Vox Blames “Rural and Suburban White Guys” for School Shootings

Climate writer for Vox, David Roberts, doesn’t know much about climate science. He doesn’t know the 97% consensus was invented by an Australian cartoonist with no scientific or journalistic experience. He doesn’t know that throughout human and pre-human history- the climate has always changed. He certainly won’t tell you that his “journalistic” specialty was called Global Cooling in the 1970s.

With so little of substance to say about his specialty, it’s not surprising that he also thinks of himself as an expert on the topic of gun violence and the right to bear arms. Recently, he tweeted, “We are traumatizing an entire generation of school children so that rural & suburban white guys don’t have to give up their hobby.”

We could go on for pages about the latent racism in that comment. But it will do to cover his willful ignorance of the facts he fails to grasp.

His tweet featured a long commentary written by a child about how at every moment in school he or she fears a school shooting. The child describes constantly imagining a shooter entering a hallway or room and wonders, ‘What would I do, where would I go if it happened right now?’

Like all brow-beating liberals, Roberts is laboring under the belief that feelings are facts. He believes that a child’s impression of the world is accurate and valid no matter what. If a child feels a certain way, then someone is to blame. It is a line of thinking that fails to recognize the fact that children are children because they are underdeveloped and still learning.

Roberts whole nonsense about traumatized children can be easily debunked by just looking at history. 60 years ago, the media had school children living in constant fear of nuclear war. “Hide under your desk,” they told us while showing us films of whole cities being blown away. Nobody had any sympathy for children back then, you can be sure. But what’s more is that none of those children grew up to be so traumatized by the threat of nuclear war that they refused to leave their homes or participate in society.

Just like how the media dramatized the threat of nuclear war on school children, they do the same with school shootings. The threat of school shootings, while horrific and unacceptable, is nowhere nearly as prevalent as the media would have you believe. The media is guilty of sensationalizing mass shootings making them a sure fire way for sick people to become instantly famous and to have a major impact on the culture.

The mainstream media covers school shooters all wrong. They publish the name and face of the shooter and they create detailed narratives of the shootings. All of this makes copycat shootings much more likely to happen. Parkland mass shooter Nikolas Cruz told investigators he shot up his former his school because he wanted to be famous.

The media also blames the wrong people for mass shootings as schools. They blame lawful gun owners even though the vast majority of gun crimes are carried out with unregistered, illegally possessed guns. They blame hunting rifles, like the AR-15 even though handguns are used to kill more people than any other type of gun.

But that’s not all Roberts gets wrong. He calls gun ownership a hobby. Certainly, shooting guns recreationally can be a hobby. But firearms training and practice is not a hobby. Training and practice are necessary for anyone who wishes to know how to use a gun properly and effectively.

We could go on for pages about how hunting responsibly saves more wildland than any activist effort and is more humane than letting aging animals die at the hands of natural predators. Hunting for meat is also far more humane than factory meat farming.

Finally, the point that no soft-handed liberal millennial could ever understand is that the right to bear arms is the only right tyrants fear. People like Roberts will never comprehend that fact that history clearly shows that every time a government disarms its subjects, tyranny follows.

That is why we are the only nation with legal protection for the right to bear arms.

The wording of the second amendment reflects this. It says, that because that state must have a military- the citizens also have a right to be armed. Why? Because a state militia (read government military) can always be turned against the people.

As a soft and unserious man, David Roberts cannot understand the motivations of experienced and serious men. And his hobby, printing racist libel, is more dangerous than a closet full of AR-15s.