A Chinese state-run media outlet published an article criticizing private gun ownership in the United States after armed parishioners took down an active shooter at a church in White Settlement, Texas on Sunday.
In an article titled “Gun ownership, deaths out of control in US,” an outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily newspaper defined the problem as gun ownership itself, calling the right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment a “severe human rights flaw.”
Keith Thomas Kinnunen used a shotgun to kill two West Freeway Church of Christ congregants Sunday morning before Jack Wilson and other armed volunteer security team members used their own weapons to quickly eliminate the threat.
WHITE SETTLEMENT, TX – DECEMBER 29: Law enforcement vehicles are parked outside West Freeway Church of Christ where a shooting took place at the morning service on December 29, 2019 in White Settlement, Texas. (Photo by Stewart F. House/Getty Images)
“Who own these guns?” Global Times asked after citing the fact that hundreds of millions of firearms are in the United States. “Are certain people prepared to use them as murder weapons? These issues have not been tracked or supervised effectively. Various criminal motives exist in American society. From the perspective of gun murders, the US is beset with crises.”
The outlet insisted that the “problems” created by gun ownership have “already exceeded the benefits” because “the spread of guns enables crime to unleash greater killing energy.”
Although “many interest groups have benefited from it and some ordinary people have truly gained a sense of safety,” Global Times insisted that the United States “can neither manage the safe storage and use of so many guns owned by ordinary people, nor can it establish a new national system that bans or strictly restricts guns.” (RELATED: Beto O’Rourke Can’t Bring Himself To Thank Armed Churchgoers Who Stopped A Mass Shooting)
“Massacres and shootings should be deemed a serious violation of human rights,” the outlet concluded. “In the world’s most modern society, people’s lives are threatened by unregulated guns. Isn’t this the most severe human rights flaw? The US acts as the world’s guard but turns a blind eye to its own human rights defects. People are forced to get used to a US where both modern and barbarous elements entangle in a weird way.”
China has its own history of religious suppression and human rights violations, with millions currently imprisoned for political crimes. Although some Hong Kong protesters have displayed signs wishing it were not the case, there is no right to carry firearms in the communist country. Former President Barack Obama once cited China as an example of a goal for eventual U.S. gun control.