http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437043/print Congressional Democrats’ Sit-In: What a Pompous Exercise in Virtue-Signaling
To defeat ISIS, America will need bombs and bullets, not gun control.
By David French — June 23, 2016
Talking to gun-controlling Democrats after Orlando is a truly amusing exercise. On the one hand, they turn to the horror of Orlando and demand action. They demand a response, and that response is gun control. Point out that the very gun-control measures they now demand would not have prevented the massacre, and they immediately pivot — this isn’t about any one shooting, they say. It’s about the problem of gun violence generally.
Indeed, if a government was designing a rational policy to prevent jihadists from killing Americans, gun control would be at the bottom of the list. As I’ve noted before, less than 3 percent of Americans who’ve died to jihadist violence on American shores have died to gun violence. And when jihadists do use guns, they tend to violate multiple laws to do so — often including laws and regulations that ban weapons from their target locations. Laws intended to bring safety made Americans more vulnerable instead.
We actually have a model of policies that kept Americans safe. Between 9/11 and President Obama’s first term, three Americans died here at home to jihadist violence. Relentless offensive military action combined with heightened security here at home deprived the jihadists of safe havens and denied them freedom of action. By the end of the Surge, even the mighty terrorist force called al-Qaeda in Iraq (soon to be renamed ISIS) was reduced to a few hundred demoralized terrorists scattered across Iraq, hiding from American and Iraqi special forces.
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