German Lopez · Monday, November 06, 2017, 6:11 pm
He made the case for gun control while trying to argue against it.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Monday threw out the typical conservative talking points following the mass shooting at a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church, arguing not to politicize the shooting and making some claims about “a good guy with a gun.” But in the process, he made — accidentally, it seems — a good case for gun control.
“Evil is evil is evil,” Cruz said on CNN, “and will use the weaponry that is available.”
This, it turns out, is exactly the point made by gun control advocates. There are bad people in every society in the world. The US is not unique in this regard, and I don’t think Cruz is saying that America is uniquely evil.
What Americans seem to have, instead, is extra stock of — and way more access to — incredibly deadly weapons in the form of firearms. And this stock and access give “evil” people an easier way to commit mass atrocities — more so than they’d be able to if they only had access to, say, a baseball bat or a knife.
As Zack Beauchamp explained for Vox, a breakthrough analysis in 1999 by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins found that the US does not, contrary to the old conventional wisdom, have more crime in general than other Western industrial nations. Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.
Read more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/6/16615218/ted-cruz-gun-control-sutherland-springs-texas-shooting
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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