Social media is full of people who act like they’re authorities on a great many topics they know nothing about. It’s a running joke that the people who were, say, epidemiologists during the pandemic are now experts on Israeli-Palestinian relations this week.

Obviously, these folks are all gun experts right about now as well.

Yet a few people like to pretend they’re experts on firearms and the politics surrounding the Second Amendment all the time. One of those is the X, formerly Twitter, account K-12 School Shooting Database (K-12 SSDB).

Ostensibly, it’s just there to collect data on supposed school shootings, but the account includes a lot of pontification on gun control in general.

But a couple of posts over the weekend really illustrated how little the individual behind the account understands, well, anything.

Let’s start with this one:

Note the far-right anti-government imagery on the shirt for this .308 semi-auto rifle advertisement. pic.twitter.com/l3rE4xUn0C

— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) October 27, 2023

Now, as the community note points out, the artwork was drawn by Ben Franklin back before the American Revolution. While it’s arguably anti-government, that government was the British Crown, not the US government.

Of course, if the anti-gun side wants to lump the Founding Fathers in with us pro-Second Amendment folks, we’re more than happy to let them. However, that doesn’t mean historic artwork by one of our Founding Fathers is, in and of itself, “right-wing, anti-government” art.

It should be noted that this is part of an effort to demonize the .308 round, particular when fired from an AR-pattern rifle.

If this were all the stupidity from this particular account, it would be enough.

The problem was, K-12 SSDB also can’t identify a real gun from an air rifle.

This might be the next school shooter making this comment on my post.

We need an Executive Order to stop this problem from spiraling out of control. pic.twitter.com/arvLCV3lAU

— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) October 29, 2023

Here’s the thing, though. Even if you don’t know a pellet gun on sight, the fact that it was ordered via the internet with no background check or paperwork needed should have been a big red flag for them.

I’m not saying people don’t buy guns illegally via the internet. Of course it happens.

Yet someone who did that wouldn’t likely post it on X for the world to see. Moreover, they’re not typically selling “sniper rifles” that way, even with a suppressor and scope.

See, the problem is that there are a lot of people who want to be authorities on gun control, but don’t bother to actually understand the subject in and of itself before staking out a position. For K-12 SSDB, they took the mantle of “gun authority” upon themselves and opine on gun control with regularity, yet they can’t even tell what’s a real gun and what isn’t.

And this is true of most people who like to argue about gun control online. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They will suddenly become ballistics experts and talk about how the .308 is just such a super-dangerous round, all without realizing it’s also one of the most popular big game hunting rounds in the nation.

They know little to nothing about the subject, yet are often taken seriously by their fellow travelers.

After all, K-12 SSDB has more than 13,000 followers on X. Not all of them are there to point and laugh.