Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has become a rare voice of reason on gun control after a March 7 school shooting in Des Moines.
Democrat legislators and gun safety advocates immediately started using the tragedy to justify tightening Iowa’s gun control laws in response to the shooting. It is important to note that according to official reporting, the firearms used in the shooting were not accessed legally.
Amazingly, Gov. Reynolds responded with some common sense, reportedly saying: “I think the tragedy is our system — our educational system — is letting these kids down. They should have been in school. We should be figuring out resources to help them stay there and to help them get an education and a life where they can take care of themselves and their families.”
This criticism of the education system is the cold hard truth, as much as it’s hard to hear for gun control advocates.
The anti-gun lobby would have you believe that passing more and more strict gun control laws will somehow decrease gun crime. The issue with this theory is that criminals do not follow laws. So, passing more and more gun control only hurts law-abiding citizens. Cities like Chicago and Baltimore serve as examples of these failed gun control policies, with murder rates that rank them among some of the most violent cities in the world up there with Rio and Caracas.
Also, with the massive amount of new gun owners throughout 2020 & 2021, there has been a shift in opinion on gun control. Many Americans now support the enforcement of current laws instead of creating new gun control.
Gov. Reynolds brings up the thing that so many anti-gun politicians hate to hear. The problem isn’t the firearm. It’s an education system that fails those in it. Of course, fixing our broken education system here in the United States would take actual work with real solutions, and we know for a fact that the anti-gun lobby isn’t after solutions.
In fact, the anti-gun lobby only seeks to disarm law-abiding citizens, to create new, never-ending problems with firearms until the United States resembles other restrictive, repressive states like Australia or England.
To hear a Governor speak out on one of the real causes of gun violence is exceptionally refreshing. The anti-gun local Iowa politicians didn’t think so, though. Iowa Democrats immediately began to criticize the governor’s response, saying Gov. Reynolds was “blaming the educational system for a tragedy.”
Source: London School of Economics
But was she? Many studies done over the years indicate that poor education leads to crime and violence. Democrats themselves cite the same studies when lobbying for public school funding! Why are these same points discredited in the context of gun control? Could it be that there are ulterior motives at work here?
Hopefully, other governors will follow in Gov. Reynolds example and bring awareness to the fact that gun violence is a highly complex issue.
If we as a society collectively stopped looking at the firearm as the problem and looked at the root causes of violence, we may find that there are solutions to the issues at hand. In no other instance do we blame and regulate the tool of violence instead of punishing the person who committed the crime. Drunk driving is often cited as an example of this hypocrisy, as we do not blame the car for drunk driving; we blame the driver.
