Modern Mythology: Five Myths About Gun Control

A radio talk show host recently asked me to name the top five myths about gun control.

My response was “Why discuss only 0.0001% of the lies?”

My statistical snideness aside, the question provoked some necessary thinking. After a decade of debunking such myths in Gun Facts, it would be easy to rattle off several fabrications about firearms, numerous misinformation points involving numbers, or even disclose that Chuck Schumer and his kindlier brother Beelzebub are no long on speaking terms. All those items would bore the average audience into comas and not enlighten discussions about that political perversion called the gun control “movement” (given the utter lack of dues paying members to any gun control organization, and given their backward “progress” in the last two decades, their “movement” is oddly immobile).

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After long and painful consideration, I managed to distill gun control mythology into five rather straight forward points.

Myth #1 – gun control works: There are more data points detailing the failure of gun control than stars in the sky, grains of sand on the world’s beaches, or Nancy Pelosi’s Botox injections. The main myth is that the stuff works. Oddly, we have Bill Clinton to thank not only for endless new cigar jokes, but for kick-starting a five year study by the National Academy of Sciences that found zero evidence supporting a correlation between gun control and violent crime. After ingesting 253 peer-reviewed journal articles, 99 different books, 43 government publications, a survey of 80 different gun-control laws and some of their own independent research, they tossed a 328-page report that showed reducing firearm ownership rates does nothing to reduce criminal firearm misuse rates. Nobody with functioning neurons was surprised by the conclusion.

Myth #2 – “common sense” gun control laws: Dictionaries confound political discussions. My dictionary defines “common sense” as “sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge.” For any law to be “common sense” oriented, there must be a clear end result, an expectation that it will be enforced, and some validation that the scheme has the desired effect. No proposal from the Brady Campaign, Violence Policy Center, or Criminals for Societal Manipulation (a.k.a. Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns) meets the definition of “common sense.” The desired results all depend on the assumptions that criminals will not disobey new laws (such as filing off microstamping markers) or that the laws will be executed and enforced (such as catching criminals with altered guns … which they stole to begin with). Common sense requires incarcerating miscreants, not unviable and exotic technology.

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Myth #3 – gun control reduces violent crime overseas: This Lie of Exotic Divergence was once popular in gun control cabals, until the Dutch Ministry of Justice performed a uniform multi-national survey of crime victimization, discovering that violent crime rates were higher in Australia, England, Scotland, Canada, Finland, Poland, Ireland, Denmark, France, Sweden and Holland (America ranked #13 of 17 nations for violent tendencies, with Japan, Portugal, Spain and barely Belgium below us). Our firearm homicide rate is higher in the USofA, but our own Bureau of Justice Statistics says that 94% of those homicides are gang- and drug-trafficking related. Eliminating Crips and Bloods – what a wonderful idea – might bring American violence levels down to Japan’s.

Myth #4 – concealed carry laws endanger the public: When Barack Obama told the Chicago Sun Times “There has not been any evidence that allowing people to carry a concealed weapon is going to make anyone safer,” intelligent and educated people were forced into impromptu BVD changes due to laughter-induced involuntary tinkling. In 1988 only 10 states allowed citizens to carry concealed firearms, and two of them had simply never bothered to outlaw the practice. Today 42 states provide for private pistol packing, and the violent crime rate is 32% lower than 23 years ago. Professor John Lott once told me that not a single peer-reviewed criminology paper showed violent crime rising in states that passed concealed carry laws (compared to national averages). Yet Barry Obama dislikes the idea, proving that the people who voted for him are as intelligent as he.

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Myth #5 –– “we have to do something”: We have to do smart things, which means isolating and understanding the source of violence and, if you are myopic enough, the source of gun violence. Doing “something” for the sake of doing it means wasting grand gobs of tax money and police time chasing otherwise innocent citizens and not garden variety thugs. Given the number of firearm homicides, the fact that 94% of those homicides are gang related, and that gang suspects in homicides are the lead subject in an average of two more unsolved homicides, then most of the mess could be contained by incarcerating as few as 3,000 well known repeat violent offenders. That would be doing something smart

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