Every time there’s some mass murder anywhere in the country, there seems to be a new crop of anti-gun activists. I suppose it’s natural to seek to make sure the thing that traumatized you doesn’t traumatize, or worse, other people. The problem is that just surviving something or losing someone you care about in something, no matter how horrible that something is, doesn’t actually make you an expert.
How many times have we seen anti-gun activists pop off with what they’re sure is a particularly clever point, only for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of, well, anything to rip it apart?
It’s unfortunate that we’ve got a prime example in some recent news, too.
Newsweek spoke with the grandfather of one of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. He’s now an anti-gun crusader and, unfortunately for him, he’s been given a lot of terrible information along the way.
Ben Wheeler would be in college now. Looking at photos, his grandfather, Carmen Lobis, said he still gets emotional.
Wheeler, along with 19 other children and six adults, were killed in a mass shooting in December 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – a massacre that shocked the nation’s conscience when it happened and still ranks as the second-worst school shooting in U.S. history.
“Ben and I had a very, very special relationship,” Lobis, now 87, told Newsweek in an interview. “His loss was devastating. It still is.”
In the nearly 12 years since that shooting, Lobis has worked to campaign for gun safety, an issue that crops up every election year — even if it’s rarely acted upon.
Lobis has spoken publicly about gun safety, asking questions about people with mental health struggles who are nevertheless allowed to access high-powered rifles, how to securely store a firearm and whether there are certain types of guns that should simply be outlawed.
“The frustrating thing was I always got the answers that I wanted but never changed anybody’s mind,” Lobis said.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all…It’s not based on any logical decision making but some inherent passion that they have or concern that they have that people are going to take their guns away from them.”
Now, he’s not entirely wrong here, in a way at least. He could present literally every bit of evidence in the world–and not the current crop of evidence that’s all highly suspect at best–and I still wouldn’t favor gun control because the right to keep and bear arms is just that, a right. However, that evidence is suspect. There’s a lot of evidence supporting gun research being incredibly biased, which means I’m not going to view any of that as part of any “logical” approach, especially when criminals break the laws that exist and I know there’s no new law that will stop them from doing so.
What’s more, people are going to take our guns away from us if we let them. It doesn’t start there, but that’s where it will invariably end. We know this because every time I’ve asked anti-gunners where the line is, what bit of gun control is too far for them, the only line they can cite is that they don’t want a total gun ban. Yet we also know that if the elites can have guns, it’s not a total gun ban.
But that leaves a lot of disarmed people throughout the nation.
This, however, is just your regular talking point. Wheeler is upset that guns aren’t a bigger issue, that people are more worried about the economy and stuff, then goes completely off the rails in his understanding of, well, anything.
“Do I think [gun safety] is important? Absolutely. When we have all the rules we have about a car: you can’t own, rent, sell, buy or drive a car without a lot of documentation because a car can be a dangerous instrument…But when we have something else that kills more people and people don’t want to do anything about it.”
That’s an impressive level of wrong here.
First, you don’t have to even have an ID to buy a car. The only documentation involved in buying or selling a car that’s required depends on how old the car is, but it all simply revolves around ownership. The seller signs over ownership to the buyer and nothing else. From there, you don’t need anything to own, sell, or drive a car. You need that if you do so on public roads, but if you buy a farm or ranch truck that is never going to put rubber on asphalt, you don’t.
As for renting a car, most of those requirements are from the rental company, not the government. That’s an important distinction.
Meanwhile, for a car, one doesn’t have to undergo a background check. We don’t have to leave our car at home because we’ll need to visit a car-free zone. We can use our cars to take our kids to school or to church. We can take our cars to polling places.
The list continues.
See, the problem here is that Wheeler went through something awful, and while I get why he wants to do something so no one else goes through it–believe me, I truly do understand–the truth is that like a lot of anti-gunners, he doesn’t actually understand the subject he’s suddenly being treated like an expert on. His experiences are real and, unfortunately valid.
But that doesn’t mean he understands the gun debate, gun laws, or much of anything else.
For example, his grandson was killed by a monster who had already murdered his own mother just to gain access to her guns. He then went to a place where everyone was disarmed by force of law and committed a massacre of small, innocent children and their teachers.
How can you stop that kind of evil with new laws, especially when you’re so adamant that no one is coming to take our guns?
See, victims and survivors are traumatized, but they don’t actually know much about the subjects they’re talking on. They tend to get everything from anti-gun sites, from anti-gun voices, and then parrot it because that’s what they know. They live in a world of confirmation bias and then repeat those arguments as if they’re truisms when they’re nothing of the sort.
I hate that Wheeler went through what he did. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like. Honestly, someone should have suggested he simply mourn instead of becoming a voice for a movement that is predicated on not understanding anything but what the anti-gun side says.
