Up and down the political spectrum Tuesday, Americans were reminded that anti-gun sentiments pervade every level, from a nominee to run the military health care system to the chairman of the King County, Wash. Council, and that was even before a special Evergreen State Senate election put Democrats in control along the entire West Coast.
Responding to questions from the Senate Armed Services hearing in Washington, D.C., Dr. Dean Winslow (USAF Ret.) and a professor at Stanford University was quoted by the Washington Examiner and Fox News observing, “I may get in trouble with other members of the committee just say how insane it is that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semi-automatic like an AR-15, which apparently was the weapon that was used” in the Texas church shooting.
Second Amendment activists are beginning to fume over that one, especially from a Trump administration nominee. Winslow apparently isn’t a math professor, else he might have figured that millions of AR-type rifles are in private hands, including the hands of the man who shot the Texas killer, and their owners have not hurt anybody.
Then came West Seattle Democrat Joe McDermott, chair of the King County Council. According to MyNorthwest.com, while pressing for adoption of a gun control measure in the county Tuesday, he declared “We have an epidemic of gun violence in our country. Over 30,000 Americans are gunned down in our streets, victims of gun violence, every year in our country.”
That statement is demonstrably false, but it reflects the mantra of the gun prohibition lobby with which far too many Democrats seem to have locked arms. The number reflects a combination of homicides, suicides and accidents. That’s how anti-gunners have convinced many people that there is a criminal blood fest in progress.
Tuesday’s apparent election of Democrat Manka Dhingra to the Washington State Senate in a race that cost millions of dollars likely puts Democrats in control of the legislatures in California, Oregon and Washington. The Seattle Times editorialized Wednesday not-so-convincingly that this probably will not result in legislation to ban so-called “assault weapons” in the Evergreen State. The Times endorsed Dhingra’s opponent, Republican Jinyoung Lee, and the newspaper has a history of backing every gun control effort it sees.
One year ago, American gun owners began napping, convinced that with the surprise election of Donald Trump their troubles were over, or at least delayed. Gun owners helped the GOP take control of Capitol Hill, but so far they have been rewarded with very little in terms of legislation. Concealed Carry Reciprocity and the National Hearing Protection Act both gather dust in committee.
Wednesday, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety sent out a mass email declaring that “we elected a slew of gun sense champions to help make these stronger gun laws a reality, including Virginia Governor-elect Ralph Northam and New Jersey Governor-elect Phil Murphy… In the wake of the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, we are showing that we can move our country in the right direction with the right lawmakers. We are showing that candidates who support strong gun laws win on Election Day. And we’re going to carry this electoral momentum into an unprecedented 2018 campaign to elect gun sense candidates across America…”
Trump has put a conservative on the Supreme Court, and nominated others to the lower federal benches. Congressional Republicans need to get busy and deliver the goods, else in 2018 at the mid-terms, the same gun owners who brought them to the dance may leave them in the parking lot.
