the trigger and not what the trigger is attached to.

Demonizing AR-15s allows some to pretend there’s a simple solution to a problem that goes way back.

Now, I get that the problem seems to be growing. I won’t dispute that in the least.

However, that doesn’t mean the issue is now a weapon that’s been on the civilian market for six decades, yet didn’t come onto the market until well after these things started happening.

If we can finally convince people that the issue isn’t guns like the AR-15 but the people pulling the trigger, maybe we can finally start looking at the deeper issues that seem to prompt some to try and make their names synonymous with evil.

The American public deserves actual answers. The American people deserve to have us look beyond superficially scary guns and recognize what, for many, is the truly scary fact–that no gun control ever will stop these horrific events.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/04/16/ar-15-mass-shooting-n69490