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“The 21-year-old suspect in this week’s Colorado mass shooting will make his first court appearance on Thursday, three days after authorities say he opened fire at a supermarket and killed 10 people, including a policeman. Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa faces 10 counts of murder and an attempted murder charge stemming from the rampage on Monday.” Reuters
Read our recent coverage of the Atlanta shooting and the gun control bills passed by the House. The Flip Side
The right opposes additional gun control laws, arguing that they would not prevent most mass shootings, and criticizes those in the media who rushed to blame the shooting on white supremacy.
“What new gun control law currently under consideration would have prevented this shooting? People are demanding even more background checks, but [it’s reasonable to assume that] Alissa passed his. Some want higher age limits for gun purchases, but the shooter was 21. How high do you want to raise it? You can try to make the ‘assault weapon’ ban argument if you like, but there are plenty of other semiautomatic rifles on the market that don’t ‘look scary’ and can inflict just as much damage…
“Finally, as everyone who considers these questions honestly already knows, shootings like this account for only a tiny fraction of all shootings in America. If you want to reduce the violence, go after the illegally owned guns on the streets.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
“An ‘assault rifle’ is semi-automatic, like many rifles sold nowadays, and like the large majority of pistols. Those classified as ‘assault weapons’ are usually relatively low-power rifles and are distinguished by features that people who know nothing about firearms consider scary, like barrel shrouds. According to FBI data, rifles remain among the most unpopular of all murder weapons, ranking well below knives, blunt objects and bare hands. Nevertheless, we are in for another tiresome round of fruitless ‘assault rifle’ hysteria.”
John Hinderaker, Power Line Blog
Regarding the shooter’s identity, “The Capitol riot having revivified their shopworn caricatures of deplorable Trump supporters and Republicans generally, progressives have decided to make white supremacism their Big Bang theory for all that ails America… Right up until ‘Alissa’ was identified as the Boulder shooter, Monday’s murders were portrayed as just another illustration of the wages of racism and white supremacism… And now, inevitably, the Will we ever know the motive? narrative has commenced…
“The kabuki dance that follows every mass-murder attack in which a Muslim is implicated is for the most part… inspired by an admirable, if overwrought, determination not to tar all Muslims with the atrocities committed by jihadist zealots in the thrall of Islamic supremacist ideology… We shouldn’t rush to judgment, politicizing the anguish of grieving families in the process. We should wait until we know enough facts to draw reasonable conclusions. We must not be blind to the threat of ideologically driven violence, but neither should we project onto the innocent the sins of the guilty. But everybody — not just Muslims — is entitled to that consideration.”
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
“Here is what we are not seeing from the media: rash speculation about whether Islam drove him to murder, or whether Trump Derangement Syndrome had anything to do with this attack. All ten of Ahmad Alissa’s victims are white. We are seeing no speculation as to whether or not anti-white racism played a role in this crime…
“And you know what? The media are being responsible here. From what we know at this point, there is no reason to blame his religion or his political views for what he did, nor is there reason to blame race hatred. This is not the standard the media applied to the white male Southern Baptist shooter of Asians in Georgia, of course.”
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative
The left supports additional gun control laws, arguing that they are widely supported and would reduce gun homicides.
The left supports additional gun control laws, arguing that they are widely supported and would reduce gun homicides.
“Eight dead in Atlanta. Ten dead in Boulder, Colo. Is this what returning to life as usual in America means?… The Second Amendment did not envision assault rifles of the kind used in Boulder on Monday afternoon. It was the product of a certain time and mind-set, not the repository of eternal wisdom…
“There’s [also] no separating these shootings in aggregate from a culture that celebrates guns, fetishizes them and scatters them in such ridiculous bounty across such ludicrously broad swaths of American life. That culture makes ownership of a gun for reasons other than sport utterly unremarkable, and it turns guns, with their special deadliness, into weapons of choice when anger swells and sanity ebbs… Our gun-loving culture is killing us.”
Frank Bruni, New York Times
“No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths… The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times the rate of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to 2012 United Nations data compiled by the Guardian… As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries…
“The US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime: Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns… [A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries] found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.”
German Lopez, Vox
“‘We have a lot of drunk drivers in America that kill a lot of people,’ said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) this week. ‘The answer is not to get rid of all sober drivers.’… Drunken driving is indeed a big problem, which is one reason we regulate even sober drivers — you have to take a driving test and carry a license that allows the state to track you, we set up checkpoints to stop drunk drivers, and so on.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“The House passed two gun bills earlier this month. One would expand and strengthen federal background checks on all gun purchases. The other would close the ‘Charleston loophole,’ which allowed the gunman who massacred nine people at a Black church in South Carolina to purchase a firearm. This has near-universal popular backing. Ninety-two percent of Americans support requiring background checks for all gun sales. Only 7% oppose it, which is less than the number of Americans who believe that the moon landing was faked…
“The record on state background check laws shows that they decrease gun-related homicides and suicides (though some studies have questioned their effectiveness). Other research has found that background checks are even more effective when combined with other gun safety legislation, like licensing requirements and minimum age restrictions…
“In an ideal world, Congress would enact a package of measures, including a ban on assault weapons (which President Joe Biden endorsed on Tuesday) or waiting periods to purchase guns. But this is no time to make perfection the enemy of the good — and it's certainly no time to accept more foot-dragging from Washington.”
Michael A. Cohen, USA Today
