President Obama believes in the gobbledygook science of massive anthropogenic climate change, but he doesn’t believe in the first rule of holes: stop digging.
On Tuesday, Obama continued digging himself deeper on issues ranging from abortion to ISIS. But his most laughable line came with relation to the Colorado Springs shooting outside the Planned Parenthood facility: “This just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
He said this in Paris.
Yes, Paris. The place where just three weeks ago, 130 people were murdered in a mass shooting attack by ISIS. The place where just last January, 12 people were murdered at Charlie Hebdo offices and at a kosher deli in an ISIS attack.
It’s as though Obama lives in an alternative universe.
It does raise the question, however, as to why Obama and his allies constantly focus on mass shootings as the single standard of violence government must prevent. Leftists are fond of pointing out that few Americans are killed in terrorist attacks each year; the same could be said of mass shootings. From 2000 to 2014, according to Jacklyn Schildkraut of State University of New York and H. Jaymi Elsass of Texas State University, the US underwent 133 mass shootings and 487 dead. That’s over 14 years. Over ten people die every day in the United States thanks to unintentional drowning.
So why the focus on mass shootings? Because it’s the only measure of declining gun violence that critics of gun ownership can show correlates with mass gun confiscation. In Australia, a mass gun ban after a mass shooting ended in a zeroing of mass shootings, even though gun violence as a whole did not decline as fast in Australia as it did in the United States, where gun ownership continued to rise. As Samara McPhedran of the University of Sydney wrote, “The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence.” In the UK, the same thing has happened: gun crime has risen 89% from 1999 to 2009, after the 1997 ban on handguns after a mass shooting.
So Obama will continue to mouth off about mass shootings, even in places where mass shootings have been far more spectacular than the United States.