According to Firearm Chronicles
Our friends in the anti-gun media know an opportunity when they see one. While the murder of George Floyd didn’t involve a firearm in any way, shape or form, the Washington Post’s Robert Gebelhoff has engaged in a bit of pretzel-like logical contortion in order to argue that you can’t expect to reform the nation’s police forces without further restricting the gun rights of all American citizens.
Reading his op-ed, you know what you’re in for when when he quickly whips out an old favorite of the civilian disarmament industry, claiming that America is in the midst of an “epidemic of gun violence.” We could fully fisk this load of equine fecal matter, but we’ve done it dozens of times. The inconvenient fact that Gebelhoff refuses to acknowledge is that America’s has been experiencing historically low violent crime rates at a time when the number of civilian-owned guns has never been higher.
If you really want to get bad cops off the streets and make all of them think first before they act, there are two surefire changes that need to be made. First, eliminate police unions that protect the jobs of bad cops like Chauvin. He’d been involved in two prior shootings, was the subject of 20 complaints and received two letters of reprimand in his 19 years on the job. It’s difficult if not impossible to fire problem cops…until something like George Floyd happens.
The second remedy for bad policing is the elimination of qualified immunity. That’s the judiciary-created doctrine that protects government employees from being personally liable for constitutional violations. Violations like the use of excessive force. If police officers — or their civilian superiors in the mayor’s office — were held personally liable for infringing on individuals’ civil rights, there would be a lot less of that kind of conduct.
Somehow, however, Mr. Gebelhoff didn’t mention those solutions. Why? Did they just not occur to him? Some might say it’s because they violate two dearly held features of government in this country that are jealously defended by liberals; Democrat vote-generating labor organizations combined with a lack of individual accountability. But we couldn’t possibly comment.
In any case, Gebelhoff’s fatuous prescriptions for somehow improving police officer conduct by limiting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans are irrational, incoherent and would be wholly ineffective. In other words, they’re exactly what we’ve come to expect from a Washington Post columnist opining on the subject of gun rights.