The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms took issue Monday with the gun prohibition movement by pointing fingers at an “assault weapon” nobody wants to ban, yet has been used to kill a lot of people all over the world.
It’s not a gun, and instead of ammunition, it uses an internal combustion engine.
“When it comes to mayhem,” CCRKBA said in a news release, “this one has quite a body count to its credit, including eight people killed Sunday at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas.”
CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb ran down a short list of mass murders in recent history, all involving people who drove into crowds deliberately. This sort of attack may not be as sensational as a mass shooting, but as Gottlieb pointed out, “The victims are just as dead.”
A man identified as George Alvarez drove a motor vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians outside a migrant center in Brownsville Sunday, killing eight and injuring ten other people, say published reports. The suspect has been charged with eight counts of manslaughter and 10 counts of “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Brownsville was just the latest outrage which proves people intent on mass murder and mayhem don’t always use firearms,” Gottlieb stated, “but in none of these cases has anyone ever tried to blame, and then ban, motor vehicles.”
The veteran gun rights advocate noted other cases of mass murder in which the perpetrator was held responsible, not the instrument he used. Cars have never been demonized by the media the same way guns have.
“Remember the six people murdered by Darrell E. Brooks when he drove an SUV through the annual Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2021,” Gottlieb noted. “Sixty-two other people were injured in that rampage.
“Eight people were killed on a New York City bike path in 2017 when an Islamic extremist deliberately ran them down with a rented pickup truck,” he continued. “The driver was punished, not every truck owner in America.
“Who can forget the 2016 mass murder in Nice, France when a man drove a large truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day,” Gottlieb recalled. “He killed 84 people and injured hundreds more.”
Gottlieb believes it is significant that the Brownsville suspect was charged with assault “with a deadly weapon.” This puts the vehicle in the same class as the semiautomatic rifle allegedly used by a gunman who killed eight people at a shopping mall in a Dallas suburb Saturday.
“The double standard at work here is staggering, and it underscores what we’ve been saying all along,” Gottlieb observed. “It’s not the tool, but the person using it. Penalizing people who didn’t commit any crime, and banning guns that weren’t involved might be good for a headline, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.”
