Oh, Mother… Jones, what the fresh heck is this steaming pile!? and what is that featured image?!
To help wee-wee the gun control agenda up in response to the continued spike in gun owners and concealed carry permit holders, Mother Jones’ writer Bryan Shatz boldly declares in one hell of a sensationalized headline Only 3 In 5 Gun Owners Have Received Firearms Training!!
Ahhh, everybody run for your lives!!
Just kidding, he’s full of shit. The first line of his own article disproves the headline:
Forty percent of America’s gun owners have not received any formal firearms training.
But even that’s not quite truthful either.
Shatz’s article is in reference to a brief report funded by the Fund for a Safer Future and the Joyce Foundation, both advocates of gun control, which states that a nationally representative survey conducted in 2015 found that “firearm owners with formal firearm training has not meaningfully changed since two decades ago”, further clarifying that “training programme contents vary widely.”
Ah-ha! So you mean that a) some people may not refer to their training as “formal”, b) since the results are based on a voluntary survey, numbers are likely disproportionate to reality, and c) the survey still reported:
61% of firearm owners and 14% of non-owners living with a firearm owner reported having received formal firearm training. The most commonly reported combination of training topics was safe handling, safe storage and preventing accidents.
All three of my children have received firearms training. Was it “formal training”? No. Does that mean they’re “untrained”? NO.
Do I advocate for everyone to continuously seek firearms training? YES. Do I think that should be mandatory? NO.
Once again, Mother Jones and the gun control agenda is twisting skewed data to make gun owners look like a bunch of untrained idiots.
Also, if you’re going to act like an authority on “formal firearms training”, Shatz – it might help if you knew the minimum about basic firearm safety… like, oh I don’t know, the four rules of gun safety? Your featured image says it all.
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