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 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ Let’s have an honest debate about guns in America. Either we want them, or we don’t.
Jun 03, 2021 @ 15:05:53
The devils are in the details in a lot of these toxic political areas. A thousand cases of abbreviating a wholesaler might be a “paper” violation but unless the abbreviation prevents identification of the source, its just…paper. Selling Glocks to people under the table is a real violation. Trace should be ashamed of itself for not digging, but my guess is they are not in the business of actually digging deeply enough to verify what they are talking about.
Jun 03, 2021 @ 15:23:56
honest?
When it comes to guns, when did/does honesty have to do with it?
Jun 03, 2021 @ 23:19:04
Firearm owners hold you to a much higher standard than gun controls indoctrinated stooges. I use Stalin’s description of them “useful stooges” whose only knowledge is what gun control told then. However facts and truth play little part in your gun control propaganda peppered writing.
The very term “gun violence” a gun control construct to link what has no link in unsuspecting people minds, guns and violence. It is physically impossible for guns to be violent or anything else. Yet daily you and gun control are animating metal making false claims. You promote guns as some sort of disease a gun control strategy determined as worth trying as other avenues had proved somewhat fruitless. I quote your use of pathogen and assume you know what it means. Pathogen is an organism that causes disease. Animating metal and giving life and human like qualities to guns is a breech of the laws of physics. I assume you went to school and well know that. It is totally delusional to claim guns can force or make people do anything. It is on a par of people claiming to hear voices in their heads.
Now if guns do cause people to commit these acts as you claim why do the counts not accept a plea of diminished responsibility as required by law? Why are lawyers sitting on their bums when government tries to introduce laws that require a causal link between guns and crime to justify them? Government cannot have it both ways. Nor can you.
How do you justify your stance by wanting to control guns and remove citizens rights to ownership using facts you can prove valid? Trying to establish BS arguments based on the fact 99.9% of prostitutes arrested and charged wear lipstick, therefore if we control the use and ownership of lipstick and deprive people we do not like or fear prostitution will be reduced, will be rejected as false and delusional. Only gun control stooges believe lies like that. So which are your sensible honest firearm owner or gun control stooge?
Will We Ever Have An Honest Debate About Guns? |
Jun 04, 2021 @ 10:37:28