Growing up during the Cold War, I’m still most of the opinion that Russia isn’t a country we should look to for guidance for most things. Few get it wrong all the time, admittedly, but even now, Russia isn’t exactly a bastion of freedom.
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Particularly on the subject of guns.
Like most nations lacking the words “united,” “states,” and “America” in their name, they have extensive gun control over there and have for decades. What’s more, most nations bordering them and even those bordering those nations do as well.
And on Friday, all those laws accomplished nothing at all.
Assailants burst into a large concert hall in Moscow on Friday and sprayed the crowd with gunfire, killing over 60 people, injuring more than 100 and setting fire to the venue in a brazen attack just days after President Vladimir Putin cemented his grip on power in a highly orchestrated electoral landslide.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on affiliated channels on social media. A U.S. intelligence official told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies had learned the group’s branch in Afghanistan was planning an attack in Moscow and shared the information with Russian officials.
It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the attackers after the raid, which state investigators were investigating as terrorism.
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The attack took place as crowds gathered for a performance by the Russian rock band Picnic. The Investigative Committee, the top state criminal investigation agency, reported early Saturday that more than 60 people were killed. Health authorities released a list of 145 injured — 115 of them hospitalized, including five children
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This was, to use a term we’re all familiar with besides terrorism, a mass shooting. It’s mass murder that’s not unlike what the two twerps at Columbine tried to do.
Russian gun control isn’t just about stopping homegrown nutbars and extremists, supposedly. After all, the worst “school shooting” in history didn’t happen on American shores, but in Breslan, Russia. Supposedly, this shouldn’t have happened again.
Yet it did.
Now, 60 people are dead, none of whom had any real opportunity to defend themselves. 145 people have injuries, many of which will leave physical scars to go with the psychological ones they picked up.
The American gun control crowd would have us believe that gun control prevents these things. It doesn’t. Often, they don’t even pretend we can’t prevent all of them and just reduce them. They argue that with the next back of gun control laws, we can prevent these horrors forever.
But we can’t.
Russia is notorious for not respecting the rights of its people, even after the fall of the Soviet Union. They definitely don’t respect the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and yet ISIS-affiliated terrorists obtained “assault rifles” with which to massacre innocent men and women.
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The laws accomplished nothing.
Why do American gun control activists think it would be any different here, especially with a border so open that it might as well be trying to carry water in a colander?
It won’t.
So instead, let’s use our freedom to meet these threats and to put them down before anyone but the bad guys get hurt.
