Gun Control: The Killer’s Best Friend

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is suspected of murdering four unarmed Marines in Chattanooga and wounding others. As I write this, we still don’t know how Abdulazeez obtained his gun or what his motivations were—though, we can take an educated guess on the latter. What we do know is that Abdulazeez shot his victims in a “gun-free zone,” which is a useful illustration of the absurdity of gun-control laws: we constrain conscientious Americans but offer free rein to killers. In this case, even our best trained warriors were helpless.

Surely, we are in for a new round of emotional pleas for more gun-control laws. And, helpfully, in this week’s Newsweek cover story by Kurt Eichenwald we already have a compendium of muddled and misleading anti-Second Amendment talking points that dominate the Left these days.

The confusion begins with headline, which is based on an absurd premise, and bleeds into the lead:

Let’s start with an undeniable truth: In the United States, the people have the right to keep and bear arms. And let’s then acknowledge that the childish interpretation of that constitutional amendment—that Americans have the right to whatever accessory they can put on, in or over a gun for the sole purpose of making it more deadly—is a dangerous falsehood.

First off, can you imagine a pro-Second Amendment writer being offered space in a major publication to begin a piece (I’m not sure if this is a column, article, or a feature at Newsweek) like so: