My article from the Sept. 17, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

After a gunman calmly murdered 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard
yesterday, the Left began trying to exploit the Navy employees’ deaths
to advance its never-ending campaign to disarm law-abiding citizens.

The FBI identified the shooter, who was killed in a gun battle with
police, as Aaron Alexis, 34, of Fort Worth, Texas. A civilian military
contractor who was reportedly a practicing Buddhist at one time, Alexis
received a general discharge from the Navy Reserve in 2011 after a
shooting incident in his home. A general discharge usually indicates a
problem in a serviceman’s record. He was previously arrested in Seattle
2004 after shooting out the tires of a vehicle.

During the assault around Building 197 in the military installation
near the Washington, D.C. Nationals ballpark, Alexis used a shotgun,
handgun, and an AR-15, the same kind of rifle used by Adam Lanza in the
Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre in December.

As with elementary schools and other “gun-free” zones, perpetrators
know they can carry out mass shootings at military bases because the
personnel there have been disarmed.

 As the Washington Times previously reported,

Among President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office
in 1993 was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases. In March 1993,
the Army imposed regulations forbidding military personnel from carrying
their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders
to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection. For
the most part, only military police regularly carry firearms on base,
and their presence is stretched thin by high demand for MPs in war
zones.

Aaron Alexis, who was reportedly not even a good shot, still managed
to pick off two dozen human targets, aided by President Clinton’s
inexplicable weapons ban. Similarly, a few years ago Major Nidal Malik
Hasan mowed down military personnel at Fort Hood, killing 13 people.

But common sense is lost on leftists who don’t seem to understand that taking away guns makes Americans less safe.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), author of the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban, said
the Navy Yard shootings that took place about a mile from the U.S.
Capitol constituted proof that Congress is “shirking its responsibility”
in the gun control debate.

“This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur
when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple
weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many
people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?” Feinstein
asked.

Earlier this year the Senate killed a plan to expand background
checks on firearms buyers, along with a fresh assault weapons ban
sponsored by Feinstein.

Other left-wing ambulance chasers were quick off the mark.

Before the facts were known President Obama weighed in
on the atrocities, hoping to use the deaths to push more
unconstitutional gun control schemes. “We’re confronting — yet another —
mass shooting,” he said. “And today it happened on a military
installation in our nation’s capital.”

Obama, of course, is a devout ideologue who doesn’t believe Americans
should be allowed to own guns. He’s a longtime supporter of gun
confiscation but when he started running for president he began claiming
to be a supporter of the Second Amendment in order not to scare away
moderate voters. He has Freudian-slipped from time to time. In his first
presidential campaign he mocked small-town Americans as “bitter” people
who “cling to guns or religion,” paraphrasing Saul Alinsky’s ugly
attacks on ordinary Americans.

Emily Miller argues in the Washington Times that Obama is
scare-mongering. Although any loss of life is a tragedy, mass shootings
“are not a cause for increased alarm.” Many more Americans are killed in
non-mass shootings and in gun accidents.

A recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service
(CRS) stated that “there have been 78 public mass shootings in the last
30 years that claimed 547 lives.” This works out to 18 victims per year
or a tiny fraction of all murders by firearms in America.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),
the U.S. does not even have a particularly high murder rate compared to
other nations. In 2011, the U.S. had an intentional homicide rate of 4.7
per 100,000 population, placing it roughly in the middle on the list of
nations of the world.

Honduras had the highest intentional homicide rate (91.6) and Monaco
the lowest (0.0). The rates for a sample of other countries are as
follows: Jamaica (40.9); Mexico (23.7);

Russia (10.2); Philippines (5.4); India (3.5); Finland (2.2); Canada (1.6); Australia (1.0); and Singapore (0.3).

But Obama is nothing if not a salesman. Instead of focusing on the
8,583 murders committed using firearms (in 2011), the president “focuses
on the rare mass shootings because the uncontrollable and random nature
of them are more frightening to the public, which is politically
helpful for him to push his gun-control agenda,” writes Miller, author
of the new book, Emily Gets Her Gun.

Within hours of the massacre, erstwhile conservative David Frum wrote
a tasteless screed urging more gun control. After lamenting the
successful recall by voters of two gun-grabbing state lawmakers in
Colorado last week, Frum pontificated that, “America’s uniquely grisly
record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.” He
also ascribed sinister motives to gun owners, accusing them of working
to maximize future body counts.

In Frum’s view there is no reason to wait to discuss “mass casualty
shootings, such as that which just occurred in the Washington Navy
Yard.”

The historic military facility, he writes,

now joins the long roll of place names indelibly
associated with massacre and grief: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown. I
write on the day of the killing. Gun enthusiasts say it is
inappropriate to talk about gun violence at the time it occurs. Better
to wait … and wait … and wait … until time has passed, and the weeping
next of kin have vanished from TV, and it’s safe to return to business
as usual. The idea of the gun enthusiasts is that the way to show
respect for the victims of gun violence is to do everything possible to
multiply their number.

But why are there so many mass shootings at public institutions such
as the schools Frum names? Because they’re so-called gun-free zones.
They’re magnets for psychotic mass murderers who know they get the most
bang for the buck by preying on the defenseless. The way to give
students and teachers a fighting chance against aspiring homicidal
maniacs is to give teachers, or at least school security guards, guns.

The shooting spree yesterday came the week after al-Qaeda chief Ayman
al-Zawahiri called for Muslims to carry out small-scale attacks “here
and there” inside the U.S. “We should bleed America economically by
provoking it to continue in its massive expenditure on its security,” he
said, “for the weak point of America is its economy, which has already
begun to stagger due to the military and security expenditure.”

At press time, it was unclear what motivated Aaron Alexis to carry
out the attack. Washington, D.C., mayor Vincent Gray said there was no
evidence that what transpired yesterday was a terrorist attack but that
investigators are not ruling out the possibility.