On Wednesday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles discusses how the Left may push President Trump toward ineffective gun control policies. Video and partial transcript below:
President Trump has signaled after those shootings a couple weeks ago that he wanted certain kinds of gun control. He was very careful about how he was talking about it, but he still signaled he wanted more gun regulation. We’ve seen him do this before. He passed gun regulation after the Las Vegas shooting, which was to ban … bump stock. So he banned bump stocks, which was completely pointless. It’s not going to save any lives. It’s a rounding error, it’s nothing. But it’s a virtue signal.
Forget the fact that the vast majority of people who are killed with guns in this country are killed by handguns, not by AR-15s. Not by any other guns, and certainly not by bump stocks. He still banned them, I think sort of pointlessly. Now, the New York Times is reporting — so take it with a grain of salt — that President Trump is considering more gun control. They write:
Mr. Trump on Sunday telephoned Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Democrat who has been one of the leading voices in Congress for gun control, an indication that the president is interested in pursuing legislation. Earlier in the week, Mr. Murphy had contacted the White House to indicate that he was willing to work with Mr. Trump on the issue, which prompted the call. The conversation was positive, with Mr. Trump indicating that he was serious about persuading Republicans to act, according to officials familiar with their discussion.
Bad idea. It’s just a bad idea. There is no gun control law that would have prevented the shooting. Not the shooting in El Paso, not the shooting in Ohio, not the many, many, many, many more shootings that are not talked about in the mainstream media. Not all the shootings in Chicago. Not all the shootings all around the country, not the gang violence, not the drug violence, not the suicide — which is the majority of gun deaths. It won’t stop any of that. It will just take away our liberties for no reason other than to empower the Left and to empower the government, which in the long run, is the Left — and the Left is the government in the long run. [It’s] a very bad idea. It’s just emotional.
I mean, The New York Post had that awful editorial a couple of weeks ago that said we need to ban assault weapons. Even though we can’t define assault weapons, we need to ban them. And not just the cosmetic features, but the different features that really differentiate assault weapons from other rifles — even though there aren’t any features that substantively differentiate assault weapons from other rifles. Nothing. Just we need to act now.
It’s this constant push of emotivism — of, I don’t care about the facts. The facts be damned! I need to feel better about myself. This gets you into a lot of trouble and not just at the political level. It gets you into trouble and the culture. It gets you into trouble on religion. We’ll see that with a major evangelical figure apparently losing his faith. We’ll see how it’s actually the same cause — it’s this emotivism. It’s this giving yourself away to emotion.
I really hope that President Trump doesn’t push for more gun control. There is no appetite in the country for it over the long run. There is no defense of it constitutionally or legally from our political tradition, or morally as far as I can tell. And I think it’s just him being suckered in on this emotivism by Democrats. Now Trump is not a sucker. I hope he doesn’t allow himself to be played as one. And if he does push for gun control, as it appears that he may be trying to do, I hope that Senate and congressional Republicans stand firm and do not give an inch on it. It’s stupid. It’s just a terrible idea. And I suspect it’s being pushed by forces around the president that are left-wing to begin with. Stop it. Get rid of it. It won’t help you in 2020. It won’t help our liberties in this country. It won’t help our constitutional government. It won’t help anybody but the Left.
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