If you have not already heard, yesterday some psycho 21 year old guy went to three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, or as the news referred to them, “spas,” and shot a total of nine people, killing eight of them. It is indeed a tragic loss of life committed by a cowardly, soulless excuse of a human being. This horrific incident involved three separate incidents in three different locations.
As if on cue, the political left is already screaming about white racism* and gun violence. I guarantee that Biden and his folks are going to point to this incident to try and push their “assault weapons” ban, “high capacity” magazine bans, and they will tout the need for more, stronger, longer, better background checks.
But does this tragedy have anything to do with “assault weapons” or “high capacity” magazines?
Let me start by saying as of the time of this writing, I have no idea what weapon the waste of skin (suspect) used, but that is exactly part of my point. This gutless act could have been accomplished using nothing more than a revolver. It did not require anything more modern than a 19th century handgun to shoot the number of people the suspect shot at each incident.
At the first scene, the suspect shot five people. At the second scene, he shot three and at the last scene, he shot one. While I have no idea how many rounds he fired or how many times each person was shot, that horrible deed could have easily been accomplished by one person with a low capacity firearm, assuming they were a good marksman, and lacked the slightest bit of human decency.
Capacity A Non-Issue in Atlanta
For more than 150 years, commonly available revolvers have held up to six rounds of self contained cartridge ammunition. Modern revolvers hold even more. Smith and Wesson makes several 8-shot revolvers chambered in .357 Magnum, as do several other manufacturers.
A motivated killer would not have been prevented from committing this horrible crime even if there were magazine capacity laws in place, or if “assault weapons” had been banned.
But What About Background Checks?
As for more strenuous background checks, this is also a false argument. First, we have no idea at this point if the suspect did or did not acquire his gun legally. There are sadly plenty of tragic examples of mass murderers legally buying the guns they used, and passing the federally required background checks. Background checks won’t stop someone who has no previous criminal record, as is the case with nearly all mass killers.
Beyond that, the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the United States is committed by people who illegally obtained their guns. If they are not legally getting their guns now, adding one more law is not going to change how they get their guns.
As in nearly every single tragic crime involving firearms during my lifetime, there is not a single gun control law, in effect or proposed, that could have prevented the crime. Instead of trying to prevent crime by making gun laws, perhaps we should turn our attention to what is causing these individuals to commit the crime. If the same thing has proven ineffective for decades, more of it will be just as ineffective. How about we try something different?
*As is being reported shortly after this piece was written, the subject was NOT motivated by race, but is instead claiming it was due to a sex addiction.
