United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- If there is one pattern that leads to Second Amendment supporters losing ground, it is what comes with mass shootings. These horrific incidents are when anti-Second Amendment extremists make their biggest pushes to attack our rights, often with a major assist from “mainstream” media outlets.
In the wake of Uvalde, we saw that pattern play out with a very limited amount of success for anti-Second Amendment extremists. That said, it is clear that to preserve our rights – particularly the victories we secured with the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen – we need to break that pattern.
The first thing to keep in mind is that if we are fighting legislation in the aftermath of these events, we’re 90% of the way to failure. As is the case when we discussed the heroics of Eli Dicken at the Greenwood Mall, Second Amendment supporters need a different standard of success:
Things should not have to come to the point where we need to fight a legislative battle in the aftermath of a mass shooting any more than the prevention of a mass shooting should come down to an armed citizen’s skill, courage, and luck.
How many mass shooters had prior run-ins, or worse? The Sutherland Springs shooter had disqualifiers under 18 USC 922 – but the NICS records were never updated, and he carried out a horrific act that a heroic NRA instructor eventually stopped. Would it not have been better for NICS to have flagged the shooter, and for said shooter to have faced charges under 18 USC 922 than for that massacre to have happened?
Similarly, the Parkland shooter was caught with ammo on school grounds and once reportedly held a gun to someone’s head. There were ample chances to put him away before he carried out that horrific shooting. None were taken.
The same can be said for other mass shootings. Too many times, there were warning signs that were ignored. Too many times, our rights become targets – and while the federal level has seen negligible losses, these events have seen massive moves by some states.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it. The more mass shootings that are prevented long before they hit the news, the safer the Second Amendment is. We should be looking for constitutionally-sound guardrails to prevent those mass shootings – and should have a long time ago.
Our rights are best defended when there are multiple levels of protection. We can’t just beat legislation after a tragedy or bank on the skill, courage, and luck of an armed citizen. Otherwise, we will be caught in the type of pattern that eventually led to the fates suffered by gun owners in England, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
That pattern can be broken if Second Amendment supporters develop Second Amendment-friendly solutions to prevent these tragedies in order to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists via the ballot box at the federal, state, and local levels.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.
The pattern is this: We gun owners and lovers of liberty are winning this fight. The anti gunners are getting ever more and more desperate, and we are growing well beyond the ability of quisling authors to continue to force us down. The whining Moms and this author are soon to go the way of the dodo bird, and they are fighting fang and claw, using both hooks and crooks, to try and hold back this tide of liberty. They will fail. They ARE failing. Miserably. This is the pattern that Harold wants so badly to see broken. IMO only,… Read more »
Harold 99.9 % of gun owners do not commit mass murder
As we all know the system in place failed
The one that fails again and again is police work that fails to have these mentally ill offenders added to the background check list. As most of the time there was multiple encounters with the those individuals and law enforcement.
Why call it what is is not call it what it is mass murder.
Harold the democrats are soft on crime and criminals rights.Look at all the democratic controlled states. Mayhem on a grand scale………
True story. Where we tend to lose is in the post incident reporting and the emotion driven propaganda surrounding the incident. We must recognize we live in a zero accountability society when it comes to public schools, juvenile justice and mental health. Everyone gets a trophy, no one gets marched in front of a judge under Florida’s Baker Act or other ‘5150’ laws. Failure to use standing law and process is endemic in these incidents. Nicky Cruz and Jerrod Laugher are prime examples. These kids radiate ‘crazy’ from an early age but in the name of diversity and tolerance no… Read more »
So, where’s some suggestions? The author states we need suggestions, so where are a few from the author? I’d certainly be willing to entertain them with the caveat that they not infringe upon the rights of the law abiding citizen to own, buy, or sell a firearm… as specifically and clearly enumerated in the Constitution. All the prior acts that were mentioned in the above article were procedural (police, prosecutor’s, judicial, and behavioral) failures. Punitive action can only be taken after the fact against the party responsible… so why must the law abiding firearms owners, who are not the perpetrators… Read more »
Prevent these tragedies?
How about this, this world has never, and will never, prevent tragedies.
They will happen.
When they do, citizens that were prevented by law from being ready and able to defend and minimize tragedy right there on the spot, will not as a result surrender their arms to those that kept them unarmed at the moment of tragedy thus maximizing tragedy.
The game is over, they have passed laws to disarm citizens, nobody complied.
This has never, and will never, be a safe world.
We have the right to EFFECTIVE armed defense.
The goal of the left is not to prevent mass shooting or crime. It is to disarm those who might have read Solzhenitsyn and taken his advice to heart. They want mass murder and crime because they think it strengthens their position with the majority population. As we have seen the last few years, it doesn’t; the data clearly indicates that when people perceive danger they immediately think to arm themselves. You act and talk and think as we did in the early 1990’s. All such appeasement was tried and failed, as appeasement always does. Catch up to us in… Read more »
“That pattern can be broken if Second Amendment supporters develop Second Amendment-friendly solutions to prevent these tragedies” The thing is that all solutions have failed for decades. Nothing is going to change tomorrow. I have tried to mold my government and found that to be impossible. The one thing that any one of us can do today is to carry our weapon to stop these things from happening. The other side of physically stopping bad things from happening is to let the rest of the people know that we are on-duty; they must see the weapon. In time, they will… Read more »
“Wouldn’t it be better for NICS to flag shooters? We need constitutionally-sound guardrails to stop shootings”
There you go again humping de facto gunowner reg, prior restraint & ‘compromise’ instead of CIVILIAN CARRY & 1ST PRINCIPLES: Unsafe around guns = unsafe without guardians.
You wouldn’t know a constitutionally sound guardrail if you tripped over it.
You push RINOs in primaries e.g. Oz-Collins-Cornyn, then hector us to deal.
You shill for LaPew’s “Winning Team” that grifted $Bs from NRA members that should’ve gone to elections & taking legislative turf.
“TIME TO ACT!” LOL
STRIKE GROUP ROGAINE!