New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has been vicious in her contempt for people’s Second Amendment rights since taking over the office of governor after the previous gun-grabber-in-chief of New York left office under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations.

If we thought gun owners in the state would get a reprieve, we were wrong.

Recently, she–a member of her staff, most likely–penned an op-ed titled, “Kathy Hochul: How many more dead children will it take to ban the AR-15?”

In America today, our babies are more likely to be shot than to die in a car accident. They’re more likely to be murdered with a gun than to die from disease. They’re more likely to be massacred by a weapon of war than to die from starvation.

No, they’re not. The studies that supposedly showed this actually omitted babies entirely, starting their study at kids age one and going up until their 20th birthday, which means a lot of 18- and 19-year-olds got counted in the statistics while actual babies being killed in car accidents were omitted.

And the “massacred by a weapon of war than die from starvation” thing is actually a good thing. It means we have enough food for everyone to eat and that we do a pretty good job of feeding even the poorest among our numbers. If you make it almost impossible to die from starvation unless you want to, then it’s not difficult for it to be more likely for you to die from literally anything else.

I’d wager kids are almost more like to die from a vending machine toppling over on them than from starvation. 

But, of course, Hochul continues.

Our nation faces daily carnage caused by AR-15s and other military grade firearms. The rate at which children are killed by guns doubled from 2013 to 2021, and yet our national policy is frozen in place while the Supreme Court debates 18th century muskets.

Rifles were a thing at the time, as were repeating arms, and Congress made no move to omit them from the Second Amendment, nor did they omit literal freaking artillery, which can kill a lot more people than an AR-15.

And that’s just the first two paragraphs. That’s a lot of stupid in just a few words, but Hochul isn’t done. Oh no, not by a long shot.

This is a shocking fact in the context of human history. We gasp in horror at images of child soldiers with machine guns overseas, and yet we repeatedly fail to take action when those same weapons are carried by children in our schools.

Guns like the AR-15 were outlawed nationwide until the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was allowed to expire 20 years ago by the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans. The AR-15 is now the common thread linking Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 and a political rally in a Pennsylvania field in 2024.

It’s the same type of weapon an 18-year-old white supremacist used to murder 10 people in a Tops supermarket in my hometown of Buffalo because of the color of their skin. And just days ago, an AR-15 enabled a 14-year-old — a child — to kill four of his classmates and teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia.

There’s a lot more stupid here, but I’ll start by pointing out that there were AR-15s aplenty during the 1994 assault weapon ban, which only banned guns if they had a handful of particular features. Remove some of those and your rifle was good to go. Since they included idiotic things like bayonet lugs and barrel shrouds, it didn’t ban all that much. Part of the reason the ban was allowed to sunset was because it was stupid.

But then Hochul pulls the old trick of “the common thread” as if it’s meaningful since she literally only chose shootings where that is the common thread.

She neglects to mention the Virginia Tech massacre where a loser used a couple of handguns, or Columbine which took place during the assault weapon ban period. She leaves out the Oxford shooting where the twerp had a handgun.

See, what Hochul is doing here is pretending that the AR-15 is the problem, but there’s one common thread to not just every mass shooting but every mass murder as a whole. That common thread isn’t a gun–some mass murderers don’t use one. It’s people.

In every case, someone wanted to kill a bunch of people and did so with whatever they could manage.

Hochul and so many others think that if we just ban the AR-15 and similar weapons, then all would be right with the world, but so long as there are people who want to murder others, we’re going to have an issue. Remove the guns and, at best, they’ll just find another way to murder people, but just removing one type of gun means they’ll switch to a different type of gun.

That’s because you’re still not addressing the underlying issues. Politicians have no interest in that because it doesn’t make headlines.