It DOESN’T Just Happen Here: The Left’s Big Gun Lie

One of the most frequently shared articles on the internet after a mass shooting is a piece of satire from The Onion.

The headline: “No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

The gist of it, as you may have guessed, is to make the claim that the U.S. is the only place in the world where these mass shootings take place. In other, more civilized countries (think Europe), they have strict gun control laws that keep these tragedies from happening. But U.S. politicians (think Republicans) are so beholden to the NRA that the refuse to acknowledge the facts.

If it was just The Onion making this case, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But in their inimitable way, the satirical paper echoes the same argument that Democrats have been making for years. And they were certainly making those arguments this week, complete with PLENTY of references to Australia’s crackdown on guns after a mass shooting of their own. To hear the left tell the tale, the only thing standing between us and a country free from mass slayings is the political willpower. If it weren’t for that dag-blasted NRA, we could join Europe in a state of gun-violence-free bliss.

But is that really true? Is that really the case in Europe? Is the U.S. REALLY the only nation where this happens?

Not at all. In fact, in recent years, countries like France have been keeping up with the U.S. when it comes to mass shootings in public places. Thanks to Islamic terrorism, we’ve seen machine gun mayhem in the streets of Paris, including the devastating 2015 concert attack that left 130 people dead. This is in a country and a city with some of the strictest gun control legislation you could possibly come up with. And yet, while the automatic-style gunfire that took 59 lives in Vegas was a historical anomaly in the U.S., France has had four fully-automatic rifle attacks in the very recent past. You don’t stop these guns by making them illegal. Any more than you stop mass murder by making THAT illegal, which is obvious to anyone who stops for a second to think.

But the left doesn’t want Americans to think in the wake of these tragedies. They only want you to feel. And it’s impossible NOT to feel shock and heartache when you watch those videos. When you hear that nasty sound of gunfire spraying down on a crowd of thousands. Over and over again. Relentless. For ten, fifteen seconds at a time. It must have felt like hours to those in that field, just praying that they would make it out alive. It’s only natural to watch those videos and feel a surge of emotion – a surge that seems to say, “We have to DO something!”

But the sad truth is that, sometimes, there is nothing we CAN do. We can pass laws and have public debates and demand answers…but it ultimately comes to little more than dramatic theater. If someone is intent, in the land of the free, to slaughter his fellow man, he can find a way to do it. It doesn’t matter how many laws we pass. France, and other European countries, are a testament to that.