On Tuesday, President Barack Obama and others traveled to a memorial in Dallas to honor the five police officers slain by a lone wolf attacker during a protest last Thursday. Predictably, the day before, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest wasted no time in turning what should have been a somber event into a platform for the White House’s pet agenda.
According to Earnest, Obama is “intensely frustrated” that his gun-control schemes have gone nowhere, saying innocent people are dying because Republicans rejected Obama’s “common-sense” restrictions, including a so-called “assault-weapons ban.” Earnest then called NRA’s views “so unreasonable, and so illogical,” and claimed the Dallas incident disproved the idea that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.
But how much of this holds water? Would an “assault-weapons” ban have stopped a criminal whose rifle wouldn’t have been illegal under the Clinton-era ban? Would even a total ban on guns have stopped the carnage of an individual so intent on destruction that he was also making bombs? How could one of the armed “good guys” have stopped the killer—a man with advanced military training and firsthand combat experience—when even the police couldn’t tell where the bullets were coming from? In truth, none of Earnest’s talking points sound like “common sense.”
