There was a shooting in Virginia today. The shooter, a former WDBJ journalist pulled a gun on two of the station’s reporters and killed them both. He also wounded the woman being interviewed on the air. She is thankfully listed in stable condition. He then proceeded to drive north on I-81 and east on I-66 with police in pursuit before shooting himself in the head.
Before the bodies of 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were even cold, Virginia’s opportunistic swine of a governor Fast Terry McAuliffe started immediately calling for more gun control.
“There are too many guns in the hands of people that shouldn’t have guns,” McAuliffe said during an interview with WTOP. “There is too much gun violence in America,” he said, adding that he has long advocated for strengthening gun background checks and that it should be made a priority.
The only problem with Fast Terry’s contention is that no background check would have stopped Vester Lee Flanagan from purchasing a gun.
Let’s for a moment ignore the fact that he could quickly and easily have gotten a firearm through illegal means.
Let’s for a moment forget that Vester Lee Flanagan did not have a criminal record, and the only crime he had ever been charged with was driving with an altered or revoked licence and having no registration on his vehicle in Pitt County, North Carolina in 2004, which certainly would not have made him ineligible to purchase a firearm. And he had no history of mental illness either. In other words, he would have passed any background check any time.
So what would Fast Terry suggest?
Depriving him of his Second Amendment right, because he had a history of filing grievances against his employers?
How about making him ineligible to purchase a firearm because he was black? Or gay?
Or how about taking away his rights because he was upset about being fired and refused to leave, forcing the station to call the police to physically remove him from the premises? Would Terry have infringed on his right to keep and bear arms, because he was a jerk to his co-workers?
I’ve always said that the gun grabbers’ goal was not to reduce violence or save lives, but to disarm those of us who committed no crime whatsoever all for the sake of political expediency.
Fast Terry knows perfectly well that no new law would have stopped this shooting. Flanagan would have passed every background check in the world, so the only option left is for Fast Terry to start working to deny others their rights. Others who may be odd… or gay… or black… or difficult to work with…
As my friend Mike said in an article a long time ago, these politicians want to keep guns out of the “wrong hands” – your hands.
UPDATE: In an interview with Megyn Kelly last night, Alison Parker’s father pledged to do everything in his power to keep guns out of the hands of people he called “crazy.”
I grieve along with Mr. Parker. I cannot imagine the unbearable grief of losing a child! I understand the emotion behind that pledge to shame “legislators into doing something about closing loopholes and background checks.”
However, I also understand the following as a rational person: There was no loophole, and no background check that could have prevented Flanagan from getting a firearm! He was not even seeing a psychiatrist! He was not a prohibited person. There is no background check he would not have passed. The fact that he was an entitled jerk, a bad employee, and a crappy co-worker does not make him mentally ill or ineligible to own a firearm.
There is literally no loophole and no law that allowed him – a law abiding citizen, until he pulled that trigger yesterday – to purchase a gun when he should not have been allowed to do so. None.
And yet, in the heat of grief, the push for more ineffective laws that will do nothing but disarm those who have committed no crime continues, with the likes of Fast Terry and Hillary Clinton leading the charge.
