Does Anyone Know Anything About Guns?

One of the reasons I have always enjoyed writing about guns is that I don’t have to figure out a story line, or even come up with an idea. All I have to do is scan the daily media and wait for one of the major media outlets to put out a gun story because invariably the story is wrong.

And the reason the media gets it all wrong about guns is that if you’re hired by an outfit like the Washington Post, the chances are you come from a nice, college-educated, liberal background and people from that background don’t usually know anything about guns.

And guns may be a consumer item found in many homes, but a gun sitting on someone’s night table or in a closet off the living room isn’t just like a car sitting out in the driveway or a new set of golf clubs in the car’s trunk.

The gap, socially and otherwise, between people who own guns and people who don’t own guns is as wide as the Mississippi River when it rains for a couple of days and the river overflows its banks. Gun owners and non-gun owners in America may both speak the same language, but the words have entirely different meanings to gun-owning versus non-gun-owning folks.

An example of this mental and cultural dichotomy is an article which just appeared in the Washington Post about a new survey on gun ownership which was commissioned by NBC News. The article was written by one of WaPo’s most active columnists, a guy named Philip Bump, who mostly covers politics, the topic which is usually the reason why people read the WaPo.

The article is based on a poll taken by an outfit called Public Opinion Strategies, whose client list is a standard, D.C.-based collection of lobbying operations, advocacy groups and K Street tenants, none of whom have anything to do with guns. I mean, when was the last time that the Coalition to Protect America’s Healthcare got involved in discussions about 2nd-Amendment ‘rights?

What the new poll showed is what is referred to as a ‘stunning’ increase in the number of homes which contain a gun, from 42% in 2013 up to 52% this year. This increase reflects both many more guns being sold, but also many guns going into households which previously didn’t contain a gun.

Except maybe this finding is true and maybe it’s not. First of all, like I said above, guns aren’t like golf clubs. There are all kinds of reasons why people won’t admit that they don’t own a gun, and I have yet to see the poll which attempts to sort that one out.

Since most gun owners have more than one gun lying around, did the big uptick in gun sales during the pandemic mean that current gun owners were buying more guns, or that new people were buying guns? The gun industry, of course, would like everyone to believe that more and more Americans are now armed, but there’s absolutely no proof that this is true, particularly because we also don’t know how many current gun owners die off from old age or other natural causes every year.

None of this would matter were it not for the fact that it is believed that the more guns we own, the more will also suffer from higher rates of crime, particularly violent crime.

That being the case, perhaps Phil Bump would like to explain how both gun purchases and street violence went way up during the Pandemic, but now that Covid-19 is under control and gun sales have slowed down, why does violent crime continue to increase?

You see, if you don’t know anything about guns, it’s convenient to create an argument which actually reflects your lack of knowledge because your readers for the most part also don’t know anything about guns.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the arguments thrown out there by Gun-nut Nation to justify gun ownership are just as stupid and lacking in real facts as the arguments made by so-called experts who inform Gun-control Nation about the risks represented by guns.

In other words, here’s a contentious and endless public debate which has been going on for more than thirty years and is carried on without any necessary attention to relevant information or facts.

But after all, if the 2nd Amendment gives us the ‘right’ to own a gun, doesn’t the 1st Amendment give us the ‘right’ to shoot off our mouths? Pardon the pun.

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