Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger should probably be up for an Academy Award. She convinced more than enough people in the state of Virginia that she was a moderate and could be trusted to focus on affordability.
Since taking office, she’s rolled as far left as she could without popping up on the right, and she’s done nothing about affordability in the Old Dominion State. She has, for example, had lots of time to play games with gun control and redistricting a state after saying she had no such intentions.
To potentially buy a little time for that redistricting plan, she kicked the gun control can down the road by asking for some amendments. However, for some in the state, those amendments are much ado about nothing.
This week, lawmakers rejected those revisions, sending the original bill back to Spanberger’s desk, but Bouch said the governor’s revisions would not have made a difference.
“It’s a game. That was from the beginning,” he said. “They’re addressing these amendments, and they’re making us think that’s the real question we should be asking.”
He argued the focus on specific weapons ignores broader trends in gun deaths across Virginia.
“Deaths in Virginia by firearms, 59 percent are suicide, 39 percent are homicide,” Bouch said. “High-capacity mags and assault weapons don’t play a part in suicides.”
No, they do not, which is why “gun deaths” is such a meaningless statistic when you’re talking about policy. A single-shot .22 can be used by someone to take their own life, but it’s a terrible choice for anyone who wants to commit a homicide. Yet, if you use suicide numbers to justify restrictions, you can justify banning that single-shot quite easily.
And so-called assault weapons aren’t exactly viable for taking one’s own life, either. It’s kind of a terrible choice for that, which means that banning either will have, at best, a negligible impact on the gun death rate.
But that’s why they lump all of those statistics into one. It’s not so they can get a bead on what’s happening in any meaningful way. It’s so they can conflate all deaths by gunshot, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why, and justify what they wanted the whole time.
Plus, Spangberger is more than willing to play games with statistics.
Spanberger pointed to another part of the policy, limiting magazine capacity, saying past federal restrictions offer a roadmap for reducing harm.
“This goes back to historical data in the so-called assault weapons ban that existed from ’94 to 2004,” she said. “There is clear evidence that a move away from large-capacity magazines is vital to saving lives.”
If that’s so, then why did the homicide rate start dropping before that ban, then continue dropping well after the ban sunset? It takes a special kind of stupid to actually miss that trend if you look for yourself, but it’s pretty easy to sell that to people who won’t. It’s factually correct, after all, that the “gun death” rate dropped during that time, so fact-checkers aren’t even going to bother addressing it.
But, as I just said, the trend started before the ban, then continued well afterward.
Now, I’d like to believe that Spanberger is just parroting a talking point she heard, but I doubt it. She’s been around long enough to have had the truth pointed out to her. Besides, part of her backstory is her time with the CIA, right? Should she be looking for all the details rather than just taking someone’s word for it?
No, she knows she’s spouting BS. She’s just hoping that you won’t know she’s spouting BS.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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