An editorial in The Washington Post claims that the only thing that kept January’s Capitol protests from erupting into horrific, terrorist-driven bloody gunfire is Washington, D.C.’s famously stringent gun control laws:
These insurrectionists came armed with zip ties, pepper spray, pipe bombs, smoke devices and other weapons. They wanted not only to disrupt the proceedings that ratified Joe Biden as the next president of the United States but also to inflict harm on our legislators and on Vice President Mike Pence.
We may have D.C.’s gun laws to thank for averting such disaster.
This editorial was written by a sophomore at Georgetown Day School (and Maryland March for Our Lives leader) with a little help from Carl Racine, the D.C. attorney general. The authors clearly believe D.C.’s gun control regime is the only thing that prevented serious violence on January 6.reason the January 6th.
Somehow though Reddy and Racine managed to ignore the looting and burning of the city that took place at the hands of anti-Trump protestors four years ago after the 45th President’s inauguration. They also turn a blind eye to the bloody violence and destruction wreaked by BLM, Antifa, and other leftist protestors around the country throughout 2020, much of which occurred in cities that also feature plenty of limits on the right to keep and bear arms.
No worries now, though, because gun control worked! It saved the day on January 6, 2020:
…our gun laws limited the scale of violence and will now help us hold accountable those who were caught carrying firearms to what was initially disguised as a lawful protest. These laws actively aided in the cause of protecting our democracy and our efforts to recover through accountability.
The authors also manage to bring mass-murderers into their equation too, opining that if we just had more limits on civilian gun rights, we’d have fewer school shootings:
Hiding from rioters with deadly weapons is a small taste of what children across this country risk every day when they go into school.
The pandemic may have granted a brief reprieve, but the data shows that the number of school shootings is trending upward.
Wait, what?
Hold on, there’s more. They flow beautifully from there into the need to ban — you guess it — “assault weapons” (just after stating there weren’t any rifles at the January 6th protest):
The new administration can start by reinstating the federal assault weapons ban. Legislators — even those in states with strong laws already on the books — can prioritize measures to ensure guns are not brought to public buildings and public spaces, to schools or to protests.
What say you all? Were gun control laws the only thing that stemmed the tide of potential widespread violence at the Capitol? Do riots/protests/whatever have any bearing at all on school shootings carried out by crazed killers? Or…is this all just a convoluted mess of concocted scenarios thrown together in a naked attempt to force the issue of the anti-gunners desire for gun bans?
You make the call.