by The Cult of Personality known as Giffords sent out a fundraising email yesterday before the quarter-end Federal Elections Commission reporting deadline. Politicians and PACs always push for more money at the end of a quarter so they can use their fundraising to say, “see, they agree with us!”
Giffords made this three claims as why it was important to give:
As Americans have dealt with a global pandemic, they’ve also had to face a worsening gun violence crisis.
In order to prevent tragedies like the ones that took place in Atlanta or Boulder, we need the Senate to pass universal background checks.
The best way we can do that is by hitting our goals so we can keep the pressure on the Senate to act.
The first thing I learned in statistics is that correlation is not causation. Indeed, through the first half of 2020, overall violent crime was actually down from the previous year which was down from the year before that. Murder rates did increase but causal factors such as the psychological impact of quarantines and the defund the police movement could lie at the core of this.
In both Atlanta and Boulder, the murderer passed a FBI NICS check. They were not buying their firearms in some back alley from an “unlicensed dealer” (sic). Indeed, Colorado has had the aforementioned panacea of universal background checks since 2013! As the law makes clear, it does apply not only to purchases but transfers. So the argument that a nationwide law regulating private sales of firearms would have prevented a mass casualty event just doesn’t hold water. Even in Newtown, the murderer first killed his own mother in order to steal her legally-purchased firearms.
Their final claim is that they need your money so they can keep lobbying the Senate to pass meaningless laws. I’m sure they do want your money as do their political consultants, their direct mail firms, their ad agencies, and others in their progressive orbit.
The one thing they won’t say and cannot say is that the only way for universal background checks to work is with universal gun registration.
They can register MY PROPERTY when they pry it from my cold dead fingers!
As the saying goes, “if their side is so just and right, why do they lie all the time?”
Now I want to try to research what percent of mass murderers passed a background check to get their gun.
Expand your definition a bit to pick up the ones (SC church shooter for starters) where the FBI was non-responsive and hit the 3 day default.