National Review
There is not much cause for a panicked crackdown on the legal sale of firearms through firearms dealers. But demagogues benefit from panic.
"There was another massacre, this one in Midland and Odessa, Texas. As
usual, tragedy was followed by stupidity.
"The New York Times, in its poetical mode, observed that the crime “clashed
with the typically serene and dusty rural landscape of the region.” In reality,
Odessa is the most dangerous city in Texas, with a murder rate about twice the
national average. So much for “serene.” It is not particularly rural, either,
though you pass through a good deal of rurality on the way there: Midland and
Odessa effectively run together to form a city about the size of Madison, Wis., or
Buffalo, N.Y. So much for “rural.”
"It is dusty.
"The killer was — see if this sounds familiar — well known to police, and well
known to his neighbors as a raving lunatic who lived in a commercial shed
without running water and at night fired his rifle into the darkness.
"The usual ghouls were on their usual soapboxes before the blood had even dried.
“Background checks!” they cried. Federal authorities then revealed that the
killer already had been denied during an earlier attempt to purchase a firearm;
our background-check system works when we work it. Which we do not always
do: Sometimes, sales are approved when they should not be, as the result of
delays in the background-check system; when the authorities become aware that
such a sale has been wrongly approved, they make no effort at all to recover the
firearms. It just is not done. Why? Bureaucratic inertia.
"After the Midland-Odessa shootings, Joe Biden brought to bear his trademark
alloy of dishonesty, sanctimony, and stupidity, insisting that only scheming
special-interest groups had prevented us from taking the obvious measure of
banning “magazines that can hold multiple bullets” — which is to say,
magazines, categorically, inasmuch as holding multiple bullets is what
magazines do. A proposal such as Biden suggests would mean an effective ban
on nearly all modern handguns and most rifles, along with a goodly portion of
shotguns." . . .
Demagogues love nothing better than a
population that is ignorant and terrified, one that needs only someone to blame.
Joe Biden, in his nearly pristine ignorance, is ready to supply whatever —
whomever — suits on that front. Most Democrats and some Republicans are
ready to go along with him.
“We had something called a blacklist, and a lot of really good people were accused of stuff. Nobody cared whether it was true or not. They were accused. And they lost their right to work. … In this country, people can vote for who they want to. That is one of the great rights of this country. You don’t have to like it, but we don’t go after people because we don’t like who they voted for. We don’t go after them that way. We can talk about issues and stuff, but we don’t print out lists. I’m sure you guys misspoke when you said that because it sounded like a good idea. Think about it. Read about it. Remember what the blacklist actually meant to people and don’t encourage anyone, anyone, to do it.”
