Dan Rodricks and his Ivory Tower
If you have followed out coverage of Dan Rodricks over the years, you will know that Dan never lets facts get in the way of his ivory tower, rose-colored view of the world. After the horrific events in Aurora, Colorado this past Friday night, Dan Rodricks decides that the perpetrator of the crime is not actually at fault. It’s clearly the fault of American gun culture.
Gun-ownership zealots, meanwhile, prefer a different connection. They believe crime rates have declined across the country because more people are carrying guns — a ridiculous claim with no credible evidence of correlation — and they believe that some of our nation’s mass killings would not have been so bad had more people been armed to take down the gunman, including the one in the Aurora Cineplex.
Rodricks then goes on to decry recent Supreme Court rulings affirming our Second Amendment rights as American citizens to bear arms, and how both D.C.’s gun laws as well as Maryland’s “may-issue” permit status are in doubt as the Court moves more and more towards an originalist viewpoint on Second Amendment issues.
What’s most disturbing about Rodricks piece, however, is this:
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That’s why we should expect more guns among us. As more random acts of gun violence occur, more gun owners will want to carry their weapons, perhaps even to movie theaters. It’s part of the new insanity.
What is insane is not the “new insanity” that more random gun violence will occur. What’s insane is to think that somehow the addition of more law-abiding citizens carrying guns into society is in somehow, someway, going to turn us into the Wild West. How many times have you heard that story before, often times in conjunction with the liberalization of carry laws? And how often does it come to fruition? It doesn’t. And why? Because more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens does reduce the crime rate.
Meanwhile, in Florida:
Two teens who were allegedly trying to rob an internet café in Florida were shot by a man sitting inside the building, according to Wednesday reports.
Davis G. Dawkins and Duwayne Henderson, both 19, entered the Palms Internet Café in Ocala Friday night with a handgun and a baseball bat, according to an ABCNews article .
Video shows the suspects running into the café and one swings the bat toward something out of view while the other is holding up the gun.
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Clearly, a law-abiding citizen carrying a concealed weapon certainly changed the calculus for these armed robbers, no?
I have a number of questions for Dan Rodricks on his interpretation of how more gun control would have stopped this maniac from committing this act of terrorism early Friday morning:
- The theater in Aurora was designated by the business as a “gun-free zone.” Do you think that the creation of more “gun-free zones” would have deterred this or any other homicidal maniac?
- Do you think that a homicidal maniac is at all concerned with violating concealed carry laws when setting forth to undertake such atrocities?
- You belittle one of your commenters for noting “The moral responsibility I feel is guilt for not being there with my carry permit so I could have done something about it.” Do you feel any moral responsibility for supporting laws that hindered the ability of law-abiding citizens to engage and stop this homicidal maniac from committing additional atrocities?
- What’s more important to you? Supporting gun control or saving lives? Because it seems like you’re doing an awful lot of the former.
