As sure as the Sun rises in the East, Univision senior anchor Jorge Ramos will find a way to renew his all-too-frequent calls for anti-gun legislation. A recent opinion column mashes violence in Mexico with incidents in the United States in order to make the same old points.
The column, titled “Run, Hide, or Fight”, rehashes some of the same old tropes that Ramos has been peddling for years. This brief sampling below pretty much sums up the entirety of the column:
*In the United States there are said to be more guns than there are people. In some areas of the country, buying a gun is easier than getting a prescription filled, and officials lack the political will to stand up to the National Rifle Association or other groups to restrict their distribution or use.
Mexico faces a different problem. Drug traffickers and other criminals have a vast supply of weapons — most of them smuggled into the country from the United States — and ordinary citizens don’t generally put their trust in the police or the federal government to protect them. If someone is robbed, or even kidnapped or killed, they know the crime will almost certainly go unpunished.
I live in Florida, a state where politicians think the best way to fight gun violence in schools is by giving teachers their own pistols. The ludicrous argument goes something like this: We must fight fire with fire, and weapons with other weapons, even in the classroom. Elected officials don’t dare take the more logical and reasonable step: banning the use of rifles, pistols and other weapons of war. Who came up with the brilliant idea that more weapons somehow equals less violence.
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a former naval officer, signed into law the measure allowing guns in the classroom. Teachers who volunteer will receive special firearms training, once authorization is given by their school district, but the bottom line is that your son or daughter’s third grade math teacher could soon be packing a firearm along with his times tables. What if the gun discharges accidentally? What if someone is mistaken for an attacker? How will children react if a teacher becomes abusive, knowing that he is carrying a handgun?
It bears noting that Splinter, post-spinoff, no longer carries Ramos’ English-language columns. Conversely, the translations are not as heavily edited- so here we see something with language that hews much closer to the Spanish-language original. Ramos’ translations now mostly run on his eponymous website, and occasionally, on Univision.
Here Ramos tries to make his point by grossly mischaracterizing the actions of the Florida Legislature subsequent to the horrific school shooting in Parkland.
The fact is that the legislature passed, and then-Governor Rick Scott signed, a series of reforms which included raising the legal ownership age of certain types of firearms to 21, over the objections of the National Rifle Association. But Ramos can’t acknowledge that and honestly make his points, so he neglects to mention these actions altogether.
Likewise, he mischaracterizes Florida’s “Guardian” bill as one that necessarily arms teachers. Not mentioned in the column is the fact that teacher participation is voluntary, and that county school boards have the option of increasing law enforcement presence on school grounds.
In Ramos’ view, the only “logical and reasonable” step is to enact a total gun ban- as if criminals and madmen were to maintain strict compliance with such prohibitions.
Before writing another column advocating for civilian disarmament, perhaps Ramos should recall his recent trip to Venezuela- a place where Ramos’ preferred policies became the law of the land.
