Opinion: Mass shootings give 'gun controllers' ammo to push 'deceitful' agenda

Christopher Beebe is a lifelong resident of Ohio and a former U.S. Marine who has studied gun control for 40 years.

There is a faction in America, composed of certain politicians, media outlets, celebrities and others, that is bent on gun control. Tragedies such as those in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, simply provide convenient backdrops for the gun controllers’ agenda, an agenda littered with deception and at times, outright lies.

Politicians have a responsibility to accomplish legitimate objectives while treading as lightly as possible on rights. Yet the gun controllers amongst them ignore this responsibility. Gun controllers have no interest in hardening schools.

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Many of the gun controllers are protected by bodyguards with — you guessed it — guns. (Congresspersons, on and off the job; Michael Bloomberg of Everytown for Gun Safety; many celebrities) Yet they leave schools with only a sign prohibiting guns. Some have actually gone so far as to attempt to prohibit funding for police in schools.

Gun controllers have no data demonstrating that their desired restrictions would curb mass shootings. They label semi-automatic rifles as the primary culprit, yet offer no explanation as to why such rifles, available to the public for well over 100 years, have only been misused relatively recently.

The fact is that rifles of all kinds are involved in a miniscule percentage of murders in the U.S. More people are murdered by “personal weapons” — hands and feet — than by rifles (2019 is most recent data available).

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They deceive us by labeling semi-automatic firearms “weapons of war,” yet they cannot identify a single military unit in the U.S. that is equipped with these firearms. Military-issue rifles are select-fire, meaning they can fire either semi-automatic or fully automatic.

Speaking of which, when the Department of Homeland Security solicited bids for such select-fire rifles, they were titled “personal defense weapons.” The gun controllers cannot explain why a select-fire rifle is a personal defense weapon when possessed by a government agent, but a semi-automatic in the hands of a civilian is a weapon of war.

The gun controllers want universal background checks, claiming there is a “gun show loophole.” They do not mention that this restriction is unenforceable without registration, a fact pointed out by the U.S. National Institute of Justice back in 2013, because they know that registration is a deal breaker.

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Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, in a recent editorial, stated he’s “willing to pass incremental change,” meaning that further increments are in the works. Never mind that universal background checks, required in California since 1991, have had no effect on firearms deaths there.

We are told of another loophole, the “Charleston Loophole,” which allowed the cowardly murderer in a Charleston church to obtain his firearm from a dealer when the FBI did not disqualify him after three days.

This is also a deception, because the “three days” counts only business days, and does not count the day that the transaction is initiated. Therefore, unless the transaction is initiated on a Monday or Tuesday, the buyer cannot legally obtain the firearm for at least 5 days.

President Joe Biden’s diatribes on gun control are rife with falsehoods. Referring to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, he claims that the gun industry is the only one in America that cannot be sued.

He claims "You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weaponry."

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He asserts that the majority of gun owners think “assault weapons” should not be sold. These claims have all been proven patently false.

Gun controllers are not as interested in saving lives as they are in advancing an agenda. History demonstrates that the passing of each restriction on firearms is the starting point for the next restriction. As sickening as these recent murders are, they do not support the deceitful proposals of gun controllers.

Christopher Beebe is a lifelong resident of Ohio and a former U.S. Marine who has studied gun control for 40 years.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: Gun control supporters interested in agenda, not saving lives