THE BLUNT INSTRUMENT OF LEGISLATION
“Legislation is a blunt instrument…”
Truer words have rarely been spoken. Insightful, profoundly true, and exactly what GOC faces each time we walk into California’s State Capitol.
Rather than focusing on the wicked who live among us – like the degenerate who killed 5 innocents in Tehema this week, the Left uses legislation like a hammer, and more often than not it’s aimed directly at the heads of law abiding folks.
In a recent online article, Reason.com nailed it with the “blunt instrument” analogy and they follow it up with a post-Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs assertion that America is diving “headfirst into our now-traditional national shoutfest about gun laws.”
They take a smart step back and suggest another way – let’s actually elevate the dialogue and start talking about guns the same way we talk about kidnapping.
They make two key points:
“1. The number of privately held firearms in America has nearly doubled in the last two decades while the number of gun murders per capita was cut in half.
2. The number of kids abducted by strangers in 2011 was 105, out of approximately 73 million children in the United States. That’s down slightly from 115 two decades ago.”
Believe it or not, there is a distinct parallel – the two share a national similarity that results in impassioned conversations on what to do? about a perceived “growing” problem.
“Take a misunderstanding of the scope and nature of a problem, combine it with a desire to “do something” in the face of national anguish, and you get a recipe for both bad law and cultural conflict…”
Reason.com asks really good questions about how the aftermath of a tragic event can create a “frenzy of attempts at preventive policy making that … actually creates the conditions for future failure…” GOC has seen this time and time again at the Capitol: a high-profile incident occurs somewhere in the state, legislation is introduced and policy pendulum swings so far one way that it takes years to fix what was done in emotionally-driven haste.
Violent crime in America has been declining for decades – which is an excellent thing – but when a mentally deranged human shoots up a little country church, it’s not easy to settle the angst. And, crimes against kids have thankfully been on a significant decrease, but there still remains a stark fear that our world is growing more dark each day, and certainly more so than when we were all kids…
The same heightened anxiety plays out when it comes to firearms – in spite of the fact that the number of personally owned guns has dramatically increased, firearm homicides have simultaneously decreased. That said, the call for gun control continues to escalate.
“…the center of gravity in the gun control debate isn’t suicide hotlines, drug legalization, or domestic violence shelters. Instead, politicians and pundits perseverate on reducing firing speeds, excluding mentally ill people from the right to buy a gun, and building lists of people with ties to terrorist groups: interventions aimed at minimizing the odds of already-rare deaths from mass shootings…”
Horrible things happen in our broken world – but exploiting tragedy to further any legislative “blunt instrument” is not a fitting option.
“Unfortunately, citing statistics rarely changes hearts and minds. Each mass shooting seems to ratchet up the panic over private gun ownership. Each kidnapping calls for wall-to-wall coverage while parents enroll their children in yet another supervised extracurricular.”
We know it won’t be long before Assemblyman Kevin McCarty or Senator de Leon come up with some new and improved proposal to keep guns out of the hands of the law abiding – even though the two semi-auto firearms the Tehema gunman used were obtained unlawfully.
“Would-be restrictionists of all kinds thrive in a world where ordinary people believe they are constantly in deadly danger—even when that danger is grossly exaggerated.”
A sad reality, indeed.