The lead paragraph in a report from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump confirms what many in the firearms community had been expecting: somehow the blame will be shifted toward the gun.
“Amid days of intense focus on the security failures that allowed a gunman to nearly assassinate Donald Trump, Pennsylvania’s top law enforcement official turned her focus to another key component in the deadly attack: the gun,” the story by reporter Mike Wereschagin began.
Still, the Wall Street Journal noted in the first paragraph of its recent report on the Trump shooting, “Assassination attempts against U.S. presidents have led to major gun laws, but the July 13 shooting at a rally for former President Donald Trump appears unlikely to be a pivotal moment in the divisive U.S. gun debate.”
Then comes the first line in a report posted by The Guardian, “More than a week after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump with an assault weapon, his political supporters and fellow members of the Republican party have remained silent on the issue of tightening America’s notoriously lax gun control laws.”
There was little doubt among gun owners and Second Amendment activists in the wake of the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting that sooner than later, anti-gunners would seize on the attempted murder to re-vitalize their crusade to ban modern semiautomatic rifles. The AR-15-type rifle happens to be the most popular long gun in the country, with millions of them in private hands. Gun rights activists have long contended that if the guns were actually a problem—and not the malcontents misusing them—it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country, every day, above the fold.
The Post-Gazette story noted Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, has “called on” lawmakers at the state and federal levels to “reinstate a long-expired ban” on semi-auto rifles.
But as Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said last week, “It’s not the tool, it’s the evil fool.”
By some estimates, there are more than 20 million privately-owned modern semi-auto rifles in the U.S., and that may be conservative. The rifles are used for all kinds of things, including competition, predator control, varmint hunting, casual target shooting, personal and home defense, as noted in a Reason article published back in 2022.
Author Jacob Sullum wrote, “Two-thirds of the respondents who reported owning AR-15-style rifles said they used them for recreational target shooting, while half mentioned hunting and a third mentioned competitive shooting. Sixty-two percent said they used such rifles for home defense, and 35 percent cited defense outside the home. Yet politicians who want to ban these rifles insist they are good for nothing but mass murder.”
Sullum was writing about a massive research project done by and for Georgetown University political economist William English.
Affixing blame to the firearm has been a strategy among anti-gunners for a long time, critics contend. By doing so, one can demonize firearms in an effort to promote new and stricter gun control laws, while downplaying the human factor in any tragedy. Still it is the human who pulls the trigger. The gun is an inanimate object, a tool in Gottlieb’s words.
It is the “fool” who sets each tragedy in motion, and has history has demonstrated time and again, even without the availability of a firearm, someone bent on mayhem will figure out a way.
