I can't tell you how sick I am of so-called survivors pretending that their proximity to something horrible happening somehow gives them some kind of expertise on the topic of gun policy.
I might cut someone some slack who was in the midst of dead bodies all around them from a horrific mass murder, but most "survivors" aren't even that, but they'll try and leverage the status to score political points on guns.
For example, we have an op-ed writer for the Salt Lake Tribute who proudly proclaims he survived a school shooting.
Which he all but discredits in the first paragraph.
I am a survivor of the Arapahoe High School shooting in Centennial, Colorado, which took the life of an innocent student and the shooter. I wouldn’t expect you to have heard of it. More than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at schools in the United States since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.
We, the victims of gun violence in American schools, have become so innumerable that we have been paradoxically forgotten.
You get forgotten because you didn't survive anything. You were in proximity to a murder-suicide, and probably not all that close, either. The killer shot a student point blank, fired a few shots at pretty much nothing, set fire to the library, then shot himself.
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I wish he'd reversed his order of operations, but I doubt the author was in any danger.
But my point, though, is that even if he had been, it doesn't make him an expert on gun policy. That becomes clear as his piece goes on.
There have been more school shootings since 2018 — 208 — than there were in the 20 years prior —205. In the decade since the Arapahoe shooting, I’ve had dozens of conversations on the topic. While school shootings are a multi-faceted issue, I’ve seen people disengage and provide excuses when reasonable gun control is proposed as part of the solution. In my experience, many people’s commitment to change wavers when firearms are implicated, despite firearms being the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.
Except that's not true.
The study that "data" comes from includes 18- and 19-year-old adults as "children" while omitting kids under the age of one. That skews the numbers significantly.
Moreover, it should be noted that people like the author may acknowledge these shootings are a "multi-faceted issue," but they always seem to have the same solution for literally anything. They want to control guns. As a result, a lot of us stop being willing to talk because we know it's a wasted trip.
Moreover, let's remember that even if school killers couldn't get a particular type of firearm, they'd use another. The shooting the author "survived" apparently involved a shotgun. The Virginia Tech massacre involved a couple of handguns.
This jackwagon does try to address this, but he forgets that while you can put a barrier in place, it doesn't mean someone won't make a different decision.
Of course, I'm not sure he does know that.
See, at no point does he demonstrate that he actually understands guns, criminals, or anything of the sort. He just parrots anti-gun talking points and pretends that violent crime is pretty simple. If you put a law in place, the criminals won't go around it. Because, you see, criminals are so law-abiding.
Anytime someone drops that they're a "survivor" of some kind of shooting, understand that they're doing that to get gravitas. They're trying to drop their credentials because people don't like attacking survivors.
But it's time we do just that, because dear Lord, some of these people are barely functional morons.
