Charlie Kirk should still be alive. Anyone who says otherwise is a monster.
But there's a certain irony in the left's call for gun control in the wake of a shooting that many of them outright celebrated and did so publicly, especially since the weapon used in Kirk's murder was one that would largely be untouched by pretty much any gun control currently being pushed.
It was an old Mauser chambered in .30-06, modified not into a more deadly weapon of war, but into the prototypical hunting rifle. The very same kind that anti-gun leftists swear time and time again they don't want to take away.
Now, though, the media sure seems to be trying to craft a narrative around the gun and how it's oh-so-terrible, one that will likely lead to regulation:
In the frantic hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, investigators discovered a gun in a wooded area near the scene in northern Utah. The federal agents seeking to trace the weapon faced a daunting task.
It was a decades-old, German-made rifle built for use by the military in both World Wars, according to multiple law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation. So old that it may have been brought into the U.S. before laws were enacted in the 1960s requiring guns to be affixed with serial numbers or other marks to enable tracing.
There are believed to be millions of such weapons in homes across America.
Fortunately for investigators, the alleged shooter was identified through other means — his family — who convinced him to surrender to police. But the alleged use of such a vintage weapon has raised fears among some former federal agents of the potential for other would-be assassins to seek out these powerful, accurate and hard-to-trace firearms.
“Short of the security afforded to the president, there’s no way to defend against the threat posed by this,” said Scott Sweetow, a retired official with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
That's right, a vintage milsurp bolt-action rifle is now the new boogieman for the anti-gun media, and they're using the "gun tracing" canard.
Let's understand that tracing only works to determine who initially purchased a firearm, not who pulled the trigger. Nor can you just trace a caliber and get the name of whoever owns a similar firearm, like they do on television.
This is the real world, and there are limits on what information is going to be available.
An unserialized, vintage firearm that may have been here since before the 1960s is also a gun that may well have changed hands dozens of times, making any ATF tracing effort impossible anyway.
The original owner could well be dead, meaning that even if he or she remembered who they bought the gun from, it wouldn't matter because they're not talking without a seance or Ouija board.
Not that it would matter, anyway, because they didn't require record keeping like they do today, so even if there were a serial number, they couldn't trace it to a manufacturer, a dealer, or a buyer. Then we should also take into account that these kinds of guns are almost never used for crime. This is the rare exception.
Honestly, pointing any of this out is ridiculous unless they're trying to mandate something else, like gun registration.
Then, the Feds could mandate that these older firearms get serial numbers then be registered accordingly, making tracing easier, which is kind of pathetic, when you think about it, because they've already connected this twerp to the rifle in question, even without tracing or anything else, especially considering the fact that tracing hasn't actually resulted in an arrest, pretty much since it first became a thing. It might be a bit of evidence to help along the way, but it's never actually broken a case wide open.
All in all, this is stupid, but it's also disturbing because too many people will see this and start freaking out about guns that have been here for decades and are rarely used by criminals.
Then again, this is the leftist media. What can you expect?
