Thoughts and prayers, y'all!
this kind of thing wouldn't happen:
While Florida has a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases, anyone without a felony record, domestic abuse conviction or a handful of other exceptions can walk into a gun store, wait a few minutes to clear a background check, and walk out with an AR-15-style rifle, magazines and ammunition.
Under federal law, you also must be 21 to buy a handgun from a firearms dealer. But 18-year-olds can buy semiautomatic rifles.
Precisely how Mr. Cruz came to possess the gun is not clear. But the authorities said the AR-15 rifle that Mr. Cruz used in the attack was purchased legally. “No laws were violated in the procurement of this weapon,” said Peter J. Forcelli, the special agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Miami.
I'm sure it's easier to buy an AR-15 than a handgun because we have such an easy time defining "handgun" (the name says it all, right?) while defining "assault rifle" is an epistemological puzzle which would baffle the greatest minds of history.
“These guns are much more deadly than traditional bolt-action rifles or traditional shotguns, but they are regulated the same way” in most of the country, said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel of the Giffords center.
See? Besides, you know, there's really nothing that can be done:
“I do think that in some circles, it isn’t fair or right to create this impression that somehow this attack happened yesterday because there is some law out there that we could have passed to prevent it,” [Sen. Marco] Rubio [Pangloss, R-FL] said toward the end of a lengthy speech in which he wavered between dismissing gun control efforts and advising against saying “there is nothing we can do.”
“If there was such a law that could have prevented yesterday, I think a lot of people would have supported it,” he said.
How can you argue with reasoning like that? If God hadn't meant us to die from guns, he'd have made us bulletproof, amirite?
“You read in the newspaper that they used a certain kind of gun and therefore let’s make it harder to get those kinds of guns,” Rubio said earlier in his remarks, referring to the AR-15 that police said Nikolas Cruz used Wednesday, and which is responsible for many of the deadliest shooting incidents in modern American history.
“I don’t have some sort of de facto religious objection to that, or some ideological commitment to that per se,” Rubio said. “There’s all kinds of guns that are outlawed and weaponry that’s outlawed and/or special category.”
“The problem is we did that once, and it didn’t work for a lot of reasons,” he continued. “One of them is there is already millions of these on the street. And those things, they last 100 years. And so you could pass a law that makes it hard to get this kind of gun in a new condition, but you’re going to struggle to keep it out of the hands of someone who’s decided that’s what they want to use, because there are so many of them out there already that would be grandfathered in.”
Or we could tax the hell outta ammunition. No, wait, that would work!
Rubio listed the ways gun restrictions would fail.
“You can do a background check,” he said. “The truth is in almost all these cases I cited, the individual either erroneously passed a background check or would have passed it or did.”
“Even if they couldn’t pass the background check, then they could buy them the way MS-13 does, and other gangs and other street elements do, from the black market.”
“Again, not because we shouldn’t have a background check. I’m just trying to be clear and honest here,” he said. “If someone has decided I’m going to commit this crime, they will find a way to get the gun to do it.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a law that makes it harder. It just means understand, to be honest, it isn’t going to stop this from happening. You could still pass the law, per se, but you’re still going to have these horrible attacks.”
It's like force majeure, ya know? Sure, every other country in the civilized world has managed to prevent this kind of thing, but this is America!
We just have to die with it. I mean, it's not like our kids can live with it.
Just spoke to Broward School Superintendent. Today is that terrible day you pray never comes.— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 14, 2018
I guess prayers are pretty useless then, huh?
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