When it comes to mass shootings, the first thing that is clear is that it shouldn’t have happened. Innocent people being injured and killed is never an acceptable situation in any society.
In their efforts to stop mass shootings, though, anti-2A activists keep looking at the wrong thing. They want to talk about the firearm(s) involved in the incident and to ban the firearms that are used in these horrible events.
Or so they keep telling people.
The truth of the matter, though, is that anti-2A activists keep focusing on banning firearms that are rarely used in mass shootings, and details from a recent mass shooting in New Mexico gives an example of just this situation. Tom Ozimek writes,
Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story said at a Saturday press briefing that the shooting took place at the scene of an “unsanctioned car show.”
Story said that there was an altercation between two groups of people, which escalated into an outbreak of gunfire. He added that an individual seen holding an AR-15 rifle at the scene of the incident—according to photographs circulating on social media—has already been interviewed and is not a suspect in the shooting.
Story added that all of the bullet casings retrieved at the scene were from handguns, not rifles.
So, to be clear, an AR-15 was on site where the shooting occurred, but it looks like the person who had the AR-15 wasn’t involved in the shooting.
In fact, only handguns were used in the shooting, as evidenced by the casings that were found on site.
And this situation lines up with data for mass shootings in general. Rifles of any kind, including AR-15s, are rarely used for mass shootings. Most mass shootings are committed with handguns.
But the press and anti-2A activists keep wanting to harp on AR-15s which weren’t involved in the shooting (and usually aren’t even at the scene at all).
The fact that handguns, and not rifles, are what are used for mass shootings is an “inconvenient truth” for anti-gun activists because they don’t get the same knee-jerk emotional reactions from talking about a pistol that they get from uninformed people when the activists screech about “assault rifles.”
There are people who have those knee-jerk emotional reactions, though, and that’s why we need to keep vigilant and to keep educating people about the reality around firearms which is that guns don’t kill people; people with evil intentions do.
