Violent crime is an issue here in the United States. It’s a bad issue that’s worse than we find in other countries.

Further, much of that violent crime is committed with firearms. For many, that’s proof that we have a gun problem.

Couple in mass shootings, which do happen here far too frequently, and anti-gunners are going to get up in arms about, well, everything.

But they often claim they’re not actually anti-gun. They use euphemisms like “gun safety” or “anti-gun violence” or something else. I’m sure you can think of plenty I didn’t name.

That goes double for supposed gun violence researchers. They tend to pretend they’re just humble researchers. However, a few are starting to let the mask slip.

A 6-year-old student. A 72-year-old man.

They are two people separated by decades and thousands of miles, but united in one tragic fact: Both made national news in January after authorities said they committed horrific gun violence.

The contrast – like many facts about America’s gun violence problem – is both striking and predictable. This doesn’t happen in other countries, experts say. It happens much more frequently in the U.S., but often hidden from public view. Children, in particular, are far more likely to shoot themselves, a friend or family member accidentally, usually inside a home.

“It’s the guns. It’s always been the guns,” said Lisa Geller, a public health researcher at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University.

Geller is far from alone in blaming guns over the last week or so. UCLA’s Adam Winkler is another who has done as much recently, which we’ve talked about already.

It’s kind of hard to pretend you’re just an unbiased researcher when you so blatantly advertise your bias. I’m just saying.

After all, we also know that despite such pronouncements, it’s not the guns.

For example, we know that knife homicides in the United States–far from the most popular weapon choice to take human life in this nation–easily outstrips other nations’ total homicide rate. That means when you stack the deck to make the US look better, we still fail to have a lower homicide rate.

How can it be the guns when you could remove them entirely and we’d still be so much more violent than other developed nations?

And that’s just if we assume people without a gun won’t kill anyone. That’s a foolish assumption in the grand scheme of things.

The truth is that anti-gunners truly are anti-gun. They don’t want you to have a firearm under any circumstances but will tolerate a few exceptions just to get a lot closer to their anti-gun Utopia. However, there’s no evidence such a Utopia would ever exist, especially if you take guns away.

After all, a lot of defensive gun uses would turn into homicides without the good guys being armed. The bad guys, on the other hand, don’t need a gun.

Like I always say, you can give the law-abiding a rocket launcher and they won’t hurt a fly with it. A dangerous, homicidal individual will use a rock if that’s all he can get his hands on.

But I appreciate these anti-gun researchers at least being honest for a change. We already knew the truth, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.