Let us remember the real victims

Pro-gun fanatic David Kopel was proud enough of the remarks he gave to the revolting convention currently happening in the same state where 21 people were senselessly and needlessly murdered as a direct consequence of policies they favor to want to publish them in the nation’s most famous conservative legal blog, whose editors in turn thought they were worthy of your attention:

But first, I’m going to address something that every one of us is thinking about: the heinous murders at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Some of the speakers you will hear later today recently received demands from the media—specifically, from Reuters and from Law360—asking if they would cancel their presentations here today because of the Uvalde murderer.

[…]

These people are among the many good and decent Americans who don’t believe that the proper response to the crimes of evildoers is to punish the innocent.

We can already see the problem here. It is not “punishment” to forbid civilians from owning military-grade firearms that pose a major danger to public safety while having no practical applications that rise above the level of hobbyism at all, any more than it’s “punishment” to prevent people from owning nuclear weapons or anthrax. “The innocent” is also doing rather too much work here.

But things are about to get much worse:

The haters declare guilt by perversely imagined association. They operate by the same rule as the medieval malefactors who thought they were entitled to kill Jews because, supposedly, Jews from 1,500 years before had been responsible for the killing of Jesus.

This was the same evil thinking as people who used the acts of foreign terrorists on September 11 as a pretext to attack and persecute patriotic and law-abiding American Muslims.

The same malice that used an illegal alien’s murder of Katie Steinle in San Francisco as a pretext to deny due process rights to peaceful persons who were accused of noncompliance with immigration laws.

Blood libels are used against sooner or later against almost every civil rights group. For many decades, our Association has been libeled precisely because we are the oldest and most effective civil rights association in America.

1)It’s not “guilt by association” to point out that the unusually lax gun laws in the United States happen to be correlated with grotesquely high levels of gun violence, and the case that this correlation constitutes a real causal relationship is somewhere between “strong” and “unanswerable.” Pointing out the consequences of the policies one is not merely pushing but projecting onto the Constitution is guilt by commission, not guilt by association.

The mass murder in Uvalde happened because people like Kopel have convinced lawmakers that buying a semiautomatic rifle designed to blow people’s bodies apart on a battlefield should be as easy for a disturbed 18-year-old to buy as a Slurpee. That’s a fact. The gun policies in the US are highly unusual among its peer nations and have been absolutely disastrous in practice. That’s also a fact.

2)”Blood libel,” just fuck off with this.

3)Comparing the NRA’s battle to ensure that as many people have unfettered access to weapons of nearly-instantaneous mass death as possible to civil rights groups fighting for equal citizenship is of course grotesque and immoral on its face. The fact that the very same legal movement responsible for the Dirty Harry Second Amendment has also rendered the most important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction into a total nullity and is also about to unleash a regime of terror, violence, and mass surveillance against American women. EYES ON THE PRIZE!

I really can’t even with this anymore.