I have been blogging and writing about gun violence since 2012, and while it’s easy to take pot-shots at Gun-nut Nation, I tend to focus my concerns more on what my gun-control friends have to say. This is because I hold our side to a higher standard. After all, the other side is chiefly in the business of selling guns.

So, while I often aim my laser-sharp views on what researchers and journalists in the gun-control camp have to say, I try to do it with some degree of restraint because I believe that my friends in Gun-control Nation are engaged in a sacred task.

Violence happens to be the only threat to the human community which we still do not understand and hence, cannot control. We know what to do about global warming, we know what to do about hunger. We don’t know what to do about violence, which can be found in some of the early chapters of the Old Testament, such as the description of Sodom and Gomorrah in Chapter 19.

Every once in a while, however, my Gun-control Nation friends forget what they should be doing and wander off in a direction that doesn’t help us understand gun violence at all and worse, promotes responses to gun violence that will only make things worse.

I am referring to the article about the ATF which appeared in last week’s The Trace. The article is based on facts which are wrong and worse, pushes out a remedial strategy which can only help to increase the anger felt by proponents of gun ‘rights,’ thereby reducing the chance that a viable solution to gun violence will ever emerge.

The article includes a complete list of every gun shop inspected by the ATF from 2015 through 2017. The readers are invited to search this database for “law-breaking firearm businesses” in the locations where the readers live. The article then says, “many violators go unpunished,” which is a not-so-slight invitation for members of Gun-control Nation to take matters into their own hands.

Luckily, my ATF inspection occurred in 2014, or my gun shop would be on the list. And in my case, the ATF found more than a thousand violations, every one of which was a ‘threat’ to community safety. Want to know what those threats consisted of? In the book where we listed who shipped us guns, we abbreviated the name of our one wholesale supplier more than one thousand times.

If the ATF’s inspection of my shop had started in 2015, I could drive down to the shop today and find myself confronted with an angry group of folks from the local Brady chapter, the MOMS group, some local anti-violence group, or all three. If they demonstrated in front of my shop for a couple of weeks, I could close down the shop and disappear.

I wouldn’t blame these folks for getting all hot bothered because here was a local retailer who was selling a dangerous product and not even following the law. After all, they knew ‘for a fact’ that I was running an illegal gun business because they had read about me in The Trace.

In fact, the appearance of my gun shop on the ATF inspection list wouldn’t have been proof that I was running any kind of rogue operation at all. The demonstrators yelling ‘close him down’ would have been reacting to the fact that we abbreviated the name of our wholesale supplier again and again.

If the journalists at The Trace want to incite gun-control advocates to make life difficult for someone who’s selling guns, the least they can do is get their facts straight. As for folks who read The Trace because they are concerned about the violence caused by people who attack themselves or others with guns, I have a different bit of advice.

 I think it’s time for Gun-control Nation to cut the bullsh*t and stop pretending they have any concern for 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Let’s have an honest debate about guns in America. Either we want them, or we don’t.

The Deadliest Pathogen: Guns and Homicide (Guns in America): Weisser, Michael R.: 9781792317866: Amazon.com: Books.