Flip the Script On Guns

Published originally in The Mallard

This column was published in the U.K. magazine The Mallard when Raheem Kassam guest edited this summer.

Every time there is a mass shooting in America, Leftists take to every media platform available and demand immediate gun control measures. If the American Right so much as suggests a defense of our right to bear arms, we are lambasted. So the general response is to condemn Democrats for “politicizing” a tragedy and wait to defend the Second Amendment once the news cycle shifts. The reality is that Democrats have something correct in these situations, but it is not the need for gun control.

Humans are rational animals, and we naturally seek to know why. In the face of tragedy, we ask two questions. First, we ask, why, and then we wonder, how can we prevent such a tragedy from happening again. When Leftists immediately advocate for gun control after a mass shooting, they are satisfying a very rational public desire—to identify a “why” and to fix the problem. In short, the Left has it right when it immediately seeks to pinpoint a cause and to suggest a solution. But it performs a sleight of hand by fingering guns as the root of our woes, and too many busy Americans do not question the Left’s logic.  

If the Democrats want to talk about the “why” behind school shootings, by all means, let us discuss. Americans have enjoyed easy access to guns for the entirety of our history, yet this heinous evil plaguing our schools only began in the 1990s—why? What changed? What are we doing differently today—specifically with respect to children—that has caused an eruption of school shootings? We can lay the blame squarely on the social policies championed by the Left that have demolished the family in America.

First, the Left encourages a society focused on free, meaningless sex and champions outrageous promiscuity. This has disincentivized marriage and led to a rapid rise in the number of American children born outside of the safety of a marital union and the security of a stable home. Out-of-wedlock births started soaring in the 1970s, and according to the CDC, over 40% of children born in America today are born to unwed mothers.   

Next, the Left has championed feminism, which denigrates homemaking and motherhood, casting these critical societal roles as useless and even degrading. Feminism has encouraged women to subordinate their children’s needs to their careers, and the ensuing influx of women into the workforce has fundamentally shifted American families from one-income households to two-income households. Now, a majority of American women with children work, by either choice or necessity. But humans, unlike other animals, must be formed. If both parents spend the majority of their time working, who is forming our little humans today? It has fallen to the government, through the schools, to form our young.

The Left is dominant in the schools, where its policies prevail in all levels of education. The Left has stripped God from the classrooms, told children they should feel liberated from archaic rules of morality, assured children they can declare their own individual truths, and encouraged them to think with their feelings rather than exercise emotional discipline or good judgment. With an endless barrage of critical race theory, the Left has instilled in our children either a deep self-loathing as whites or deep resentment as some minority. Now the Left is assaulting children with gender ideologies that have our young people confused and questioning their sexuality in record numbers.

Finally, the Left is emotionally traumatizing our young people with its high religion: climate change. Climate change presents to impressionable minds the horrid lie that the human race is a parasitic growth on a pristine planet and predicts an alarming future if society cannot achieve impossible political goals within a set timeframe. Depression in our young people is through the roof.

If, in the midst of our wondering “why,” Americans paused to consider these policies, we would discover that the Left has created a godless and indeed mentally ill America. Now, as the more perturbed of this sick society lash out and commit atrocities, the Left’s solution is to infringe on yet more of our constitutional rights as Americans.

We need to stop shrinking from this debate. Gun control is neither the cause nor the solution.  We should be clear and bold: We will not give up our guns. We will not give up our guns for the simple reason we refuse to give up our liberty. The primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to defend the sacred sovereignty of the American people against a corrupt government. No one who is thoughtfully watching the rapid advance of totalitarianism around the western world—Canada’s abuse of the financial system to crackdown on the truckers; Australia’s draconian lockdowns; France’s merciless exclusion of the unvaccinated from public life; Germany’s punitive financial penalties to coerce vaccination; Romania’s segregation of the unvaccinated from the vaccinated—can doubt that an armed citizenry is a useful check against government abuse. The world is only going to become more dangerous as governments force green energy policies that are creating a global food crisis. Americans are watching, and we are keeping our guns. Instead, it is time for the American Right to address the root cause of gun violence.   

Leftist policies have created a sick and broken society. Instead of permitting the Left to further erode our constitutional system, it is time for the Right to demand policy changes of our own in the wake of these shootings.

We should be demanding policies that incentivize men and women to marry and create stable homes—policies that promote single-income families, so that one spouse has the freedom to stay home and form the children. We should clean up our schools, which have become little more than cesspools of Leftist indoctrination, and teach our children to love their country and respect themselves and others.  

The Left is right: something is very, very wrong. But it is the Left’s own leadership and policies that have placed us all in this bleak and painful place. Success in leadership earns trust and further opportunity to lead; catastrophic failure merits perfunctory firing. Having created these horrors, the Left does not now get to arbitrarily take our weapons, too. Instead, it is our turn to demand legislation that will repair our broken families and rebuild our wounded America.

Molly McCann Sanders is Of Counsel with the Binnall Law Group in Alexandria, Virginia. Her practice is focused on appeals and litigation concerning federal civil rights and the United States Constitution. Molly is also the host of the political podcast America’s Moment and has contributed to a variety of conservative news and opinion outlets. She lives with her husband in Dallas, Texas.  Twitter: @molmccann · Instagram: @mol.mccann.