MY NEW HERO
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Ultimately, what we know is when gunmen walk into crowded places, they kill more people when they have powerful assault weapons. And this mythology that you end up killing bad guys by arming good guys just doesn’t work. Study after study shows you that in communities that have more guns, more people get killed. And the reality is that if you have a gun at home, you are more likely to be killed by it than kill an attacker or someone that’s going after your neighbor. So, we’ve got to have a conversation in this country about the kinds of weapons that we make legal because assault weapons are more likely than not going to be used in these mass slaughters rather than used by some citizen to stop someone in one of those situations.
One of the most dangerous and pervasive myths propagated by gun nuts is the canard that “more guns equals more safety.” It’s a simplistic argument that makes sense only if taken at face value. The problem is that it’s not close to being true. There’s simply no evidence (unless you count gun nuts telling me to “f—k off”) that more guns does anything except create more tragedy and death.
In this case, Sen. Murphy beautiful took down CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who while interviewing the Senator was attempting to make the argument that the Sydney siege could have been prevented save for Australia’s stringent gun laws. Opponents of common sense gun control put forward similar arguments whenever they want to try to plead the case for more guns in society. How introducing more firepower into a situation could make ANYONE safer is something that defies rational understanding.
Australia is actually an argument for the efficacy of gun control. The country banned assault weapons after a horrific attack in 1996…and hasn’t had another attack since. Meanwhile, here in this country we’ve averaged close to a school shooting per week since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012.
Despite claims by gun nuts, there’s simply no credible evidence to support their misguided assertion that more guns equals more safety…and repeating the claim ad infinitum, ad nauseum doesn’t increase the claim’s veracity. Until and unless Congress, the NRA, and gun nuts manage to remove their anterior from their posterior and face the truth, we’ll continue seeing school shooting after school shooting. More innocent children will die, but as that wise sage Joe the Plumber once said,
“Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”
Stay classy, eh?
