Gun control proponent Gabby Giffords was in Nevada over the weekend campaigning for the same background check her attacker, Jared Loughner, passed to acquire his handgun.
Loughner shot Gabby Giffords on January 8, 2011.
According to Guns.com, Giffords’s stop was part of the gun control bus tour she and her husband, Mark Kelly, have been on for 14 weeks. She was in Nevada to push Question 1, which would expand background checks to more gun sales by requiring private sales and transfers to be checked just like retail sales.
Giffords said:
Stopping gun violence takes courage – the courage to do what’s right and the courage of new ideas. I’ve seen great courage when my life was on the line. Now is the time to come together – to be responsible. Democrats, Republicans – everyone. We must never stop fighting. Fight, fight, fight!
Again — and this cannot be stressed enough — Giffords is fighting to force more people to pass the very check her attacker passed for his handgun. And she is doing it under the guise of “stopping gun violence.” But how can it stop gun violence when nearly every mass public attacker of recent memory passed a background check for his or her guns?
A short list of attackers and alleged attackers who acquired their guns via background checks includes:
- the New York City bombing suspect (September 19)
- the Orlando Pulse attacker (June 12)
- the UCLA gunman (June 1)
- the San Bernardino attackers (December 2, 2015)
- the Colorado Springs attacker (October 31, 2015)
- the Umpqua Community College attacker (October 1, 2015)
- Alison Parker’s attacker (August 26, 2015)
- the Lafayette movie theater attacker (July 23, 2015)
- the Chattanooga attacker (July 16, 2015)
- the alleged Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal attacker (Jun 17, 2015)
- the Muhammad Carton Contest attackers (May 3, 2014)
- the Las Vegas cop killers (June 9, 2015)
- the Santa Barbara attacker (May 23, 2014)
- the Fort Hood attacker (April 2, 2014)
- the Arapahoe High School attacker (December 13, 2013)
- the D.C. Navy Yard attacker (September 16, 2013)
- the Aurora movie theater attacker (July 20, 2012)
- Gabby Giffords’s attacker (January 8, 2011)
- the Fort Hood attacker (November 5, 2009)
- the Virginia Tech attacker (April 16, 2007), and many others.
How can anyone who reads that list fail to realize that background checks do not stop latent criminals? A man with criminal intent but no criminal or mental health record will pass background checks all day long, acquire the guns he needs, then kill innocents. At the same time, the new gun controls contained in Question 1 will make the gun-purchasing process more tedious and cumbersome for law-abiding citizens.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of “Bullets with AWR Hawkins,” a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.