Back in June, there was a big ta-ra-rum when the Supreme Court decided that New York’s law covering the process for being able to carry a gun outside the home was a violation of 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ New York was one of the last seven states which gave law enforcement agencies a ‘may issue’ control over concealed-carry (CCW) licenses, with the other 43 states having moved to a ‘shall issue’ procedure, meaning that if you can pass a background check, you can wander around the neighborhood with a concealed gun.

            I knew that the moment the Court told New York to change its CCW law, that I would receive a daily appeal from the various gun-control organizations beseeching me to send them more funds so they could fight against this alarming expansion of armed-camp America, which is exactly what all the gun-control groups did.

            Incidentally, I give both Brady and Everytown a hundred bucks every month, I’ve been doing it for years. I figure if I’m going to donate a chunk every year to my NRA Endowment fund, the least I can do is give some bucks to the other side too.

            I also assumed after the Court’s decision that sooner or later one of the gun-control research groups would publish an ‘evidence-based’ article that would find some kind of connection between the shift from ‘may issue’ to ‘shall issue’ CCW laws and an increase in gun violence because Gun-control Nation has been making this argument ever since CCW laws began to shift from ‘may’ to ‘shall.’

            And now, thanks to  research conducted by the Johns Hopkins gun research group, this argument appears to be validated by a new study which compares gun violence rates before and after ‘shall issue’ laws went into effect. Unfortunately, I have to work off of the abstract of the article because I have now sent $39 not once but twice to the American Journal of Epidemiology and after the website processes my payment and pulls the money out of my bank account, I get back squat.

            Anyway, what the researchers claim to have found is that “Shall-Issue CCW law adoption was associated with a 9.5% increase in rates of assaults with firearms during the first 10-years post-law adoption and associated with an 8.8% increase in rates of homicides by other means.” If I ever get the website to work, I’ll read the details and perhaps amend what I am going to say now which is how do we know how many of those increased gun assaults were committed by individuals who had the legal right to walk around with a gun?

            We don’t. And I’m sorry but regression analysis may be a good tool for comparing the movement of one trend to another trend, but it’s simply not a scientific or evidence-based method for explaining cause and effect.

            The problem with virtually all the research on gun violence done by the Hopkins public health group and other research groups is that they use all kinds of data from the CDC which gives fairly good estimates on the demographics of the victims of gun violence but tells us next to nothing about how and why the perpetrators do what they did.

            You can’t interview the perpetrators of self-inflicted gun assaults – they’re dead. And you can’t interview the perpetrators of homicides or aggravated assaults because first of all, you can’t find half of them, and the ones you can find are locked behind bars and can’t or won’t talk.

            Here’s what we know about the men (and it’s almost always men) who use a gun to try and kill someone else: they usually begin demonstrating violent and anti-social behavior in their teens. We have known this since my late, dear friend Marvin Wolfgang followed the lives of violent criminals and published his definitive research fifty years ago.

            Now that the CDC has lifted the moratorium on gun research, I would like to see them spend some of my tax money on trying to figure out how to identify, isolate and treat what Wolfgang referred to as ‘serial delinquents’ before their delinquent behavior results in putting their hands on a gun.

            What is the CDC doing with my tax money right now? They are paying a researcher who has absolutely no gun experience to go around to 4-H clubs and talk to the little, White kiddies about how they should use their 22-caliber, single-shot, bolt-action rifles in a safe way. That research is going to give us any insight at all to help prevent adolescents and young, male adults from walking down the street with a Beretta, a Sig, or a Glock?

            Of course, if we were to focus our attention on the individuals who commit more than 100,000 aggravated assaults and homicides every year with a gun, we would end up where polite, well-meaning liberals never want to end up, which would be having to talk about race. And that’s an issue which Gun-control Nation avoids like the plague.

            This country still bears the stain and the shame of having brought millions of human beings over here, declaring them to be chattel property and then declaring them to be human beings in 1865. That’s only 150 years ago, so why should I be surprised if we still haven’t figured out how to address racial issues in a proper, objective, and honest way?

            The truth is that legal gun owners, in the main, happen to be about the most law-abiding people you’ll ever want to meet. And the individuals who commit gun violence against other individuals are for the most part people who couldn’t care less about what the gun laws say.

            I am shortly going to launch a website which will provide a basic informational roadmap to anyone who is thinking about buying or carrying a self-defense gun. The website will also let visitors get their hands on a little manual that will show them how a daily, 15-minute exercise without a gun can help them develop and maintain the muscle memory they need in order to use a self-defense gun in a proper and effective way.

            The reason I am putting up this website is that it’s time for both sides in the gun debate to acknowledge a very basic fact, which is that neither side currently approaches gun violence in a positive or constructive way.

            Gun-nut Nation believes that its members should be able to walk around with a gun designed only for the purpose of ending human life without being required to spend even five minutes learning how such a lethal product even works. Gun-control Nation, on the other hand, believes that we can end gun violence by somehow making guns ‘safe’ and passing more laws to that effect.

            I have been in the gun business one way or another for more than sixty years and what I have known and experienced in the gun business can be summed up like this: Other than sworn officers, nobody needs a gun for anything at all. Anyone who thinks otherwise, to quote Grandpa, is just a ‘meshugana chaya’ (read: damn fool.)

            But precisely because the only individuals who feel they need a gun happen to be individuals who shouldn’t ever be able to get their hands on a gun, we better stop worrying about everyone walking around with a gun because they think that might just wind up at the OK Corral or Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon.