Mediaite is a strongly Left-leaning news site.

They published this story on Sunday:

WATCH: NYT’s Charles Blow Calls Out Jake Tapper’s ‘Horrible Question’ About Gun Violence

(Video from IJR)

New York Times columnist Charles Blow went off on what he called a “horrible question” that CNN’s Jake Tapper asked of Senator Cory Booker this week about the gun massacre in Virginia Beach, a question that is frequently asked in the wake of such tragedies.

On this week’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher noted that “Cory Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him, a couple of times, what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach, and Cory Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer that question.”

“Can I just say this? Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question,” Blow said. “That is a horrible question.”

“Because what we’re doing is picking out one incident out of 30,000 deaths per year and saying ‘How could you solve this one thing?’” Blow continued. “That is not the objective of gun control. The objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed. And once you reframe it that way, maybe the proposal I have today will not solve that problem, but it cuts into this massive number of people that we are losing to gun violence.”

It’s not a horrible question, especially when politicians use a particular mass shooting to justify their gun control proposal.

Politician: “This latest mass shooting is why we need UBC’s.”
Reporter: “But how would UBC’s have stopped that shooting?”
Blow: “That’s a horrible question.”

Blow pulls the mask off the idea that gun control proposed after a high profile shooting is intended to prevent other similar high profile shootings.  It is a diversion to push gun control for the sake of gun control because the politicians making these proposals are NEVER able to answer that question.

The question rankles because it smacks of pro-gun talking points, but as Blow points out, it also suffers from a serious logical flaw. It’s like asking a scientist what his cure for lung cancer would do to prevent pancreatic cancer.

No, it’s like your doctor saying:

“You have pancreatic cancer so we’re going to perform a double mastectomy.  I know it’s not going to fix this issue, but we have to do something.”

Never mind that from pro-gun advocates, this is a pure bad-faith argument that doesn’t come up when gun massacres feature details for which specific gun laws would have made a difference, such as gun storage laws that could have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre and many other preventable child deaths, or a ban on extended magazines that could have saved the life of 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green.

Adam Lanza’s mother kept her gun in a safe.  Adam killed his mother and stole the keys.  How would gun storage laws done any more to stop that shooting?  Those are intended to prevent accidental child access, not a 20-year-old from stealing the keys.

Faced with examples like these, they revert to some other talking point, often by simply arguing that people will ignore these laws, so why have them? It doesn’t matter how much data you throw at these talking points, there will always be another one to take their place.

And that is not pro-gun-control people from arguing in bad faith?

A headline from last weekend:

Chicago experiences most violent weekend of 2019: 52 shot, 10 killed

Chicago’s violence also disproportionately affects several swaths of low-income black and Latino neighborhoods on the West and South sides.

On Monday, Johnson criticized gun laws and court policies that he says turn the county jail into a revolving door for gun offenders.

“Until we stop giving them (gun offenders) the sense that they can do this with impunity, then we are going to continue to have these press conferences,” he said.

Chicago gun crime is overwhelmingly gang and drug related.  So if the purpose of gun control is to reduce crime, that how with all the gun control that Illinois has on the books, is Chicago still awash in drug dealer blood?

It is not a “horrible question” to ask how a policy will fix what advocates say it will fix.

But even if you grant the flawed premise of the question, asked in good faith by a journalist testing gun policy arguments, there is a better answer than attacking the question. When you attack the question, you are signaling that you don’t have a good answer, and there is a good answer to this question, every time.

Translation: “stop calling us out on our bullshit, you’re supposed to be on our side.”

For example, the Virginia Beach shooter used extended magazines, which allowed him to fire many more rounds without reloading. Without those, some of the 12 deaths might have been avoided. And based on the pure hypothetical of the question being posed, there’s no way to know if the shooter would have engaged in this massacre at all without that advantage in firepower.

That’s a hypothetical load of shit.  The advantage of firepower wasn’t that he had an additional 4 to 8 rounds (he carried a two 45 ACP pistols, I don’t know which ones but the average high capacity 45 holds 12-14 rounds) more than he would have with 10 rounds mags. The advantage of firepower he had was walking into a gun free zone where nobody else was armed.

Mediaite seriously thinks a guy who supposedly snapped would have had the thought “I’d kill all those mother fuckers if I only had more than 10 rounds in each gun.”  No.

In fact, Booker could have argued that any number of his policies might have dissuaded the shooter from carrying out this act. A federal firearms registry might have made him think twice, a more stringent background check might have raised a red flag, a waiting period might have allowed him to cool off, and if he had taken steps to avoid the stricter laws, those laws might have caused him to be intercepted.

The guy was killed by cops, what would a registry have done?  Most of those shooters do this knowing they won’t be taken alive.  The guy bought his guns one and three years before the shooting.  His cooling off didn’t need to happen before he bought the gun.

Every proposal fails to prevent that shooting, and many more like that.

When these people argue that the question “how will your policy work” shouldn’t be asked, and instead turn to inane hypotheticals, it shows that they don’t really care about solving problems, they just want gun control for the sake of control.

To his credit, Jake Tapper defended himself on Twitter.

Watch the longer video clip of this from Bretibart.

Clearly, the Dem Rep from California hates gun owners.  She wants gun control because she wants to control the people on the other side of the aisle she doesn’t like.  I have the feeling Blow, because of his politics, feels the same way.

But you can’t get people to vote for you by saying “I don’t like you and I want to take your guns away.”  Bill Maher, to his credit, said that.

So they have to frame their gun control push by saying it will prevent crime, but when asked how they fail.

So now the argument is it’s wrong to even ask how the policy will work.

It’s not about stopping crime.  It’s about stopping law-abiding gun culture.

They keep proving that more and more.