Gun-grabbing ghoul David Frum sinks to twisted new low to slime Charles C.W. Cooke on Alexandria; Updated

What the hell is wrong with you?

— mediapostate (@mediapostate) June 21, 2017

Earlier today, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke posted a piece debunking the notion that stricter gun control laws would have prevented last week’s shooting at a practice congressional baseball game in Alexandria, an attack in which several people were wounded, including GOP Rep. Steve Scalise:

FBI Report on Alexandria Quietly Debunks the Gun-Controllers’ Talking Points https://t.co/008JeELn0s

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 21, 2017

Cooke also called out ghoulish gun grabber David Frum for his idiocy following the attack:

Why does [the fact that shooter James Hodgkinson bought his gun in Illinois] matter? Well, because before they knew anything about the case, many in the press had reflexively tried to use the incident as an argument for stricter gun control. The Atlantic’s David Frum, for example, immediately went on an error-laden tear about Virginia’s laws, which he considers to be too lax, and then took to proposing the sort of “common sense” reforms that the Democratic party has been so impotently trying to sell. But, as the FBI confirms, this reaction was an ignorant one. For a start, the guns weren’t bought in Virginia; they were bought in Illinois, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. And they weren’t purchased privately, illegally, or without attendant background checks, but “legally through federal firearms licensees” that are obliged under federal law to run checks. Moreover, Hodgkinson only got the weapons after he obtained an additional possession-and-purchase license (FOID) of the sort that more extreme gun-control advocates want to see made mandatory in all states.

Or, put another way: Illinois has stricter rules than even Barack Obama endorsed — it quite literally licenses all gun-owners in the state — and those rules made no difference to this case.

Alas, the errors don’t end there. Frum and co. also berated Virginia for being among the 40+ states to permit open carry. But Alexandria, where the shooting took place, doesn’t permit open carry, a fact that prompted one of the most hilariously convoluted arguments I have seen in my life. Others talked about both “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. But as the FBI notes, the firearm used was an SKS in 7.62mm, which has never been classed as an “assault weapon,” and which wasn’t included in the ban that obtained from 1994-2004. Further, when he bought it, Hodgkinson’s SKS was unable to take “high-capacity” magazines at all; rather, it came with an internal 10-round box magazine. Per the report, Hodgkinson seems to have modified it to take external magazines after the purchase, a change that raises the fair question of how effective any at-sale restrictions can really be in stopping the determined. Either way, even after he modified it there is no evidence that Hodgkinson introduced a larger than 10-round external magazine (that’s the standard for the modified SKS), or that, if he did, it had any effect on the outcome.