Feinstein Challenges Kavanaugh on Stance on Second Amendment w/ 'Hundreds of School Shootings' - That Never Occurred

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 6, 2018
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On Wednesday, September 5, Her Highness, former Chairwoman of the Senate “Intelligence” Committee Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) evidently decided she had spent enough time with her Chinese spy of a chauffer and sought a way to embarrass herself even more. So she attacked Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the topic of the right to keep and bear arms.

See, not only does “Di-Fi” exhibit utter contempt for other peoples’ inherent right to self-defense with a firearm, she was the prime sponsor of the patently unconstitutional and mistitled “assault weapons” ban that expired in 2004, so she was very upset by the fact that nominee Kavanaugh once expressed his valid point that the law was, in fact, unconstitutional.

After haranguing him on the issue and his response as to why he came to what she must have seen as  a horrific and stunning conclusion, the Senator kept herself away from a much needed afternoon siesta to ask him this obsequious and foundationally unsound query:

How do you reconcile what you've just said with the hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons that have taken place in recent history?

Feel free to scratch your head bloody in frustration at the utter opaqueness and lack of specificity in there, not to mention the falsehood of the numbers.

As Jacob Sollum points out for Reason:

First, there have been nothing like "hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons," whether you look at "recent history" or go back half a century. Second, the shootings are irrelevant to the question of whether banning so-called assault weapons is consistent with the Second Amendment.

A quick exploration of her numbers is worthwhile, since it’s reasonable to assume she was offering the unfounded statement for public consumption rather than to provide actual substance in the proceedings.

Sollum explains:

According to a database maintained by Mother Jones, there have been 101 "indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker" since 1982. A Washington Post tally published last October, based on the FBI's definition of mass murder, identified "154 shootings in which four or more people were killed" since 1966. Only a small share of these attacks—16 of 101 in the Mother Jones database—occurred at schools, including universities. Just six of those 16 school attacks involved "assault weapons," which account for about a quarter of the firearms used by mass shooters, most of which are handguns.

 

Perhaps she got her numbers from her chauffer? Sollum continues with even more excellent analysis:

Even if Feinstein had in mind a broader definition of school shooting, it is hard to see how she could get to 'hundreds' involving 'assault weapons.' By her own count, 385 people were killed with 'assault weapons' from 2004 through 2011 (which is about 0.5 percent of gun homicides during that period), and the vast majority of those murders did not occur in schools. If we assume that something like 16 percent of them did (in line with the Mother Jones numbers), that would be 60 or so murders involving 'assault weapons' at schools over eight years, and the number of separate incidents would be even lower. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Feinstein was just making sh*t up when she referred to 'hundreds of school shootings using assault weapons that have taken place in recent history.'

But, of course… how can anyone think that Dianne Feinstein would make things up?

Clearly, Dianne was trying to give people the misleading impression that without her unconstitutional “assault” rifle ban, America is descending into a septic world of violent attacks, especially at schools.

Of course, not only does she mislead with her numbers, she fails to mention a few other facts.

She didn’t bother to mention that gun control laws and law “enforcement” did not prevent many of the worst school shootings, such as the attack on students in Newtown Connecticut, and the attack on students in Parkland, Florida, and egregiously anti-rights gun restrictions didn’t stop a shooting a few months ago in her own neck of the woods near DC, Great Mills High School, in Maryland.

She didn’t mention that school shootings have declined since the 1990s.

She didn’t mention that the Centers for Disease Control hid a study showing that Americans not only use guns far more often for defensive than offensive purposes, but that they also use them to stop crime more often than police stop crimes per year.

She didn’t mention that violent crime actually increased in Australia after they imposed a “gun ban” and “buyback”, and that it didn’t go down again until ten years later, when guns started to get back into the hands of peace-loving people, often through black-market means.

She didn’t mention that prohibition doesn’t work.

She didn’t mention that the FBI’s own numbers show that when Americans got on gun-buying sprees, violent crime went down.

And, God forbid that Feinstein get out of her protective limo long enough to mention that any, ANY, law she or any other politician in the US want to pass to “ban” any firearm or ammunition, any waiting period, any requirement that people get a “background check” in order to exercise their preexisting right to acquire and use a firearm for self-defense is one-hundred percent BANNED by the Second Amendment.

These insufferable, brain-eating hearings would be a lot shorter if the politicians stopped trying to propagandize viewers and they stuck to their oaths to protect and defend the supposed rulebook imposed on us.

But that doesn’t serve Dianne’s purpose.

Which seems to be the acquisition of power over us, the serfs.

Make sure you wave as she is driven by in her chariot.

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