Salon Writer Wants To Know Why Conservatives Won’t “Back Gun Control To Save Cops”

By Cam Edwards

There’s a part of me that really wants to believe that this is just trollish clickbait and not a serious argument, but sadly, I think Amanda Marcotte of Salon actually means every word of this dumb argument. First, she makes the increasingly common argument among gun control advocates that we should make it harder to legally get a gun because that will magically make it harder to illegally get a gun too.

It is true that the suspect, Maurice Hill — who had an arsenal sufficient to hold off the cops for hours — has a lengthy criminal record, including a 2008 federal conviction for illegal gun ownership. But it’s simple-minded to suggest that this crime therefore has no implications for how we regulate guns. On the contrary, there’s ample reason to believe that making it harder to get a gun legally will also make it a lot harder to get a gun illegally.

“All guns start out as legal guns,” epidemiologist Anthony Fabio of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health told the Washington Post in 2016. But although they are legally sold in the first instance, a “huge number of them” end up in criminal …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms