Shannon Watts (above left) is the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a wholly owned subsidiary of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (above right) Everytown for Gun Safety. While Ms. Watts has maintained something of a low profile over the last few months, there’s nothing like a mass shooting to bring out the doyenne of disarmament. In a post Sutherland Springs slaughter article for elle.com, Ms. Watts plays the race card . . .
After acts of terrorism that don’t involve guns, there are calls to tighten laws. But when it comes to mass shootings like Sutherland Springs, which are most often perpetrated by white men, we’re told that strengthening our gun laws just won’t work. Instead, we get the tired trope of thoughts and prayers. But if thoughts and prayers alone were enough to prevent gun violence, Americans wouldn’t get shot in our places of worship.
Ms. Watts is implying that gun rights advocates block “sensible gun reform” (or whatever she’s calling gun control these days) to protect white privilege. That gun rights advocates are inherently and secretly racist. That the white Powers That Be would support gun control if the mass shooters were black. Or if they themselves were black. Or something.
Hang on. What does a spree killer’s ethnicity have to do with anything? In fact, isn’t it racist to suggest that it does? If I were to write that a larger percentage of America’s black population commit firearms-related crimes than the country’s caucasian population, I have a feeling I’d be called a racist. So I won’t.
But the point remains: Ms. Watts is an anti-gun rights social justice warrior, an agitprop agitator who tries to stimulate white guilt to forward her statist agenda. One who doesn’t want anything to do with the facts.
For example, statista.com discovered that white people committed just over half of all the mass shootings in the U.S. between 1982 and 2017.
That stat doesn’t directly contradict Ms. Watt’s implication that a white “power elite” is blocking gun control because it doesn’t care when white people shoot a lot of people. But it does take some of the wind out of the wind bag’s sails. Doesn’t it?