The gun control fantasy of the left

Washington Examiner:
A tourist, lost in the Irish countryside, once asked a local farmer how to get to Dublin.

The grizzled old man's reply: "I wouldn't start from here, if I were you."

Irish pessimism aside, we recount this tale to make a point. One cannot set abstract goals without considering the real-world starting point from which they must be reached.

This is the problem for the many dreamers who, seeing Wednesday's on-air slaying of two journalists by a disgruntled colleague, look cross the Atlantic today. They ask aloud why America cannot enjoy the astoundingly low rates of gun violence that exist in Western European countries, where guns are less widely available.

They are wrong in more than one way — for example, those European rates are not directly comparable to American ones, and not quite as low as they think. But their most important error is their failure to consider the starting point from which they would have to reach the utopia they imagine.

There are nearly 300 million privately owned firearms in the United States today. This fact, all on its own — without considering any constitutional or political obstacles — means that the ship sailed on gun control long ago, never to return.

No gun control measure short of universal confiscation would do anything to curb shootings in this lifetime. And the prospect of rounding up 300 million guns from some 60 million households makes the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants seem like a simple matter of arranging a field trip.
...
The first response of liberals when there is a shooting is look for a way to punish the innocent who had noting to do with it.  That is what gun control is all about, since the criminals will not obey laws restricting the ownership of guns anyway.  Look at recent terror attacks in Europe and particularly in France where terrorist used weapons that would be even outlawed in the US if they fired AK-47 on full automatic.  Even the handguns used in the crime are normally banned in most European countries.

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