There is a saying on the political right: The Left can’t meme.
On any number of topics, left-leaning folks try to create memes in hopes of distilling their views on things like guns and a number of other topics into small, bite-sized portions.
Then others on the left, such as reporter and Democratic Coalition founder Scott Dworkin, share those memes as if they’re insightful.
Like this one:
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) May 20, 2023
This is what passes for clever among the anti-gun.
The argument, of course, is that if someone misuses a gun, we should intervene just as we would if one’s kid hits another with a stick.
I don’t disagree.
Those who use a firearm so irresponsibly as to intentionally try and hurt another should probably be the subject of intervention by the law.
Where things go sideways, though, is that we already do that.
People who hurt others with a gun–akin to hitting another with a stick–have their guns taken from them. They’re arrested and, if convicted, punished.
If they’re not convicted, it’s because there was insufficient evidence they “hit another child with a stick” to punish them. That’s how our system is supposed to work.
Yet that’s not what people like Dworkin want. What they want is gun control. They want to restrict everyone’s guns because of what that one person did.
To stick with the metaphor here, they don’t just want to take their child’s stick, they want to take everyone’s stick.
In fact, they want to sue the logging company that left the stick there so that they can, in time, make it impossible for anyone to find a stick.
When that doesn’t work, they want to burn the forests down to make sure there are no sticks for anyone, all because their child hit another kid with a stick.
That is a far more accurate depiction of gun control’s goals than simply removing the stick from a child who misused it.
We know that to be the case because, as I mentioned, we already remove the “stick” from people who use them to hurt others.
Perhaps the most insulting part of this is that it’s so easy to debunk. Anyone can look at that and see where this metaphor falls apart unless they’re so partisan they somehow think we actively hand guns to criminals.
It takes a special kind of stupid to push this kind of thing, in my opinion. Or, at the very least, a special kind of ignorance about gun laws in this country.
Most folks don’t realize what the laws actually are, in part because politicians and the media routinely misrepresent those laws to score political points. Yet even there, most folks likely figure that if someone shoots another, they’re not just allowed to walk around with their gun to hurt others.
Of course, to be fair, stuff like this likely is happening today when it didn’t use to, but not because of a lack of gun control. No, those guns are in the hands of people who routinely get arrested and are released by the kind of prosecutors folks like Dworkin like, who then obtain a firearm illegally.
The first gun was likely to have been stolen, either by the person in question or by another, and was then trafficked to the shooter.
To go back to this tortured metaphor, his stick was taken away, so he probably snatched a stick from another kid who hadn’t hurt anyone, just so he could hit someone else despite the rules saying he couldn’t have a stick.
Honestly, the fact that anyone looked at this, figured it was a “gotcha” n guns, then put it out into the wild tells me that humanity has a significant problem with stupid people.