Earlier this week, as everyone now knows, Nikolas Cruz, 19, shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 members of that community while injuring several others.
Unsurprisingly, the bodies of the victims weren’t even cold before the usual suspects among the political left began calling for more “sensible” or “common sense gun legislation.”
As any reader of this column knows well, I’m anything but an admirer of leftist ideology. Still, there are characteristically leftist positions on some issues that, while I reject them, I recognize as bearing at least some semblance of plausibility. And there are some arguments for some of these positions that I can respect, even though I find them neither compelling nor persuasive.
This being said, both the “gun-control” position and the argument(s) for it are about as manifestly nonsensical as any of which I’m aware. And because those on the left continue to endorse this position while refusing to so much as entertain the possibility that the time and energy they invest in clamoring for “gun control” could be better spent devising adult responses to mass murder that are of infinitely greater potential for saving lives than their stance of choice, their appeals to “gun control” are also morally offensive.
In fact, “gun control,” as its proponents conceive it, is so silly that one can be tempted to ignore it altogether, fearful that by responding to it one risks lending it just an air of legitimacy. Consider:
Whether it is Nikolas Cruz or any other mass shooter, what the Gun-Controllers would have us believe is that while the literally tens of thousands of existing gun laws at the federal and state levels were not sufficient to deter…