Yesterday I spent some time looking at various YouTube videos of the gun ‘rights’ demo in Richmond, VA. Frankly, I was surprised by the size of the crowd, if only because the organization that was the primary sponsor of the event, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, isn’t exactly as big or as financially well-endowed as AARP. But to the group’s credit, they not only pulled off a large-scale event, they did it without having to worry about any of the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, the last time a large group of gun-owners went marching around a town in Virginia showing off their guns.
The media mentioned something about a counter-demo that occurred at the event, but the pro-gun rally not only dwarfed the numbers who showed up to protest gun ‘rights,’ but the gun-toters showed little or no concern for the presence of protestors from the other side. The truth is that if Gun-control Nation were to put together a public event to support Governor Northam’s new gun bill, I would be pleasantly surprised if 500 people showed up, and I suspect that most of them would have to be brought down from somewhere in and around D.C.
Despite Schmuck-o Trump’s claim that the mainstream media is the ‘enemy of the people,’ the last thing the mainstream media ever figures out is how to report anything that isn’t within their usual scope of news and events. And a pro-gun rally just isn’t something that the mainstream media is going to understand, if only because most educated, liberal-minded people (which is who usually ends up working for the mainstream media) don’t happen to own guns.
When I went to the Virginia Citizens Defense League website, I noticed there are now 136 counties, cities and towns in Virginia that have become or are becoming ‘2nd-Amendment ‘sanctuaries,’ a pro-gun movement that I suspect is gathering steam in other gun-rich states as well. Does this development align itself with the 2020 Trump campaign? Of course. But how come I don’t see where Gun-control Nation has attempted to enroll a single jurisdiction in any kind of sanctuary movement that would protect residents from the violence caused by guns?
What we have instead on the gun-control agenda are the continued efforts by gun-control organizations and gun-control researchers to come up with ‘reasonable’ laws that will be supported by both sides. According to our friends at the Bloomberg School, gun owners are almost as strong as non-gun owners in their support for the following laws: “universal background checks, greater accountability for licensed gun dealers unable to account for their inventory, higher safety training standards for concealed carry permit holders, improved reporting of records related to mental illness for background checks, gun prohibitions for persons subject to temporary domestic violence restraining orders, and gun violence restraining orders.”
How come the researchers didn’t ask these same gun owners how they feel about being able to walk around in public with an AR-15? How come all these ‘reasonable’ gun guys, like the gun guys who showed up yesterday at the Richmond rally, weren’t asked how they feel about gun-free zones? Why is it that every time Gun-control Nation tries to figure out what the other side thinks about gun violence, they always ask questions that gun owners don’t consider to be important at all?
I am still waiting for one, single researcher from the gun-control community to sit down and ask a group of gun owners what they believe needs to be done in order to reduce the violence caused by guns. Come to think of it, if Daniel Webster from Bloomberg or David Hemenway from Harvard really wanted to know what gun owners think would reduce the 125,000 intentional injuries that we suffer annually from guns, they could have come down to Richmond yesterday and talked to some of the thousands of gun nuts who were happily milling around.
And by the way, let me tell you something that all gun nuts hold in common – they love to talk about their guns.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 11:36:23
Danged good questions, Mike. That’s why reasonable gun guys have to join Gun-control Nation and get ’em woke.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 11:36:53
I had a discussion with the head of the Injury Prevention Dept. in the New Mexico Dept. of Public Health last week. Mentioned that its rare for gun violence prevention researchers to actually do their own field work rather than gather meaningless statistical data that can be crunched by meaningless computer programs so they can write generalized papers that miss the target.
For example, people in these parts want to reduce gun violence in Albuquerque. Not a single one knows how the people in Albuquerque who are shooting up Dodge get their guns in order to create barriers. Universal background checks? For people who steal and peddle stolen guns? I suggested the Injury Prevention people look at Phil Cook’s paper where Phil and his colleagues actually talked to folks in jail and asked them how they got their guns.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 11:38:11
Nice article, I love this blog. Keep posting such an amazing article.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 11:42:47
Regarding gun-control community……their messaging campaign (starting last week and continuing today) is not about preventing violence. Looking across the media, and social media, they had one objective….to stereotype gun owners as extremists, white supremists and white nationalists. We even saw Shannon Watts go so far as to use the term “armed insurrectionists”. Their agenda has no room for dialogue…..it has become purely political.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 14:27:33
And they were rallying AGAINST the actions of a White Supremacist, and the anti-gun lobby and anti-gun politicians are rallying behind this backwards peckerwood:
https://tinyurl.com/wev6ro8
Jan 21, 2020 @ 13:53:16
“And a pro-gun rally just isn’t something that the mainstream media is going to understand,…” Interesting, I’ve listen to main stream media (national), with interest, for many years. I’ve never heard them say or give any indication that they aren’t experts on any matter they are reporting. Now I’ve heard local news outlets admit they aren’t experts and are looking for answers to their questions.
Jan 21, 2020 @ 13:53:41
The GVP does need a new approach at messaging & learn proper dialogue techniques. I would that it’s in their DNA. But, by my experience interacting with them, they seem to have a limited ability absorbing new tricks.
Jan 22, 2020 @ 13:53:48
There were plenty of “reasonable” gun owners there. Given that there was not a single act of violence… not one of them tore down the fences and stormed the sate house. I think that speaks to the reasonable nature of the gathering. Which gathering was, its worth noting, exercising enumerated civil rights that are protected under the First and Second Amendments, as well as by the Virginia constitution.
Yet here we seem to parrot the progressive and media spin and slather them with the broad brush of ad hominem, labeling them collectively as “gun nuts”. Perhaps if gun owners were approached with respect, rather than derision and dismissal, you might be surprised at the ideas they have.