United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- If there is one pattern that leads to Second Amendment supporters losing ground, it is what comes with mass shootings. These horrific incidents are when anti-Second Amendment extremists make their biggest pushes to attack our rights, often with a major assist from “mainstream” media outlets.
In the wake of Uvalde, we saw that pattern play out with a very limited amount of success for anti-Second Amendment extremists. That said, it is clear that to preserve our rights – particularly the victories we secured with the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen – we need to break that pattern.
The first thing to keep in mind is that if we are fighting legislation in the aftermath of these events, we’re 90% of the way to failure. As is the case when we discussed the heroics of Eli Dicken at the Greenwood Mall, Second Amendment supporters need a different standard of success:
Things should not have to come to the point where we need to fight a legislative battle in the aftermath of a mass shooting any more than the prevention of a mass shooting should come down to an armed citizen’s skill, courage, and luck.
How many mass shooters had prior run-ins, or worse? The Sutherland Springs shooter had disqualifiers under 18 USC 922 – but the NICS records were never updated, and he carried out a horrific act that a heroic NRA instructor eventually stopped. Would it not have been better for NICS to have flagged the shooter, and for said shooter to have faced charges under 18 USC 922 than for that massacre to have happened?
Similarly, the Parkland shooter was caught with ammo on school grounds and once reportedly held a gun to someone’s head. There were ample chances to put him away before he carried out that horrific shooting. None were taken.
The same can be said for other mass shootings. Too many times, there were warning signs that were ignored. Too many times, our rights become targets – and while the federal level has seen negligible losses, these events have seen massive moves by some states.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it. The more mass shootings that are prevented long before they hit the news, the safer the Second Amendment is. We should be looking for constitutionally-sound guardrails to prevent those mass shootings – and should have a long time ago.
Our rights are best defended when there are multiple levels of protection. We can’t just beat legislation after a tragedy or bank on the skill, courage, and luck of an armed citizen. Otherwise, we will be caught in the type of pattern that eventually led to the fates suffered by gun owners in England, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
That pattern can be broken if Second Amendment supporters develop Second Amendment-friendly solutions to prevent these tragedies in order to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists via the ballot box at the federal, state, and local levels.
About Harold Hutchison
Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.
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