“A society that loses its belief in the importance of manliness qua manliness will necessarily fail to appreciate the virtue of a home- and hearth-protecting paterfamilias. There is a direct, unmistakable connection between the decline of the former and a lessened respect for the latter.”
The latest horrific mass shooting in America, this time roughly 30 miles from my Denver home, happened on Monday. Ten died, and the suspect — a Trump-hating Syrian immigrant, hardly the MAGA hat-clad white man that the media so clearly desired — has been charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder.
The Boulder, Colorado, shooting has, predictably, reopened America’s tiresome debate over gun policy. The suspect used an “AR-style” modern sporting rifle, thus assuring that Democrats and their media sycophants would rally anew for bans on that technically undefinable and cosmetically amorphous subclass of semiautomatic weapons colloquially referred to as “assault weapons.”
Never mind that the previous 10-year federal “assault weapons” ban, in place from 1994-2004, had no discernible effect whatsoever on gun crime. Never mind the wisdom embodied in the oft-repeated truism that, as a general rule and particularly in a country with more firearms in circulation than people, restrictive gun laws tend to solely disarm law-abiding citizens. Never mind the fact that Colorado already has a “red flag” law in place. Never mind the apparent fact that a more restrictive immigration policy pertaining to Middle Easterners would have been the more causally related public policy alteration. Nope — this time, President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats tell us, an “assault weapons” ban is obvious both as a remedial course correction and as a prophylactic crime-fighting tool.
By JOSH HAMMER
