This is the part I hate, not as much as learning of the shooting itself obviously, but more than any other aspect of the aftermath of such things.
Yesterday we implored you to pray, and I'll repeat that again now. That's the far more worthy endeavor for all of us at a time like this, or any other time for that matter.
But you knew it would happen. It took less than a day for the politics to start, and it's always the same. It's the left insisting that the latest gun violence removes all doubt - not that they ever had any - that we must have gun control immediately . . . while the right disputes the left's arguments and skewers them for politicizing the incident in the first place.
Wading into it makes me feel like I need a shower, but it's sort of like the whole business or "racist cops abusing black people." If you let a false notion go unchallenged, you know what happens.
The media's favorite character in a story like this is the one who used to disagree with them, but now, chastened by events, can't wait to tell you how wrong he was and how right the media and the left (but I repeat myself) were all along. And they've found their man in one Caleb Keeter. Who's that? I wanted to know the same thing. He plays guitar in the Josh Abbott Band. Who are they? I wanted to know the same thing. I know about as much about country music as most of you probably know about quantum physics, so these names don't ring a bell with me. And I suspect that before today, most people at the New York Times had never heard of Caleb Keeter either.
But he's their favorite person in the world at the moment:
Country music artists and other performers expressed words of sympathy as well as frustration over gun violence on Monday as they mourned the mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert. One guitarist who played there said that the killings had changed his views on gun laws.
Some of these comments were politically striking, given that country music — which is widely popular across the nation — has a vocal fan base among gun owners. In 2010, the National Rifle Association started NRA Country to show “a softer side” of its organization. Its artist partners include some of the genre’s biggest stars, including Trace Adkins, Florida Georgia Line, Tyler Farr and Thomas Rhett.
The performer whose views had shifted — Caleb Keeter of the Josh Abbott Band, which was part of the weekend lineup in Las Vegas — said on Twitter on Monday that he had been “a proponent of the Second Amendment my entire life.”
He added, “Until the events of last night.”
Mr. Keeter, a guitarist, said that members of the band legally had firearms on the bus, but refrained from using them for fear the police would mistakenly think they were part of the attack.
“We need gun control RIGHT. NOW.” Mr. Keeter wrote. “My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.”
I certainly do not begrudge Mr. Keeter the right to change his mind if that's what he wants to do, although I continue to disagree with him. I'm more interested in how stuff like this gets treated by the agenda-driven leftist media.
Someone in Keeter's position will be assigned absolute moral authority on the issue because of what he went through in Vegas. You still oppose gun control? Oh yeah? Go through a shooting rampage and then come back and tell me that!
The many people who went through the same rampage and did not have their minds changed will presumably not be assigned the same absolute moral authority, for reasons I suppose are obvious. But authority is not what makes an idea good. It's the quality of the idea itself. So let's examine Keeter's full statement explaining his change of mind:
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Media pretty excited that Vegas has turned one country music guitarist against the Second Amendment
With all due respect to Caleb Keeter and the trauma he experienced on Sunday night, this is not an argument. This is an emotional reaction - a very understandable one, to be sure - that says, dammit, this is so terrible that I just want it to stop.
As do we all. But those of us who oppose gun control don't do so - as so many liberals seem to think - because we're "OK with gun violence." We oppose it because we know there is zero chance it solves the problem and a very large chance it makes it harder to stop these people in particular situations.
Keeter is probably correct that the guns he and the others had on hand would have been useless here, mainly because the shooter was so far away. But when we're talking about someone in a mall or a school or a similar setting, we've seen plenty of situations in which a person carrying legally was able to stop or at least cut short the attack before it got much worse. The guns were useless because of circumstnaces in Vegas. That's no reason to deny others the right to use them when the circumstances are different and they actually could help.
But there's an even more glaring reason Keeter is wrong here: If the shooter was using the high-powered automatic rifles it appears he was using, it was already illegal for him to possess these guns. Such weapons have been banned for more than 30 years, and it's nearly impossible to get one legally. This is the point that opponents of gun control have been making throughout this entire debate. When something terrible happens, there's an impulse for the government to do something, which usually means to ban something, because when bans are put in place we feel like action has been taken.
But we know from history and experience that these bans don't solve the problem. It's like claiming your community can't possibly have any crime because you passed an ordinance against it. Bans don't actually stop people from doing things they're determined to do. They just establish the illegality of the action when they do it. That will deter some people, but it's not going to deter a guy like this. He murdered almost 60 people. He's not going to sweat a firearm-possession charge, even if he hadn't killed himself.
Every time something like this happens, the left proclaims, "Enough is enough!" The implication is that those who oppose gun control think the level of gun violence we've had to date is acceptable, and that surely now this latest incident will prove otherwise.
That's never been the argument against gun control. The argument is that you're placing false hope in a legal or political action when the real problem is the evil in the hearts of men, who are willing to use whatever they can get their hands on to commit the evil they're contemplating - and will find ways around your ban, since they fear no sanction anyway.
And here's the news you really don't want: There is no way to be completely safe in a world that chooses to co-exist with evil. There is no way to "make sure this never happens again," which is what everyone demands every time this happens. It will happen again, because people will continue to think evil thoughts and do evil things. And there is no absolutely certain way to stop them. You can talk about metal detectors in hotels and all that, and maybe it will happen, but a man who wants to find his way to a high perch with powerful weapons will do it. Maybe you'll stop some. You won't stop them all. No matter what law you pass.
Stephen Paddock broke every gun law in the book when he hauled his weapon stash up to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. That's what evil people do. The solution is not to pass more ineffective laws on top of the ones that already failed. It's to bring the love of God against the darkness that's penetrated the nation's collective soul.
And no, that's not a job for politicians. People need to get over the idea that government can or should even try to solve everything.
So then whose job is it? Whoever is willing to take the job.
