Progressives demand pre-crime department to prevent shootings

When Obama spoke about the shootings at Umpqua Community College he demanded that these shootings be stopped. He didn’t specify how.

As the investigation advanced it was discovered that the shooter, Chris Harper-Mercer, had purchased several weapons, thirteen in all. All of the purchases were legal and complied with all laws. None of the weapons were ‘scary’ and warranted a ban in and of themselves. There were no extended magazines used.

There is a report that the shooter tried to enroll in a firearms training class and was given the boot because he was creepy:

The gunman who attacked an Oregon community college this week and killed nine people was once turned away from a firearms academy for being too “weird” and “a little bit too anxious,” according to an instructor for the center, Eloy Way. “We wanted him to take a beginner safety course and he was trying to tell me that he already had experience with firearms and I didn’t get a good feeling about him, so I turned him down,” Way told Reuters. “He was just kind of a weird guy and seemed kind of spoiled, immature. He was a little bit too anxious to get high-level training and there was no reason for it.”

So it isn’t like he was inadvertently aided by anyone.

Would registration of weapons or a gun owners database have prevented this? Hard to see how. So what other “common sense gun control” could possibly be applied here that would have accomplished diddly squat? None.

In short, there were no violations of existing laws and no apparent negligence and no conceivable new law could have had an effect. All of this underscores the idea that there is no such thing as ‘gun crime.’ There are only crimes criminals use guns to commit.

Obama has never made the case for gun confiscation, though no sane person doubts that is what he would like. So what is left?

Pre-crime.

In the 2002 film, Minority Report, the government used psychics to solve crimes in advance.

That, as far as I can tell, what progressives are demanding. They want to be able to leave all of us harmless (relatively, anyway) gun owners alone. They don’t want gun confiscation. They just want to stop rather random crimes from happening. I don’t think this administration could actually handle “precogs” but there is a possibility these masterminds could pull off: psychics. Maybe we could re-energize those old pay-by-the-minute psychic hotlines. It is worth a try. It makes as much sense as anything else the left is willing to own up to desiring. It certainly wouldn’t be less effective than their proposals and a helluva lot cheaper.

But we all know how Minority Report turned out, don’t we?

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