In Massachusetts, the legislature will consider an anti-gun bill that shouldn’t survive under Heller and Bruen standards. Politicians across the Democrat party, from Joe Biden to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., want to gut the Second Amendment, claiming that doing so will save lives. However, another brutal knife attack in China reminds us that it’s not weapons that kill; it’s the people who make the choice to wield the weapons who do the killing.

Gun Owners of America has a warning:

The anti-gun Democrats in the Massachusetts Legislature have just introduced and begun fast tracking THE WORST anti-Second Amendment omnibus bill in the whole nation!

Their bill, HD 4420, would ban more firearms than any other state in the entire country. This bill is 140 pages of the worst gun control proposals ever introduced – making legally owning a firearm nearly impossible in Massachusetts.

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The omnibus gun control bill:

• Redefines “Assault-style firearm” to be more extensive and bans ALMOST ALL semi-automatic firearms from civilian ownership.
• Redefines “firearm” into a broader term that includes even stun guns.
• Mandates “safe storage” procedures, locking up guns against your will.
• Mandates REGISTRATION of all guns and feeding devices.
• Confusing language for new MA residents and on the serialization of guns.
• Mandates reporting any parts modifications to firearms.
• Mandates reporting an itemized list of parts when modifying or building a gun.
• Mandates serializing of feeding devices (magazines).
• Mandates that privately made guns need to be registered within 7 days.
• Bans anyone under 21 from acquiring or carrying semi-automatic rifles or shotguns.
• Forces new requirements for firearms retailers.
• Forces new training mandates for law-abiding gun owners.
• Adds additional prohibited areas where even licensed individuals cannot defend themselves with a firearm.
• AND DOES SO MUCH MORE.

To justify this, Democrats always insist that getting rid of civilian guns will save children’s lives. But will it really? I doubt it.

First, while everyone wants to live in a safe community, it’s not our fellow citizens who should worry us most, even if we live in a violent community. When push comes to shove, no one deals out death like a government that turns on its own people.

Second, up until the mid-20th century or so, arms were freely available in America, yet the shootings that characterize modern America were less frequent. This 1941 photo came with the notation that the “‘Gun counter’ was the busiest place in the Sears Roebuck Store in Syracuse, New York.”

Public domain image.

Third, a knife in the hands of a person determined to use it is almost impossible to defend against because it is a close-quarters crime. A gun might miss, but a knife seldom does, especially when children are involved. This is becoming a problem in gun-controlled China:

Six people, including children, died in a stabbing attack Monday at a kindergarten in southern China, police said, as knife attacks continue at schools in the gun-free country.

[snip]

China, which has strict gun laws, has experienced multiple recent kindergarten stabbings.

Three people died and six others were wounded in an August 2022 kindergarten stabbing in Jiangxi.

Two children died and 16 more were wounded in a stabbing attack at a Guangxi kindergarten in 2021.

A school guard allegedly stabbed 39 people in 2020.

If you go through the Wikipedia list of “worst school massacres,” a very depressing read, you’ll see that it’s the armies—government-sanctioned gun wielders—that are the worst killers. After that, you start getting to religious fanaticism (usually Islamic). That’s followed by bombings, and only then do you get to civilian attacks with guns—and even those aren’t primarily in America. Instead, many are in heavily gun-controlled countries such as Russia, India, Scotland (which had gun control even before Dunblane), Germany, Canada…

There’s a lot of evil that lurks in the heart of men, and banning this or that weapon does not ban the evil. What leftists never want anyone to know is that, while tragic numbers of people in America die from guns, over half of those deaths are suicides. Gun control does not stop suicides. For example, South Korea has some of the world’s strictest gun control laws and one of the highest suicide rates. And in Canada, suicide through “helpful” government euthanasia is becoming normative.

Moreover, many of the “teen” shootings we hear about are either legal adults, although that fact is buried in medical studies that define adolescents to include 18- and 19-year-olds, or much older teens (16 or 17). Also, many school shootings are just gang crimes on school property.

Lastly, the left never wants you to know that guns in civilian hands are not only the great equalizer, but they are also the great defender. Compared to the roughly 40,000 annual gun deaths in America, guns are used defensively between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. And that doesn’t mean they simply prevent gun deaths. They also protect people from being stabbed, beaten, run over by cars, or otherwise put at mortal risk.

Massachusetts is on the wrong track. If it wants to stop gun violence, it needs to create a culture that values life. But that’s the one thing the pro-abortion, pro-child sterilization, pro-humans-are-parasites-because-of-climate-change lobby will never do. Instead, it wants only to concentrate ever more power in the government’s hands.