“Twenty-year-old Christopher Martinez was fatally shot around 9:30 a.m. a year ago, on May 23, 2014,” newsweek.com reports, in an article entitled Gun Safety Progress Seen a Year After Santa Barbara Rampage. “He was one of six people killed by a gunman during a rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara that also injured at least a dozen others.” Predictably enough, the lead leads readers to believe that all the victims of the Santa Barbara attack were shot to death or injured by gunfire. Nope . . .
Spree Killer Elliott Rodger stabbed to death three of the six fatalities (the first three victims, in fact). Of those Rodger wounded, he shot seven and used his car as a weapon on six. In other words, this is not the gun control justification Newsweek and Christopher Martinez’s father are looking for.
Strike that. Those who favor curtailing or eliminating Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms aren’t particular about the circumstances surrounding the events with which they wave the bloody shirt. A proclivity brought into stark relief by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America member Leslie Ervin’s profoundly misleading testimony about her son in front of a Texas committee contemplating licensed open carry.
The thing of it is, gun control does not prevent firearms-related injuries and death. A fact that we can see in Chicago, where “strict” gun control laws have done nothing whatsoever to reduce gun-related violence. To wit: Six Dead, At Least 25 Injured in Memorial Day Weekend Shootings. A story posted by nbcchicago.com on Sunday. As for Mr. Martinez’ home state . . .
California ranks No. 1 in the annual scorecard published by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2014, legislators in the Golden State strengthened and enacted gun laws, including the historic Gun Violence Restraining Order Law. The measure, which Martinez strongly supported, allows authorities or immediate family members to provide evidence to a judge to temporarily suspend individuals’ access to guns if they are viewed as posing a significant danger to public safety.
Even when gun control advocates understand the disconnect between their agenda and observable results (or lack thereof), they continue their anti-gun jihad. When pushed on the law’s justification relative to his own experience, Martinez admitted “he’s not certain whether the restraining order law would have prevented his son’s death, but at a minimum he says it could have been a useful tool available to the family.”
That’s progress? Under a Gun Violence Restraining Order (GVRO), the police may confiscate an owner’s firearms on a relative’s recommendation without the owner’s prior knowledge. The GVRO makes a mockery of the presumption of innocence enshrined in the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Equally, there is no proof that the law was needed or, now that it’s in place, effective.
Background check bills have been introduced in 18 other states so far this year, and domestic-violence measures have been introduced in 24, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“We’re all responsible because we let them get away with it…nobody wants to think it’s going to happen to them,” Martinez says. “It’s just beyond belief, and yet when I look at this situation, it happens every day in this country.”
Although it’s a central tenet of the progressive platform, inflicting collective responsibility on people who are not responsible for lawlessness isn’t progress either. Clearly, Martinez and his gun control allies can’t get their head around the idea of personal responsibility. Or, for that matter, the inviolability of individual rights.
To the point of self-delusion. On the one-year anniversary of his son’s death, Martinez said “public gun crimes don’t happen in other countries.” Of course they do. And how. But Martinez sees what he wants to see, ignores what he wants to ignore, and attempts to inflict his world view on the world around him. Marginalizing that kind of willful myopia to the point of irrelevancy…now that would be progress.