SCENE: Mitch BERG is at the Mississippi Market co-op buying catnip. His head on a swivel to try to avoid progressive crazies, he’s trying so hard to be careful. But despite his best efforts, he walks around a corner and practically runs into Avery LIBRELLE.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Oh, for fuuuuuu…ll disclosure, Hi, Avery…
LIBRELLE: Yet another mass shooting. It’s time for a conversation about guns.
BERG: Uh, you mean “monologue”, right?
LIBRELLE: Ha ha. The problem is, the right never offers any alternatives. That’s our big frustration.
BERG: I see your “frustration”, and raise you one; the frustration on the right is that the left keeps saying “the right offers no alternatives”. Fact is, we offer them constantly. The left refuses to discuss them honestly.
LIBRELLE: Prove it.
BERG: You asked. Here we go.
For starters: enforce existing laws – especially the ones that are objectively proven to work. Putting gun criminals in jail deters more gun crime. Yet here in the Twin Cities, the two big-county prosecutors have *never*, not once, used the sentencing enhancements that statute allows for gun crimes. *Not once*.
Second: Intervene with youth at risk of getting sucked into gangs.
Third: Fire the US Attorneys that refuse to prosecute straw purchasers. There are *many* of them. Chicago’s already bad violence became much worse after the USA for Northern IL publicly announced he didn’t care to prosecute straw buyers. “Entrepreneurs” shortly started making a pile of money buying guns in Wisconsin and Indiana and selling them to bangers. These USAs need to be fired (that’ll take a GOP president, of course).
Fourth: Start talking honestly about empirical evidence. For example – in 1,000 school districts nationwide that *allow* teachers and staff to bring their own firearms to school, strictly concealed, there has never been a shooting on school property during school hours. This responds to the *fact*, determined by the Secret Service after Columbine, that spree killers very intentionally avoid targets where people unknown to them (i.e. not security guards or cops) can resist them; there’s no way to plan around them. The left reacts with horror – “teachers are about *teaching*, not KILLING”, but they miss the point; not a single teacher or principal or janitor needs to carry single gun; the threat alone is the deterrent. The only response is pure emotion – as if living in an oppressive state of panic about potential spree killers is better than the notion that somewhere on campus, someone with a clean criminal record and decades of incident-free carry might have a gun on ’em. That’s just one of many.
Another thing we learned at Columbine – the best thing to do with a spree shooter is to resist, as lethally as possible, immediately. (It doesn’t in fact matter if that resistance comes from a cop, a guard or a good guy with a gun – but SOMEONE has to put a threat of death in the shooter’s face asap). As we saw in Uvalde (and at Parkland before it), not all cops got the word. Waiting around for a spree killer to negotiate doesn’t work. (Salutory fact; when a spree killer has 20 minutes as at Parkland, or an hour as at Uvalde, the AR15 doesn’t matter; someone could kill 20 people in an hour with grandpa’s break-open shotgun, a cowboy six-gun, or a muzzle-loading musket). Anyway – push policies that favor aggressive self-defense and police response.
Fifth: You want a “red flag law”? Do one in good faith, one that involves more than an easily abused ex parte hearing that serves mostly as a medium for ex-spouses’s revenge, one that allows the subject to defend themselves, with results more useful than taking a suicidal or dissociative person’s guns and leaving ’em alone,
Those are things that people on the right *constantlty* reiterate, and have for decades. I’ve been an activist on this issue for almost 30 years, and our line *has not changed*.
And yet people on the left keep repeating “if only the right had any alternatives”.
All due respect, it’s not true, and it’s getting old.
LIBRELLE: (Mock sleeping, Librelle makes an elaborate show of waking up). Like I said, no alternatives.
BERG: Exactly.
And SCENE