It wasn’t a failure of laws. I just don’t see how our gun laws could have stopped something like that.
Amanda Wilcox,
Lobbyist for the California chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
April 6, 2012
California’s tough gun laws could not prevent Oakland tragedy
[It’s nice to see the Brady Campaign admitting gun laws cannot stop mass shootings but she still has some pretty significant symptoms of Peterson Syndrome.
Did you noticed she said “It wasn’t a failure of laws” but then in the next sentence she says she doesn’t see how gun laws could have stopped the shooting. One or the other of those statements has to be false.
The corrected statement should be:
Our gun laws have failed. Our gun laws cannot stop something like that. The best known way to stop an active criminal shooter is for another person to shoot back. As long as our gun laws make it difficult or impossible for potential victims to defend themselves these tragedies will continue to happen.
But the Brady Campaign has a vested interest in the blood of innocent people running in the streets. If they were more rare their funding would dry up and they would cease to exist. Hence they give out sound bites that at first glance support their warped view but upon closer examination cannot even maintain coherence from sentence to sentence.
See also Say Uncle and the comments to his post.—Joe]
Unfortunately, they mean that the present gun laws are not working. To them, that means that we need more restrictive laws.
“It wasn’t a failure of laws” and “I just don’t see how our gun laws could have stopped something like that” could be simultaneously true if it is possible to create more of them.
Note the keyword “our gun laws”–I take this to mean “the gun laws currently in place in California.” If it is taken to mean “the gun laws the Brady Campaign wants in their idea of an ideal universe”, then yes, that is an admission that no gun law will keep guns away from those who want them badly enough. While true, and tempting as it is to think that these folks actually told the truth for once, if only by accident, I just don’t read their intent that way. They are so deluded by their own obfuscation of the facts that they actually believe themselves.
I think they are they are trying to argue for a need for more stringent gun laws. Since CA just made things even more of a PITA and that didn’t work, obviously it’s time for something new–maybe they are gearing up to try to do to semi-autos what they did for “assault” weapons. Or ammo registration… Because obviously following the same failed template, only harder, works. The thing is that, post-Heller, it’s hard to get much more restrictive than they already are without blatantly flouting the Supreme Court’s decision. Or are they above such things?
I suppose in a sense it could be an admission of failure because CA seems to be running out of things to ban and registers nearly everything it can’t.
I agree with Publius’ assessment. She’s planting a seed in people’s minds. What she wants us to read is this:
The clincher is this:
She knows that banning semi-automatics is a non-starter politically right now. But if she can plant the seeds, it might be possible in the future.
Here is the ridiculousness of guns laws,in the wast the taking of human life is abhorrent to the social and the primary taboo of our society. So when a predator decides to take a life they have broken one of society most basic of rules. Knowing this makes the other crimes of illegal gun ownership and whatever various other nonsense that can be dreamed up a paltry excuse and null and void as the crime of murder is paramount. Everything else is just BULL$H!T!!!