I wish the Oscars weren't so political these days, but that's on the actors and directors who seem to think their politics matter. That's especially true when they hand out awards for explicitly political pieces.
And, unsurprisingly, an anti-gun documentary not just won, but had the mother of a Uvalde victim speak during the acceptance. Unfortunately for everyone, she illustrated a fatal flaw in gun control thinking.
Mom of 9-year-old Jackie, who was killed in Uvalde during a school shooting, spoke at the Oscars after "All the Empty Rooms" won for best short doc.
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) March 16, 2026
She talked about how gun violence impacts kids in America and that Jackie is more than a headline.https://t.co/R14HEn36lh pic.twitter.com/h8M7LdBWcp
She finishes by saying that if everyone saw the empty bedrooms, the country would be different.
In other words, we don't support gun control because we don't feel badly enough about these children being murdered.
I'll get to my own take in a moment, but Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros had a response I want to share, first.
The mistake she and other parents of victims make is they assume the pro-2A side has no empathy, and if we could just understand the unimaginable grief mothers like her go through after losing their child to a school shooting, we would all agree and pass more gun control.… https://t.co/W5TgLjjdVf
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) March 16, 2026
That's just not correct. I have a child of my own, do you think I'm OK with the idea of an armed lunatic in her school? Of course not.
The disconnect is we reject your premise. Making good people helpless through disarmament does not equate to safety. Instead, we should meaningfully secure our schools and other truly sensitive places.
He's right. This isn't due to a lack of empathy.
Years ago, a dear friend I'd known since the 8th grade was murdered in the Cafe Racer shooting in Seattle. She was executed by a maniac who was pissed that he couldn't sit down for a cup of coffee anymore, though the cafe was willing to give him a cup to go. He lost it and murdered her and too many others.
I have empathy.
The problem is, as Moros notes, we simply don't accept their solutions as viable. That's because they're not viable.
Old Dominion University proved that all on its own. The only reason that wasn't a massacre, possibly on par with Virginia Tech or Uvalde, was because the killer tried to take on a class of warriors and lost. That's not the norm on any campus in America, much less at Old Dominion. We feel empathy for what she lost, and I simply can't put myself in the position of how much worse I'd have felt all those years ago if it had been my kid instead of my friend I was mourning. But recognizing that gun control doesn't work won't change because of some empty bedrooms.
Especially since most of the empty bedrooms in this country aren't the result of people who bought guns lawfully. They're the result of criminals who simply don't care about human life and who got their guns through illicit means. These are people who will always get guns somehow, and even when they can't for whatever reason, they're still a threat.
But our empathy also means we remember the stories of people who were defenseless when evil came at them.
Gun control advocates think that people like me oppose their measures because we don't know and can't imagine what it feels like.
They don't understand that we oppose them because we can feel those things.