The Gun Control Movement Is Still Losing
Despite their best efforts, members of the anti-gunner lobby continue to lose influence. Even after using the high-profile mass shootings that occurred in 2022, those who would restrict your right to bear arms are failing to persuade Americans to accept the notion that gun ownership is a bad thing.
Signs that the gun control zealots were beginning to lose the battle emerged when the numbers showed that Americans were buying firearms in record numbers. The trend was particularly notable among blacks and Hispanics, who have been arming themselves at much higher rates than in years prior.
The riots that occurred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the crime wave that followed, certainly contributed to this trend. But it appears that people’s faith in the government’s ability – and willingness – to protect them has wavered considerably.
Nevertheless, the left is still trying.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruenfurther complicated matters for the anti-gunners by effectively doing away with “may issue” states, making it easier for people to obtain concealed carry licenses. The editorial board at the New Jersey Star-Ledger is none too happy about this decision – or the Second Amendment. They published an article in which they referred to 2A as “a curse,” and bitched and moaned about how horrible it is for people to own guns.
“After the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority revoked women’s right to an abortion, overturning a 49-year-old legal precedent, it also struck down a more-than-century-old state law that restricts the right to carry a concealed handgun in public,” the authors wrote.
The editorial board also made the dubious claim that “where you have fewer guns and stricter laws, you have fewer gun injuries and deaths, research has shown.”
They also pointed out that Americans “continue to bleed daily, with an average of more than 300 people shot every 24 hours, including 22 children and teens.”
The article went on to argue against the idea that Americans need firearms for self-defense, pointing out that we have “a public policy in which nearly 49,000 people a year are killed by guns and nearly 400 million firearms flood our streets.”
You may have already guessed that the op-ed left out the fact that instances in which Americans defend themselves using guns far surpass cases in which firearms are used to commit crimes. Indeed, this has been the gun control lobby’s Achilles heel in the Second Amendment debate. As much as they insist that guns lead to murder, they more often save life, limb, and property.
This inconvenient fact has been so problematic for the anti-gunners, they went so far as to pressure the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) to delete a reference to one of its studies showing that defensive gun uses (DGUs) occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million per year. In fact, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), along with the White House, has been on a quiet campaign to get the agency to take the reference off their site. In December 2022, they succeeded, according to reporting from The Reload.
“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), wrote in an email to CDC officials after a meeting, The Reload reported. “It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value – even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.”
Bryant continued:
And while that very small study by Gary Kleck has been debunked repeatedly by everyone from all sides of this issue [even Kleck] it still remains canon by gun rights folks and their supporting politicians and is used as a blunt instrument against gun safety regulations every time there is a state or federal level hearing.
Put simply, in the time that study has been published as ‘a CDC Study’ gun violence prevention policy has ground to a halt, in no small part because of the misinformation that small study provided.
Nevertheless, people are starting to wake up to the reality that it makes no sense to stop law-abiding gun owners from protecting themselves. A new Associated Press poll released on Sunday revealed that Americans are not as gung-ho about restricting gun ownership as they were previously. The results showed that the percentage of those prioritizing gun control dropped by 11 points since June 2022.
The gun issue has plummeted from being the second-most important issue in this time period to a tie for fifth-most important in December of 2022.
This is good news for proponents of gun rights because it makes it less likely that President Joe Biden and his merry band of anti-gun Democrats in Congress will push for even more measures to curtail gun ownership. The lack of a national outcry means they won’t have the same level of support for these endeavors as they did last year. Of course, this could change, if and when another mass shooting occurs – but even then, it does not appear America is quite as amenable to viewing more gun control as the solution. All in all, the future is looking good for the Second Amendment for the time being.
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