John Lott’s newest piece at Fox News starts this way:
Americans desperately want something done about mass public shootings. Hillary Clinton took a page from President Obama’s playbook Monday, vowing that as president she will bypass Congress and use executive action to change how guns can be purchased.
She is angry that Republicans “refuse to do anything” about mass shootings.
But that isn’t accurate. Clinton isn’t the only one to speak out boldly on this topic. On Saturday, Donald Trump said: “And by the way, it was a gun-free zone. … I’ll tell you, if you had a couple of the teachers or someone with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off.” Others such as Sen. Marco Rubio have made a similar point.”
The Republican push has at least the virtue of potentially stopping these crimes. The Umpqua Community College in Oregon shooting shows yet another case where guns were banned. With these killers explicitly picking places where victims are defenseless, at some point it should be impossible to ignore.
Clinton’s proposals wouldn’t have stopped these attacks. The “universal” background checks on private transfers may raise the cost of law-abiding citizens getting guns.
They wouldn’t have stopped any of the mass public shootings during Barack Obama’s presidency, including last Thursday’s in Oregon. At some point an enterprising reporter might ask Obama or Clinton to name just one of the cases they have used to push this law where the law would have stopped the attack.
Clinton is proposing three other measures:
1. Prohibiting domestic abusers and stalkers from buying and possessing guns. This sounds reasonable, but the change from existing law would allow people to have their guns taken from them without a court hearing. If people are committing crimes, they should be prosecuted for felonies or misdemeanors, but Clinton’s solution is to take away their guns even when they aren’t being prosecuted. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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