Democrats: Stop Exploiting the Jacksonville Tragedy to Push for Gun Control | Opinion

What sickness of the human soul pushes one to be so blinded by racial hatred that you target and kill three innocent people because of the color of their skin?

That's the question Americans should be asking ourselves after the horrifying shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, where a white man who I won't name shot and killed three Black people in a crime authorities say was motivated by racial hatred.

But instead of posing that crucial question which would help us prevent such heinous crimes in the future, we've devolved into the same old partisan calls for gun control. "We must continue to do all we can to keep guns out of dangerous hands," White House Press Secretary Karinne Jean-Pierre said, immediately focusing on gun control.

In a similar vein, Vice President Kamala Harris put out a statement seizing on the tragedy to resurface her pre-existing gun control policy agenda, writing that the shooting was "carried out with a weapon of war that should never have been on the streets."

"These tragedies must stop," Harris concluded. "We must renew the ban on assault weapons. It is long overdue."

You get the idea. Many Democrats and progressives have focused on guns and gun control after the Jacksonville shooting. Yet this obsession entirely misses the point.

For one, the things they're actually proposing would've made no difference in this case. For example, banning "assault weapons"—an AR-15 was reportedly used in this shooting—isn't some novel idea. The federal government actually banned "assault weapons" from 1994 to 2004—and it didn't work.

Besides, the shooter in this case killed three people before ending his own life. That is an immeasurable human loss. But, and forgive me for being blunt, killing three people does not require an assault weapon. Some of the deadliest mass shootings in American history—shootings like Columbine—were actually carried out with handguns, and banning handguns isn't even on the table among mainstream Democrats and gun control proponents.

Frankly, you don't need a gun of any kind to kill three people. A deranged individual can kill 10 or even 19 people with a knife in a stabbing spree, as horrifying incidents in Canada and Japan, societies with strict gun control, have shown. Or, as we've seen in countless other senseless murders, trucks and cars can be turned into deadly weapons and used to kill as many as 86 people in a single attack.

So when you find yourself in a situation where a young man wakes up one day and decides to kill people because of their race, the absence of certain firearms—or even all firearms—wouldn't actually solve the problem or prevent tragedy.

"We have to stop people who have bad intentions," Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, who is Black, said. "The story is always about guns... people are bad. This guy is a bad guy. The problem is the individual."

The sheriff is exactly right.

A gun is simply a tool. People can use it to do great evil, as we've witnessed in this case. But they can also use it to do good, as it's estimated that guns are used in self-defense somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million times every year in America.

When Democrats tell the public (and themselves) that simply getting rid of certain guns could stop these kinds of atrocities from happening, they're either being woefully naive or deeply dishonest. Unfortunately, the desire among these deranged individuals to cause harm is utterly unaffected by the availability of a tool; they'd simply make use of another one to carry out their evil intentions.

But for many Democrats and progressives, it's easier to delude themselves into thinking there's a simple policy fix to this problem than to look into the darkest depths of evil—and truly reckon with how we cure this sickness of the human soul.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.