Restrictive Laws Are No Barrier to the Likes of Elliot Rodger

Just
hours after Elliot Rodger
stabbed and shot six people in Isla Vista, California, before,
apparently, belatedly ending his own wretched existence on this
Earth, an as-yet unidentified gunman
murdered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The usual
round of pundits immediately started pointing fingers at their
favorite political targets in the United States as the
real culprits. Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker
found an opening to blame gun owners.

Wrote
Gopnik:

Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians
and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer in question was in the
grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was also capable
of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues to
the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez
family and ruined their lives.

I’m not sure why the means of killing half of the victims is
“peripheral” if the means of killing the other half is a core
concern. And let it be noted that misogyny
has also been called out as the real culprit by other pundits
with other axes to grind.

But Gopnik isn’t alone. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also
wants to “end
the insanity” and tighten gun restrictions in the United States
until they’re…What? As restrictive as those in Belgium? Maybe he
just wants national laws as tight as those in Connecticut, where
new restrictions
promptly met mass defiance and turned tens of thousands of
residents into instant felons.

But back to Belgium. That country has rather tighter
laws than those in most of the United States, including
licensing and registration. Ammunition purchases are restricted
along with gun ownership. Backgrounds are checked, including for
mental health issues. Owners are required to justify their purchase
of guns with a rationale, whether it’s hunting, collecting, or the
like.

That this hasn’t prevented amok murders like Saturday’s shooting
at the Jewish Museum of Belgium is obvious. Nor did such laws
prevent the 2011
mass murder in Liege, which took the lives of five people.

Laws aren’t magical barriers against bad things. Really, nobody
ever thought that Belgium’s restrictive laws had disarmed the
country. In 2003, the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimated that
the country’s 11 million people had stashed
2 million illegal firearms to accompany the legally registered
458,000 in civilian hands.

The residents of Belgium and Connecticut would seem to have
something in common.

Laws may define the limits of legally accepted behavior and the
penalties for those who are caught crossing those limits, but they
don’t prevent those limits from being crossed.

And, sadly, researchers have yet to find
any effective means of preventing spree killings. The
Congressional
Research Service is among the bodies that concluded that
popular public health and law enforcement efforts show no promise
in preventing such crimes.

That’s not reassuring news to those of us who want to see an end
to such killings, and to such killers. (Although it’s encouraging
that such crimes
do not seem to be on the rise.) But if nothing else, it’s
obvious that the restrictive laws peddled as instant solutions
don’t just threaten liberty, they’ve failed to live up to their
advertising where they’ve already been tried.