One of the most obvious things about the gun debate is just how spectacularly uninformed one side is. Not just about history – for instance, the ludicrous “The 2nd Amendment only applies to muskets!” argument – but about firearms themselves.
The anti-gun lobby are apt to make ridiculous and demonstrably false claims – from big media outlets, mind you, not just brainless celebrities – that the AR-15 can “decapitate” and disintegrate a person (NPR) and that they’re “a weapon of war more powerful than the guns we gave our Marines in Vietnam”. (MSNBC)
Suffice to say that neither claim is remotely true.
Witless left-wing politician have also spouted more than their share of gibbering lunacy. “Some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat-seeking device.” (Democrat politician Patricia Eddington) “This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second.” (Democrat Kevin De Leon)
This sort of towering ignorance allows the anti-gun left to continually get away with the most ridiculous claims. A new, peer-reviewed academic study debunks some of their most popular, endlessly repeated and completely wrong memes.
Consider the argument, most recently clucked by The View biddy Joy Behar: “Once black people get guns in this country, the gun laws will change. Trust me.”
Demographically, gun owners are diverse. 42.2 per cent are female and 57.8 per cent are male. Approximately 25.4 per cent of Blacks own firearms, 28.3 per cent of Hispanics own firearms, 19.4 per cent of Asians own firearms and 34.3 per cent of Whites own firearms.
That’s that for that myth, then.
In fact, even in ultra-liberal California, 16 per cent of LGBT adults own a firearm. Following anti-gay attacks such as the Muslim terror attack on a gay nightclub in Florida, groups such as the Pink Pistols sprang up – and were warmly welcomed at shooting ranges.
Another anti-gun meme is that ‘the good guy with a gun doesn’t exist’. Never mind that that’s exactly what happened at a recent would-be mass shooting in an Indiana shopping mall: “Elisjsha Dicken, 22, of Seymour, Indiana, fired 10 shots at Sapirman from his Glock handgun, preventing ‘many more’ deaths.”
The anti-gun left, predictably, attacked Dicken, just as they vilified and smeared Kyle Rittenhouse for defensively shooting violent Antifa/BLM rioters.
But how true is the ‘good guy with a gun’ narrative? Very true, as it happens.
The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1 per cent) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9 per cent of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9 per cent) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2 per cent) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner’s home, and approximately half (53.9 per cent) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of 10 (9.1 per cent) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of 20 (4.8 per cent) occurred at work.
So, defensive use of firearms outnumbers homicides and firearm injuries (48,628) by 34:1. That’s a hell of a lot of good guys with guns, then.
A majority of gun owners (56.2 per cent) indicate that they carry a handgun for self-defense in at least some circumstances, and about 35 per cent of gun owners report carrying a handgun with some frequency. We estimate that approximately 20.7 million gun owners (26.3 per cent) carry a handgun in public under a “concealed carry” regime, and 34.9 per cent of gun owners report that there have been instances in which they had wanted to carry a handgun for self-defense, but local rules did not allow them to carry.
2021 National Firearms Survey
An armed society may not necessarily be a polite society, but if the numbers tell us anything, it seems to be that preventing law-abiding citizens from arming themselves is a Godsend to armed criminals.