Marcotte The Latest in Long Line of Leftists Pushing Gun Control After Tucson

I really try not to ready anything by Mandy Marcotte if I can help it. Her worldview is generally overshadowed by a pervading anger and her reasoning, such as it is, is warped and generally illogical. Unfortunately, I ran across her latest post in the U.K. Guardian, an appropriate location for an America-hating leftist, as she whined about America's refusal to conform to what she views as sensible gun control.

As usual, the rant quickly broke down into another shrill feminist rant against penises, which according to Marcotte, are now and have always been the bane of human existence. That particular complaint is of course never worth addressing with someone so steeped in illogic, but the following claim was worth destroying:

It's stunningly obvious that if gun laws were even slightly more restrictive – if background checks were more thorough, if semi-automatic weapons were more restricted, if you couldn't buy 30-round magazines – we would have more survivors of this attack today. Or we may have never had an attack at all.

Based upon past experience reading her half-literate rants, when Marcotte claims that something is "stunningly obvious," you can know for a fact that the next comment she utters will be completely incorrect. This is typically because her fixed and intolerant worldview simply makes her incapable of recognizing that much of what she "knows" is a fallacy, or because her powerful prejudices make it impossible for her to see any other side of an issue.

More extensive background checks on handguns, restrictions on semi-automatic firearms, and reduced capacity magazines would not guarantee few casualties when a lone gunman attacks. If anything, historical fact teach us just the opposite.

Gunmen who plot these attacks are unhinged mentally, but they are not stupid, and the tend to plan their attacks with the goal of generating as many fatalities as possible, as efficiently as they can.

Loughner probably chose the Glock 19 after considering a number of factors, including it's relatively compact size, controllability, ubiquity, and affordability. Glocks are among the most common handguns in America, and the Glock 19 one of the most popular variants of the most popular 9x19mm centerfire pistol caliber on the planet. The Glock also has factory-made 30+ round magazines that can be purchased as an aftermarket accessory. These facts are most likely what led Jared Loughner to select the weapon he did.

Marcotte makes the unwarranted assumption that if he did not have access to this kind of weapon, with this capacity magazine, that his rampage could not have been so bloody. This is an opinion based on her particular weakness of incredible ignorance compounded by insufferable arrogance.

Let us presume for the sake of argument that Marcotte and her fellow progressive/socialist/Marxist allies had her way, and laws were in place to keep Jared Loughner from purchasing a semi-automatic handgun or high-capacity magazines, and those laws functioned completely as designed. Let us presume that those laws kept Loughner from purchasing handguns of any kind. What would be the likely outcome?

Rather obviously, it would mean that Loughner would have had to find an alternative weapon with which to carry out his intended goal of assassinating Gabrielle Giffords and as many random bystanders as possible. Loughner's most natural next choice would either be a rifle or shotgun, or constructing a crude bomb.

If he filled the trunk of his aging muscle car with propane canisters and fashioned a crude detonator, he could have emulated the successes of your typical terrorist car-bomber, killing dozens, wounding perhaps hundreds.

But what if he went the "easier" route, and went with the sort of common long arms that even radicals such as Marcotte would be forced to allow, such as bolt-action deer rifles, and 12-gauge pump shotguns?

Well, then you would have a gunman with weapons with much greater range and far greater destructive power per bullet, which was the recipe for disaster that Charles Whitman brought to the bell tower of the University of Texas, Austin in 1963, where he killed 16 and wounded 32 in 1966.

Marcotte doesn't seem to quite grasp the law of unintended consequences, nor does she know enough about the subject matter she has pretended to master to know that when you take away less lethal, shorter range weapons such as pistols, your invariably push would be-shooters towards longer-range, more powerful weapons that keep any would be Samaritans at a much greater distance... or to devices with far more capacity for carnage, such as crude but brutally effective bombs.

Marcotte's British readers know the terror of those devices, with the Tube Bombings killing 52 and wounding roughly 700.

Would-be elites such as Marcotte love to delude themselves into thinking that they are intelligent enough to control their fellow man.

Predictably, they have never been right.