“The latest victim of gun violence in America is the daughter of an Olympic sprinter, one of the fastest we’ve ever had in America, named Tyson Gay,” New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica [above] writes. “Her name was Trinity Gay. She was 15 when she came out of the Cook Out restaurant in Lexington, Ky., on South Broadway near the University of Kentucky campus, at which point early Sunday morning her future Second Amendment rights did her no good at all when somebody started shooting from a nearby car.”
As TTAG commentators lament, we never hear about “car violence” or “knife violence.” Yet those who support civilian disarmament constantly refer to “gun violence” — as if the gun itself is somehow responsible for the carnage created by someone wielding a gun.
“Misdirection is a form of deception in which the attention of an audience is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another,” wikipedia.org informs us. It’s the stock-in-trade for gun control advocates. In this case, Mr. Lupica wants to distract us from the person or persons who shot Trinity Gay. And goes to extraordinary lengths to do so.
Trinity Gay was in the worst possible place in America: She was somewhere. She was out late, absolutely, took the bullet at around 4 in the morning outside Cook Out. But in the end the hour doesn’t matter and the neighborhood doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is another gun in the wrong hands. That is all it took to turn South Broadway in Lexington into the most dangerous neighborhood anywhere.
Ms. Gay wasn’t just “somewhere” when she was gunned down by [suspected] gang bangers. She was in Lexington, Kentucky. For reference, neighborhoodscout.com gives Lexington a safety rating of 9 out of a possible score of 100. With 1062 reported violent crimes per year.
While I’m not blaming the 15-year-old athlete for being in the wrong place at 4am, Lupica’s efforts to dismiss the circumstances surrounding her death are disingenious at best, intentionally misleading at worst.
Truth be told, these circumstances don’t matter — to Mr. Lupica. Like all gun control advocates, he willfully discounts any variables that don’t lead to the simple conclusion that guns are the problem. That removing guns from society is the answer to “gun violence.” Like this:
What happened to Tyson Gay’s daughter can happen anytime and anywhere, middle of the night or middle of the day. The latest wrong place at the wrong time turned out to be 855 South Broadway, Lexington, Ky., because that’s where the guns were.
More precisely, more importantly, that’s where the bad guys with the guns were. But Mr. Lupica ain’t got time for that. Nor does he have any time for the idea of armed self-defense against bad guys.
You are constantly told, by the National Rifle Association and all of its shills and tame politicians that the only way to solve gun violence is with more guns. You’re told that all we need in America is more armed shooters, defensive shooters, at the ready when more bad guys go on the offensive. Now you want to ask all these people how things would have been different for Trinity Gay if she somehow had been carrying a gun when she came out of that restaurant.
While NRA supports gun rights, it makes no claim that arming Americans is the way to reduce or eliminate firearms-related crime. The NRA constantly beats the drum for eliminating “revolving door justice.” It supported Kentucky’s 2011 Public Safety and Offender Accountability Act, which freed up prison space for violent offenders.
Again and in any case, it’s classic misdirection. Mr. Lupica would have us believe that because Ms. Gay’s life couldn’t have been saved by an armed defender, there’s no need for Americans to be armed in their own defense.
On some level, Mr. Lupica knows he’s on shaky ground. Which is why he incudes a defense of gun control referring to Mrs. Clinton’s notoriously anti-gun rights platform (which includes a new “assault weapons” ban and the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act).
Hillary Clinton doesn’t want to abolish the Second Amendment, another fiction from this campaign. She doesn’t want to take away everybody’s guns. She just wants to take guns away from whoever was in that Dodge Charger in Lexington Sunday morning, the last of Trinity Gay’s life. Whoever had the gun in the sports car with the tinted windows.
What are the odds that the people who gunned down Ms. Gay were already banned from legal firearms possession? What are the odds that making it more difficult for law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms would reduce the likelihood of violent criminals being armed?
As the Brits say, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; gun control is not supported by the facts. Mr. Lupica’s willful ignorance on the subject shows just how pig-headed gun control advocates can be. Then again, what else could they be?