(Originally published in The American Thinker.)
Last month, a Wisconsin jury convicted Darrell Brooks of first-degree intentional homicide while using a dangerous weapon for driving an SUV into the crowd gathered at a Christmas parade last year in Waukesha, Wisconsin. He was found guilty of 70 other counts. He was sentenced to life in prison, as mandated under under Wisconsin law.
So a court of law has determined that a car or SUV is a dangerous weapon. It certainly can be, and this is not the first incident of a vehicle being used as a weapon.
Earlier this year, a German man drove a car into a group of pedestrians in Berlin. He killed at least one person and injured 14 others (five of the injured had life-threatening injuries), according to Reuters. The dead person was a teacher, and the injured were students.
Bystanders detained the man until a police officer arrived and arrested him. The driver was a 29-year-old German-Armenian man. He drove into the group as they stood on a street corner. Then he drove back onto the road and crashed into a shop a short distance away.
“The latest evidence suggests this is a case of a mentally ill person running amok,” said Iris Spranger, Berlin’s interior affairs minister, according to Reuters.
Earlier this month, a California man drove an SUV into a group of more than 20 young recruits with the Sheriff’s Training Academy and Regional Services (STARS) in Whittier, California. The recruits were out for a morning jog. The crash critically injured five of them, with 18 others suffering minor and moderate injuries.
How long will it be before the left demands legislation limiting who can own a vehicle so this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the United States? Maybe leftists will want to put limits on how large a vehicle can be or how fast it can travel.
Using the logic the left uses on gun control — that the problem is the weapon and not the person who uses the weapon — politicians should be out there trying to ban knives, hatchets, cars, and anything else that could be used to kill a person.
They aren’t because even they know they can go too far.
Not that they won’t try. Even now, they are trying to lower the bar to get citizens to give up even more of their rights. New York recently banned bulletproof vests, taking advantage of the fact that the Buffalo shooter who killed 10 people in a supermarket wore body armor. Of course, the law they passed wouldn’t have prohibited the type of body armor that shooter wore.
Why would they do that? Their goal wasn’t to stop shootings. It was to ban something and look as if they were doing something that would help.
Meanwhile, they refuse to take a hard and honest look at the problem.
More legislation is not the answer. Nor will eliminating guns stop the violence. In London, where firearms are essentially outlawed, criminals have simply switched to using knives. If someone wants to commit violence, he will find a way to do it.
Something needs to be done to address mass shootings, but the problem isn’t the tool used in the violence; it’s the perpetrators.
Democrats are continuing to block true reform that deals with the problem of gun violence and instead pander for votes. Perhaps we should say the blood of the victims is on their hands and not those who support gun rights.
Michael A. Letts is the CEO and Founder of In-VestUSA, a national grassroots non-profit organization helping hundreds of communities provide thousands of bulletproof vests for their police forces through educational, public relations, sponsorship, and fundraising programs.
