After any tragedy, there’s some degree of gun control that’s going to be talked about. There’s no way to avoid it at this point.

And if you believe gun control is the answer, why would you be quiet? Even if you accepted that the immediate aftermath wasn’t the time to talk politics, which literally none of them do when it comes to gun control, you’d still get to it sooner or later.

But we on this side of the debate aren’t receptive to it.

Why? 

Because of attitudes like this:

Many pro-life advocates are also advocates of the right to carry. Many gun control advocates, including myself, support responsible gun ownership for self-protection. This is as long as the firearms are stored safely. However, there is no need for anyone, especially a minor, to possess an AR-15 outside the military.

Being pro-life while also opposing background checks and other measures to protect children in schools highlights a clear inconsistency. Prioritizing access to firearms over access to abortion, or focusing on banning books rather than guns in schools is contradictory. There is a clear disconnect from the true meaning of being pro-life. Again, we see MAGA politicians attempting to push their personal agenda onto others–whether that be with the implementation of religious curriculum in public schools, forcing women to carry to term or banning books.

I find it so nice when someone else decides to tell other people what they should believe based on their other positions, often while failing to acknowledge why people have the positions they have.

I’m not getting into the pro-life discussion because that’s not what we do here, but let’s understand a couple of things that the author doesn’t seem to grok.

First, those who are gun rights advocates aren’t going to suddenly switch gears because of their pro-life position. Why? Because they don’t believe gun control works. Over and over again, people like the author–and yes, this is a student op-ed from the UGA student news site, but it’s a sentiment echoed elsewhere–keep saying they want some reasonable, common sense gun control and then try to attack you for being opposed to crime or mass shootings yet not supporting gun control

The latest attempt on Trump’s life involved a convicted felon who had a gun with a destroyed serial number. Absolutely no part of that was legal, even in Florida. Every gun control law on the books failed.

That’s what happens.

The author says she supports “responsible gun ownership for self-protection,” but I hate to break it to her, she doesn’t get a say in why I own guns in the first place. I can have them for self-defense, defense against tyranny, or just because I think they’re cool and I like to look at them.

So-called reasonable gun laws aren’t reasonable. They’re oppressive because, like the author, they take a constitutionally protected right and turn it into a privilege. In this case, she argues we have no need for an AR-15. Yet no one has a need for a social media account to talk politics. No one needs more than one newspaper in town that just happens to be owned by the government. No one needs more than one church per so many people in a given town.

Yet as has been said repeatedly, it’s the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs.

Trying to change the Second Amendment into simply protecting what guns you think we should need isn’t reasonable. As such, there are no reasonable gun control laws, and people like the author–a journalism major who clearly can be trusted to report on the gun debate fairly when she graduates –will just have to learn to deal with disappointment.