This morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced he would be pushing a bill that would create yet another commission – this time on “mass violence.”
Said Manchin:
“I have linked up with and I will be with John McCain introducing a bill that Joe Lieberman, our dear friend, has been championing for a long time, which basically puts a commission about mass violence together. You bring experts from all different fields. You bring people such as myself that are NRA members that have been sportsmen all of our lives, and look for a commonsense approach to how we change the culture of violence in America. And that’s what needs to be done.”
This sounds downright reasonable, except that the commission will, in all likelihood, do nothing but consider broad gun control. There are two dead giveaways here: first, Manchin’s rearguard action of citing his membership in the NRA is a justification for throwing the NRA under the bus; second, the use of the phrase “mass violence” as opposed to actual murders and violence using guns means the commission will focus only on the statistical anomaly that is school shootings, rather than the serious problem of murders using guns, which takes place largely in major American cities.
The truth is that the factors most linked with violence using guns – single motherhood and the gang culture in the inner cities – have yet to be tackled in any serious way. There is little chance that they will be now. It’s much easier to grandstand than to take care of the problem.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).