Are Guns Really The Problem?

The Columbine High School massacre drew a proverbial ‘line in the sand’, and from that, two groups with two very different ideas about the way forward have emerged and the Sandy Hook shooting only widened the divide and increased the animosity between the two groups.

Group 1 thinks guns are the problem.

Group 1 believes the solution is to simply eliminate guns; ALL guns. The rationale behind this simplistic Utopian fantasy is that if there were no more guns, there would be no more gun violence.

Painfully simple in principle but in practice, this would be impossible to implement, as evidenced by the utter failure of so-called “Gun-Free Zones” where over 96% of public mass shootings occur. It also ignores the fact that millions of criminals and illegal arms dealers would never willingly get rid of their guns, and without worldwide disarmament, disarmed Americans would simply acquire more guns from countries outside the United States.

Far more importantly, this simplistic approach entirely ignores the much larger and much more salient issue of human nature. That is that human beings, since time immemorial, have actively sought to victimize, rob, harm, kill, dominate, oppress, or enslave their fellow humans. Gun violence is merely the most recent and most outwardly visible expression of that timeless endeavor.

Group 2 thinks people are the problem.

Group 2 believes the solution is to be found by imbuing people with greater personal responsibility, accountability, awareness, education, and training combined with much more robust and comprehensive oversight and safeguards (including but not limited to mental illness) regarding who does and does not, have access to guns.

In practice, this has proven to be extraordinarily effective as evidenced by the extremely low number of mass shootings and illegal gun deaths committed by law-abiding gun owners or authorized users of lawfully owned firearms. A fact that goes unreported by most of the media is that many would-be criminals are thwarted each month by law-abiding citizens exercising their 2nd Amendment rights.

For anti-gun proponents and the left-leaning media corps, the suppression of pro-gun news is an around-the-clock job. According to the 2013 study on defensive gun use ordered by Obama’s executive action after Sandy Hook,the false narrative was unmasked.

The Agenda Narrative vs The CDC’s Facts

The CDC study proved conclusively that lawfully armed Americans use their firearms in self-defense or defense of others between 500,000 and 3,000,000 times per year. And in 2019, more than 6 years after Newtown, statistics continue to provide strong evidence that leans heavily in favor of armed citizens.

If we are to believe the narrative coming from the anti-gun side of the debate, privately-owned guns and law-abiding gun owners pose an imminent, unrivaled, existential threat to America’s very existence and each time you step outside your home without getting shot, it’s a miracle.

Just The Facts Please

“Obama had announced at the beginning of the year his push for three major gun control initiatives — universal background checks, a ban on “assault weapons,” and a ban on “high-capacity” magazines — to prevent future mass shootings, no doubt hoping that the CDC study would oblige him by providing evidence that additional gun control measures were justified to reduce gun violence.

On the contrary, that study refuted nearly all the standard anti-gun narrative and instead supported many of the positions taken by gun ownership supporters.” The New American

To put it mildly, it blew up in Obama’s face:

CDC Study Ordered by Obama Contradicts White House Anti-gun Narrative

Much to the Obama Administration’s horror, the CDC study was non-partisan and declared the “Use of Firearms for Self-Defense is an Important Crime Deterrent” and proved, once and for all, what pro-gun advocates have been saying all along. America is a dangerous place, crime doesn’t wait around for the police to arrive, and Americans were exercising their Constitutionally-protected 2nd Amendment rights by using their legally-owned firearms in self-defense on average, up to 8,219 times EACH DAY!

According to “Death by Firearms in the US, 2018“, a study conducted at UC Davis, there were a total of 39,740 gun deaths in the US in 2018. Of those, 24,432 were self-inflicted suicides. That leaves 14,037 combined deaths from firearm homicide (35.1%) and mass shootings (0.002%). Divided by 365 days in a year, guns are used to commit a homicide, on average, 38.5 times each day.

Plain English Translation: For every 1 time a gun is used to commit a homicide in the United States, a gun is used in self-defense or in defense of others as many as 213 times.

Forbes writer Paul Hsieh authored Any Study Of ‘Gun Violence’ Should Include How Guns Save Lives, an article that sheds even more light on the importance of an armed population.

On The Matter of Liability

For nearly 15 years and counting, gun manufacturers have enjoyed a special type of immunity from litigation provided by a law called PLCAA that was signed into law by George W Bush on October 26, 2005.

The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a United States law which protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. However, both manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible in much the same manner that any U.S.-based manufacturer of consumer products is held responsible. They may also be held liable for negligent entrustment when they have reason to know a gun is intended for use in a crime.

GovTrack

Challenges to PLCCA

As of October 2020, seven lawsuits have so far challenged the constitutionality of the law under the 5th and 10th Amendments, and all but one of these have found the PLCAA constitutional. The last one, Gustafson v. Springfield Armory, was ruled unconstitutional, but that decision is currently under review by the Pennsylvania Superior Court.

The Power of PLCCA in Politics

The PLCAA is a political hot button when it comes to the gun debate and winning elections. During the 2016 United States presidential election, the issue was raised multiple times, most frequently within the Democratic Party primaries.

Bernie Sanders, voted for the law in 2005 when he was a congressman. In 2015 he found himself defending the PLCAA but then Hillary Clinton said that, if elected, she would repeal the law and falsely claimed: “They are the only business in America that is wholly protected from any kind of liability. They can sell a gun to someone they know they shouldn’t, and they won’t be sued. There will be no consequences.”

Her statement was blatantly untrue and fact-checker Politifact immediately rated the statement false. As an attorney and a senator, a reasonable person would expect her to know this, given the fact that she voted on the law.

Bernie Sanders, after seeing how Clinton used the PLCCA to gain momentum, flip-flopped and changed his position in January 2016, saying that he would favor a partial repeal of the law, but it was too little too late. Sanders lost and Clinton won the presidential nomination but it was later revealed by the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee that Clinton rigged the election against Sanders.

In 2020, Sanders, the liberal’s favorite whipping boy and the democratic socialist that all the establishment democrats love to hate, was back in the presidential race again, and once again was attacked for voting in favor of the law, especially by Joe Biden.

History repeated itself with Sanders losing again and Biden, like Clinton, going on to win the presidential nomination.