by Zachary Faria
Gun control groups can never be bothered to wait for details when a high-profile shooting happens. In responding to the Monterey Park shooting in California, it appears they have once again jumped the gun.
A 72-year-old man is suspected of killing 10 and wounding 10 more at a Lunar New Year celebration. While authorities are still trying to nail down a motivation for the crime, gun control groups jumped feet-first into their typical gun control talking points. Giffords declared, “The Monterey Park community deserved better.” David Hogg declared that this wouldn’t have happened “if we had leaders who did their job.” Newtown Action Alliance complained that Congress won’t pass an "assault weapons" ban.
Newtown’s complaint runs into another problem. Normally, an "assault weapons" ban would be meaningless because it focuses only on the cosmetic features of a semi-automatic rifle, and both other semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic handguns function in the same way. There is little functional difference between the scary-looking AR-15 groups such as Newtown are obsessed with and the 85% of privately owned semi-automatic handguns that are the most popular choice by people for self-defense.
In this case, an "assault weapons" ban would be even more meaningless. According to police, the gun recovered from the shooter was a “magazine-fed semi-automatic assault pistol.” In other words, it was a handgun. So unless California (and the rest of the country) is supposed to ban all handguns, there isn’t exactly a solution here that gun-grabbers would be happy with.