I started writing here at Bearing Arms on August 5, 2017. A couple of months later, I found myself writing about a deadly attack in New York City. I think you can see why I’m thinking about that attack these days. After all, it’s the Big Apple. It’s a major city that just saw a deadly mass murder in one of its office buildings, and now we’re talking a whole lot about guns, gun control, and the like.
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But that October, I didn’t really.
Sure, I covered the story of the attack, but gun control wasn’t as much of a thing with that one. That’s because, while that attack killed twice as many people, it didn’t involve a gun.
In what turned out to be a terrorist attack, the killer used a rented truck, tore down a Central Park bike path, and killed eight people while injuring 13 others. He didn’t need a gun to do it. He just needed a murderous intention.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the Enoch Brown school massacre. That one killed 11 people and used flintlocks and clubs. This one used a rental truck that people use to haul things around when they don’t have a truck of their own.
Funny, that.
In the wake of the 2017 attack, there was a lot of discussion and debate over what to do, but pretty much no one demanded that we conduct background checks for rental trucks, restrict “high-capacity assault vehicles,” or any other such silliness. Not seriously, anyway.
The fact that the killer didn’t use a firearm meant that no one focused on the tool, just the act.
Now, though, we see a killer murder half as many people, and everyone’s focused on the tool he used, completely ignoring how little some of what they’re pushing would have done. Ban assault weapons? This guy could have killed just as many people with a handgun. Gun-free zones? New York City is riddled with them, and that did nothing.
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In 2017, people seemed to know that renting a truck wasn’t a bad thing, and that this was just someone misusing a perfectly useful tool in a malicious way.
Today, they’re not.
Instead, they’re continuing to demonize guns and anyone who tries to point out that restricting them won’t yield the results they think it will.
Why is it that when a firearm is used, people “think” so much differently than when the weapon used, even when more deadly, is literally anything else?
The 2017 attack wasn’t even the first use of a truck as a weapon of terror. A year earlier, in Nice, France, 86 people were killed and 450 others were injured when a terrorist used one in just that manner. The terrorist also died, but I didn’t add him to the number because I was only counting people.
And yet, so many people seem to have forgotten that truck attack. They remember Columbine, Parkland, Uvalde, and other mass murders committed with a firearm, but they forget that anything can be a weapon to those who want to kill.
It’s not even like 2017 was the last time someone used a vehicle as a weapon of mass murder. We started off the year with a similar attack in New Orleans, for crying out loud. Again, no one blamed the vehicle.
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No, they want to take away or guns, and this isn’t the reason. It’s the excuse, hence the focus.
President Trump and Republicans across the country, however, are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
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Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about gun owners and the right to keep and bear arms.
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