Poor Lauren Boebert Living In Constant Fear Of Hammer Murderers

Please, hammer, don't hurt her.

Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, a Republican of Colorado, has finally gotten rid of the wall of decorative guns that has famously appeared in all of her Zoom interviews, but that doesn't mean she is embracing any kind of common sense when it comes to firearms.

In an appearance on Newsmax on Thursday, Boebert addressed the recent mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, suggesting that it would not have been quite so deadly if all of the shoppers had been carrying firearms and were able to "neutralize the threat" with said firearms. It is highly unlikely this would have occurred, and if it did, there's certainly a chance that more people would have been killed in the crossfire.

Rep Lauren Boebert: "If hammers are the cause of more deaths than firearms, then maybe we need to start having back… https://t.co/qGHbUnKMWT

— Jason Campbell (@Jason Campbell) 1616683139.0 

Yeah, no.

Boebert explained:

Colorado does have some of the most strictest gun laws. We have just about everything that Democrats are wanting to push nationally, and unfortunately our state is showing that these do not work, as Chicago is showing that gun laws do not work, and every time something like this happens, there's more knee jerk reaction to legislate law-abiding citizens and restrict them from being able to defend themselves. You know, Officer Talley is a hero. He went, while everyone else was running out of King Soopers in Boulder, Colorado, he ran in and faced the attacker head on. You know, I wish that there were more people there to back him. If that place wasn't such a soft target, perhaps there would have been more law-abiding citizens carrying who could have helped neutralize the threat that was taking place there in Boulder.

Unfortunately, the common theme in Colorado, with all these tragedies that we see, is defenseless victims. A law didn't protect them. They needed a way to physically protect themselves. In America, we see more deaths by hand, fist, feet, even hammers — and, you know, are we going to start legislating that away? Are we going to be, uh, like these other countries who even ban knives. I mean, if hammers are the cause of more deaths than firearms, then maybe we need to start having background checks on hammers. I mean, look out Black & Decker!

I would be the last person to tell Lauren Boebert that hammer murders don't happen — they   absolutely   happen! — but also they happen far less frequently than people are killed with guns. Almost 20,000 people last year were murdered with guns in the US (and another 24,000 killed themselves with guns), while in 2019, only 397 people in the US were murdered with blunt objects like hammers or clubs.

This is not an anomaly. Here are the FBI statistics on murders by weapon for the years 2012-2016, clearly showing that, even if you add them up, murder with blunt objects and murder with hands and feet do not even add up to one tenth the number of gun murders per year.

Additionally, people are almost never killed by hammers by accident, as is frequently the case with guns. It also takes a decent amount of effort to kill someone with a hammer. But a gun? Pretty easy! For instance, were a bunch of children to find a hammer in an apartment, it is unlikely that it would result in the death of a six-year-old boy, as happened with a gun earlier this month.

In Boebert's defense, in 1984 there was a serial killer going around Aurora murdering people with hammers — Alexander Ewing, who was not identified as the man who slaughtered four people with a hammer until 2018. It is totally possible that she heard about that and was scarred for life.

I would never tell Lauren Boebert to not fear being murdered with a hammer. In fact I share that fear, and given the choice, I would much prefer to be murdered with a gun than a hammer. But not only are hammers not actually as immediately dangerous as guns, they also, unlike guns, serve a purpose other than killing or injuring. You can use a hammer to fix or repair things, whereas it would be a very ill-advised idea to attempt to use a gun in this manner.

Boebert mentions Chicago, as Republicans are wont to do, but fails to mention that Chicago is about 20 minutes away from Indiana, where it is incredibly easy to obtain a firearm. She also mentions "other countries" while failing to point out that "other countries" that have banned guns (and even knives!) have far fewer mass shootings than we do here in America. In fact, they barely have any. They surely trail us in the number of children being accidentally killed by firearms. We had 73 of those in 2018, which you may note is several times more than the number of poisoning murders we have in any given year.

Look. Lauren Boebert likes guns. She's got a gun-themed restaurant and, frequently, gun-themed decor. Guns are her whole thing, and without them, it is unlikely that she would have much of an identity. But it's not really fair for all of these people to keep getting murdered just so Boebert doesn't have to take a trip to Crate and Barrel and explore some new decorating options.

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