Accuracy Is Not His Forte

This piece in the American Prospect by Peter Dreier who teaches at Occidental is par for the course for lefty drivel on guns. Let's start with the Title: The Virginia Shooting Isn't About Bernie. It's About The Right's Embrace Of Guns.

OK. I agree that it's usually not very important to talk about the politics of a criminal. But the left has made such a fetish of the political leanings of some cherry picked criminals, we right thinking individuals point to the lefty leanings of a lot of recent mass murderers (in Alexandria, thank God, no one was killed) to set the record straight about the claims of right wing political violence, of which there is very little. Here, here, here, here, here, and here are but a few of the stories claiming, falsely, it's the political right that is to fear vis a vis political violence.

The falsity is pretending ordinary crimes by individuals are actually politically motivated terrorism. Please.

But back to Dreier. Here is the first paragraph:

Soon after James Hodgkinson brought an AR-15 assault rifle to a baseball field in suburban Virginia and opened fire, injuring Republican politicians and staffers...[Newt Gingrich and others mentioned the fact that the shooter was a lefty].

Well, it wasn't an AR-15. Dreier is as wrong about most of the rest of his article as he is about the weapon used. It was an SKS. Next.

The claim that Hodgkinson’s actions have anything to do with Sanders or the left is ridiculous.

The left always says that it's ridiculous to talk about the politics of a mass murderer when the mass murderer is a lefty. When it's not a lefty, however, the political association is very important. See the links above.

When it comes to inciting violence, the person on whom the media and politicians should be focusing is not Bernie Sanders but Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

I would blame the shooter only and not talk about indirect incitement at all. Nothing doing for Prof. Dreier. And what did Mr. LaPierre do to incite violence? Well he did not immediately condemn the politically motivated shootings in Alexandria and the non-political shooting at the workplace in San Francisco. He didn't condemn them? Why the dastardly fiend! Of course silence after a crime is incitement of that crime. Who doesn't know that? Who doesn't know that silence is the exact same thing as actually urging violence (of which there are numerous lefty examples recently)? Dreier keeps digging.

Like climate-change deniers, Wayne LaPierre doesn’t care about facts.

This is rich from a guy who knows nothing about guns and gun laws in America.

The NRA opposes a federal law requiring background checks on would-be gun buyers and a national registry of guns. It defends the rights of Americans to carry concealed weapons in schools, universities, churches, bars, and elsewhere.

Earth to Dreier. There is a law requiring background checks on would-be gun buyers. See 18 USC Sec. 922, for example. It applies to people in the business of selling guns which are most but not all of the people selling guns. For private sales, we trust that the gun owner, who passed the background check, has the sense not to sell to crazy people or criminals, just as we trust the gun owner to use his or her gun responsibly. By listing certain places where right thinking people maintain the Second Amendment applies, Dreier seeks to bring in emotion (guns in churches? Oh Lordy, no!) to cloud the NRA's straightforward belief that we should not be prevented anywhere from protecting our lives and the lives of others. But yes, the NRA supports constitutional concealed carry (no government permission needed) and the NRA does not support the patent idiocy of gun free zones. Like a criminal is going to obey that sort of nuisance law when he or she is disobeying so many others, like the laws against, robbery, assault and murder. Magical thinking is too often on the left. Dreier certainly has it. And the NRA opposes a Government registry of guns as unnecessary and politically dangerous. Why would the Government need a list of who owns guns but for, ultimately, confiscation when the Age of Gun Aquarius finally arrives? It's not paranoia when the lefties tell us straight out that they want to take away guns from citizens.

Hodgkinson apparently had a permit for the AR-15 assault rifle he used on Wednesday. According to the NRA, the AR-15 is America’s most popular rifle, with an estimated nine million in circulation in this country. The NRA claims that they are used safely by millions of people for sport. But it is also the weapon used in many mass shootings. It accommodates high-capacity magazines that can fire off 100 rounds or more within minutes. That’s clearly a quasi-military weapon, not a recreational tool.

No, it was an SKS, but to anti-gun lefties all rifles are AR-15 or "assault rifles." Most mass shooters use hand guns. Rifles are used in less than 2% of gun murders in America. Of course it's a weapon, moron. It's a gun not a water ski. I wonder if Dreier complains that water is too wet.

Upon taking office, the Trump administration has taken steps to make it easier for both fugitives and the mentally ill to buy guns.

This is a lie. No such steps have been taken. The form one fills out to go through a background check in order to buy a gun has not been changed in any way since January 20, 2017. All the 2017 changes to Form 4473 were made by the Obama administration.

Congressional Republicans have introduced a bill to allow people without permits or training to carry firearms across state lines (which they call “concealed carry reciprocity”).

Again, it's a lie to define concealed carry permit reciprocity as allowing "people without permits to carry firearms across state lines." (emphasis added). Real idiocy. Gun owners can carry guns across state lines now. What he's talking about is allowing a person who obtains a conceal carry permit in his state of residence to carry a concealed weapon in another state that requires concealed carry permits. Kind of a full faith and credit type of thing.

Big finish:

But don’t expect to see a serious public discussion of gun control so long as Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are running things in Washington. Until we tame the power of the NRA, we can expect more incidents like the two that occurred on Wednesday. Such events are part of the deadly daily diet of murders throughout America committed by angry and unstable gun-toting people whose “freedom” to own weapons of mass destruction Wayne LaPierre and his political allies defend.

All you really need to know about the basic lefty Weltanschauung Dreier is constantly revealing as underlying his near drivel is that he puts the word freedom in challenge quotes. And notice how the description of hand guns and rifles has subtlety changed. Now they are "weapons of mass destruction" like poisonous gas shells, bombs, nuclear weapons. Yeah, a hand gun is just like a nuclear weapon, Dreier. Just like it.

It's like lefty professors have an agenda or something. An anti-freedom, pro-big government agenda.