Is This The One For Which The Gungrabbers Have Been Waiting?

Every year sees Congressional leftists and liberals, but I repeat myself, try to pass new gun control bills. Most of the time these bills die in committee or simply never get a floor vote because the public has little appetite for more gun control. In fact, it has been a great mystery to the r-strategists why highly publicized shootings have largely failed to lead to more laws restricting the right to bear arms; and, in fact, conservative states seem to be going the opposite direction by increasingly liberalizing the carrying of firearms for self-defense. 

    This year, for instance, the House of Representatives passed two bills that would restrict the Second Amendment, including one that would have expanded background checks to include private sales or transfers of firearms. But lacking the votes in the Senate, these bills have stalled, even after several shootings that the leftists probably hoped would build public support. But they were the wrong type of shootings: the wrong type of perpetrator, wrong type of weapon, etc. 

    Not to be deterred, "U.S. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) reintroduced on Wednesday the Keep Americans Safe Act, a confiscatory ban on magazines with a capacity over ten rounds," reported Guns America. This bill goes beyond most magazine capacity bills by requiring that "high capacity" magazines be surrendered to the government through a "buy back" or destroyed. Right on que, late Thursday night, a gunman armed with a rifle opened fire at a FedEx processing center near the Indianapolis airport, killing 8 and wounding several others before taking his own life. Most of the articles have focused on the reports that the shooting only lasted a couple of minutes. 

    This shooting checks most of the right boxes for the authoritarian left: the gunman was a young white male (19-year-old Brandon Scott Hole); he was apparently armed with a rifle, variously describes as an AR or "a sub-machine gun or automatic rifle" and probably using a magazine with a capacity greater than 10 rounds; and it is likely that his victims included POC (in this instance, members of the Sikh community). The anti-gunners must be weeping with joy that the stars finally lined up to their benefit. I fully expect Menendez's and Deutch's bills to get a lot more attention because of this event.

    So, a few other takeaways. First, this is yet another case where the gunman was known to local and federal authorities as potentially dangerous. For the gungrabbers, this will be "proof" that we need national red flag laws, rather than proof that law enforcement is not up to the task of preventing these shootings. 

    Second, this was another gun free zone. In fact, according to the deputy chief of police, the facility had a security checkpoint and a metal detector that workers were supposed to go through before entering the facility; but he didn't believe that the shooter had made it through the checkpoint. We will have to see what other information comes out, but it would be telling if the victims shot inside the facility were at a bottleneck caused by the security checkpoint. Remember that most of the "gun free" or "weapon free" policies are not intended to make workers safer, but to protect employers from liability because they can point to their policies as a defense that they did something. 

    Finally, this is yet another example of "when seconds count, the police are minutes away". From what I read in the news accounts, there was some delay in notifying 911 because, per FedEx policy, employees were not allowed to have cell phones on them.