in case they do not make this morning’s APR. They come from his Friday Washington Post column, which is titled The issue is not mental health. The issue is the guns.
There is a one-sentence paragraph that sets it up:
At the heart of the matter, though, lies the gun.
Here are the two key paragraphs:
There are disturbed individuals like Cruz in countries around the world, but only the United States suffers mass shootings so regularly that they have almost become routine. Why? Because you can’t shoot up a school or a nightclub or a country music concert the way it was done in Parkland, Orlando and Las Vegas if you don’t have access to weapons of war that were designed for the battlefield.
The Supreme Court has made clear that the Second Amendment, while guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms, is not absolute. The Bill of Rights was written in the era of muskets and dueling pistols. We don’t allow private citizens to own surface-to-air missiles capable of downing an airliner, so why do we let them own assault rifles designed not to shoot targets or game but to kill human beings in large numbers?
It is worth noting that after a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia severely restricted onwership assault weapons and other semi-automatic rifles, as well as semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns. That was done on Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, and since then Australia has not had a single incident of 5 or more people killed in a single shooting incident. Yet despite multiple occasions in schools (Sandy Hook as well as Parkland, for example) and elsewhere (including Las Vegas), we still have not gone back to the assault weapons ban that Diane Feinstein introduced, and which was allowed to expire. And consider the death tolls we have suffered since then — here are just SOME of the top 20 events, excluding the death of the shooter(s), since then in which semi-automatic rifles were used, usually AR-15 type weapons:
2017 Las Vegas 58
2016 Pulse Night Club, Orlando 49
2012 Sandy Hook 28
2017 Sutherland Springs church 26
2018 Parkland FL 17
2015 San Bernadino 14
1999 Columbine 13
2012 Aurora CO 12
All of these are since Australia moved to restrict access to weapons which could do such damage.
Hence the conclusion of Robinson’s superb column, which makes it clear what we now face:
This is madness. Look at those grieving parents in Parkland. Know that because of the NRA, others surely will soon join their ranks.
This is the kind of “American Exceptionalism” I could do without.