"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." —H.L. Mencken

The country is again in an uproar following the latest mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.  In response to the hysterical clamor in the media to "do something," politicians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties want (yet again!) more gun laws.  Republicans, including President Trump, are proposing a "red flag" confiscation law that would enable police to summarily seize an individual's guns based on hearsay.  Such a law would blatantly violate the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.  In practice, these laws would have no significant effect on actual shooters, but would ensnare people like Donald Montgomery, a retired police officer from Long Island who sought insomnia treatment — and was declared "mentally ill" and had his guns permanently seized under Andrew Cuomo's notorious "SAFE" Act.  Republicans should know better, but apparently, they don't.

Democrats are calling for a national ban on semi-automatic "assault weapons" and magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds.  If elected, there is no question that they will enact such a ban.  Some are even calling for a national confiscation, patterned on the confiscations in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

What is absolutely certain is that such a ban will have no impact whatsoever on mass shootings.  It is entirely possible to commit mass murder with weapons that do not fall under the label of "assault weapons," and a significant number of mass shooters have done so.  In 1949, World War II veteran Howard Unruh murdered 13 people with a German Luger pistol with an 8-round capacity.  In 1966, University of Texas shooter Charles Whitman employed a bolt-action Remington hunting rifle in his spree.  In 1993, Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson, motivated by anti-white hatred, murdered six people and wounded 19 on the Long Island Railway with a 9mm pistol.  In 2006, Korean immigrant Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech with a brace of pistols, a 9mm Glock and a .22 caliber Walther.  Two thousand nine Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan used a Fabrique Nationale pistol to kill thirteen and wound thirty victims.  Twenty thirteen Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis used a stolen 9mm pistol and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.  The Thousand Oaks, California killer murdered thirteen people with a .45 cal. pistol in 2018.

I could go on listing examples of mass shootings committed without so-called "assault weapons," but the facts are easily available to anyone with the intellectual honesty to research them.  Unfortunately, almost no one in the media or the Democratic Party has such honesty.  The demonization of "assault weapons" is merely a pretext to get gaggles of ignorant, squealing soccer moms who don't know a muzzle from a buttplate to demand what the Democrats have always wanted: total gun control.

Indeed, if you look at the history of gun control, there is almost no firearm that Democrats haven't wanted to ban.  Their modus operandi has always been to employ demagogic politics after sensational killings to advance the agenda of complete disarmament.

During the 1930s, shootings with machine guns were rare, but saturation press coverage led to the 1934 National Firearms Act, which effectively banned them.  However, gangster Clyde Barrow, who helped inspire the legislation by committing numerous robberies and murders with machine guns, didn't purchase his Browning Automatic Rifles legally; they were stolen from a National Guard Armory.  Sixty years later, the ban didn't stop two crooks, a scam artist and a Romanian immigrant, from illegally modifying rifles for fully automatic fire and engaging in a protracted shoot-out with the cops during a bank robbery in North Hollywood, California.

In 1963, communist Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy with a surplus Italian rifle he had ordered in the mail.  Instead of banning communists, Democrats banned the mail order of guns.  In 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King with a pump-action Remington hunting rifle.  He bought it at a sporting goods store, not through the mail.  That same year, Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy with a cheap .22 revolver; Democrats then proposed banning "Saturday Night Specials."  And in 2005, the Democrat-led California Legislature banned single-shot .50 cal. rifles — even though no crimes had ever been committed with them.

Too small, too big, too powerful, too weak — it doesn't matter; Democrats want to ban them all.  Democrats are fond of saying mass shootings don't happen in other countries that have gun control, but that claim is so easily disproven as to be farcical.  Even in nations that have enacted laws that Democrats dream of — gun bans, confiscations, and universal registration — there have been a number of mass shootings.  A universal registration requirement and the total prohibition on AK-47s in France failed to stop the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan shooters from killing 142 people.  The British handgun and semi-automatic rifle confiscations did not prevent Derrick Bird from murdering 12 and wounding 11 with a legally registered bolt-action .22 and a shotgun in 2010.  The Egyptian ban on all rifles failed to prevent jihadists from killing over 300 at a Sinai mosque in 2017, and India's ban on all firearms and ammunition was ineffective in stopping the Mumbai massacre in 2008.  Nor did strict Russian gun laws stop the Beslan slaughter of 330 schoolchildren in 2004, or the mass shooting in Crimea in 2018.

The supposedly "conservative" intellectual Charles Krauthammer gave away the endgame in 1996: confiscation of all guns.  Referencing the 1994 Clinton "assault weapons" ban, Krauthammer acknowledged that the ban would have little effect on actual homicides:

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move[.] ... Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. ...

De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades.

The postmodern welfare state seeks to ban all guns because it is ultimately totalitarian.  It seeks to regulate and provide happiness and entertainment for the masses, so long as they agree to sacrifice their individuality and independence.  Tocqueville prophesied in 1833 that democracy would create a new kind of despotism:

Above this race of [democratic] men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ...

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.  Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

That is the real goal of proposed gun confiscations and "red flag" laws: to completely disarm the public, destroy all individuality and all independence, and have the population eating from the hand of the government as if they were domesticated animals.

All in the name of "safety" and "happiness," of course.

As of this writing, they are frighteningly close to achieving it.