I&I Editorial

Beto O’Rourke has been trying to gain some traction for his presidential campaign by making increasingly aggressive statements about gun control. From “nobody wants to take your guns away” to “Hell yes, we will take your AR-15.”

In a disastrous “Ask Me Anything” event on Reddit, O’Rourke got pummeled with questions about his new position.

One questioner asked O’Rourke how he’d go about confiscating the roughly 10 million AR-15s currently in people’s homes. O’Rourke’s reply — “Americans will comply with the law” — was downvoted by more than 13,000 Reddit users. Two questions later, Beto had dropped off the Reddit program.

Even if Beto could overcome the fierce public opposition to gun repossession, to say nothing of the Second Amendment, there’s the question he hasn’t yet been asked or answered.

What’s next on his prohibition list?

If “assault rifles” are so dangerous that no law-abiding citizen may own one, what else should the government take away to protect citizens?

Despite the relentless focus on “assault rifles,” and their use by deranged mass shooters, these weapons are responsible for a tiny fraction of murders each year. Data from the FBI show that, of 15,129 murders in 2017, 10,982 involved a firearm. Of those, rifles of any kind were responsible for 403 deaths. Regular old handguns, however, were used in 7,032 homicides.

So if Beto wants to ban a weapon that is, as he put it in his Reddit answer, “so often used to kill and terrorize people throughout this country,” why ignore the one that kills and terrorizes the most?

And why stop at guns?

Why not ban knives, which were used in three times as many murders in 2017 as rifles?

Or hands and feet, since more people are killed by being punched and kicked to death — 696.

The fixation on one type of rifle makes even less sense when you expand the field of vision to look at other ways in which innocent lives are lost.

The same year that rifles took 403 lives, cars and trucks killed almost 6,000 pedestrians, and killed another 783 on bicycles. Drunken drivers were responsible for almost 11,000 deaths that year.

By Beto’s logic, to the extent that he has any, he should be calling either for a ban on alcohol or cars, or both.

Meanwhile, stairs are responsible for roughly 1,300 deaths a year, according to the National Safety Council. How about a ban on second stories, Beto?

More than 500 people drown in pools each year. Almost as many drown in bathtubs annually (around 350) as are killed by rifles. Why do we allow these dangerous products?

Cold is deadlier than rifles. Roughly 700 people die from exposure to cold, which is more than twice the number who die from exposure to heat. (An argument for global warming, isn’t it, Beto?)

If any of this seems far-fetched, consider the fact that Democrats already have a long and growing list of things they promise to ban if elected.

During the CNN town hall on global warming, for example, Democrats promised to ban plastic straws, incandescent light bulbs, internal-combustion engines, nuclear power, factory farming, as well as off-shore drilling, fracking, oil exports, and coal mining.

“We have to take combustion engine vehicles off the road as rapidly as we can,” said leading Democrat Joe Biden, the supposed centrist in the group.

Democrats used to be called the party of “tax and spend.” These days, they’re coming across as the party of “tax, spend and ban.”

— Written by John Merline

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