Food fairs and other community gatherings shouldn’t be places where violence breaks out.
Frankly, no place should be a place where violence breaks out because people should be treating each other better than that.
But we don’t carry a firearm because we’re looking to start a fight, are we? No, we carry because we want to protect ourselves and our loved ones if someone else initiates violence.
Sadly, though, people do initiate violence in our world, in our society (in all societies).
Including at food fairs, as Seattle, Washington found out recently. Tim McLaughlin and Chadni Shah write,
Three people were killed and four others, including a toddler, were wounded on Sunday in a shooting at a downtown Seattle food festival, police said, adding that a suspect had been taken into custody.
A second suspect was also believed to be involved, and officers were searching for that person, Seattle Police Department Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis said in a media briefing late on Sunday.
Absolutely tragic and horrible situation. It should not have happened.
So, what was the cause of the situation? We can figure it out by one small other bit of the news story:
Asked whether the gang unit had been called in, [Seattle Police Department Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis] said several detectives, including homicide and gun violence reduction units, were on scene.
And there we have it: the single biggest cause of gun violence in America: Gangs.
Yes, gang activity is the connecting factor among a massive amount of gun violence, and it helps to explain why gun violence in even the cities with the highest rates of it is concentrated in just a few neighborhoods in those cities.
It’s because gangs are often territorial. If you’re not in what they consider to be their territory, they’re much less likely to go out of their way to commit violence against you.
Knowing this, it’s that much more appalling to see anti-2A politicians and media outlets blame the guns and legal gun owners for gun violence when literally everyone who has looked at the data knows that gang activity is the real problem.
So, if anti-2A activists really want to decrease gun violence, they should be focusing on reducing gang membership in America.
The fact that they don’t work to reduce gang membership in any meaningful way is a glaring sign that gun control isn’t really about saving lives; it’s about disarming people that they disagree with politically.