Anti-gunners routinely manipulate reality to push their gun control agenda. That includes constructing studies in such a way that literally none of them can be trusted.

Yet most such folks aren’t researchers. A whole lot of them are in the media, unfortunately, which is another reason one should be cautious about the news.

In fact, based on the editorials I read, the vast majority in the media–particularly in larger markets–aren’t fans of our right to keep and bear arms.

There, too, anti-gunners will distort the truth to keep pushing that anti-gun agenda, such as this editorial out of Orlando.

This type of deadly mass shooting would have been beyond anyone’s imagination in 1789, when Congress proposed the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. It was plainly meant to perpetuate the citizen militias on which states then depended for defense and to maintain order (and control slaves).

The best marksmen at the time could manage at most three or four rounds a minute from their muzzle-loading muskets. That’s a far cry from the blast of violence that an assault-style firearm can deliver — the kind of weapon used in roughly 85% of “mass casualty” events. The vast majority of those were legally obtained.

If Florida lawmakers had banned the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the aftermath of the 2016 massacre, as Connecticut did after the slaughter of 20 young children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2004, would the 2018 slaughter in Parkland have been less lethal? Would it have happened at all?

That’s a question that should haunt Florida’s leaders even now.

Multi-shot weapons did actually exist in 1789 and our Founding Fathers were well aware of them. In fact, I’ve even provided examples in the past.

Further, they bring up Orlando and suggest that it’s entirely possible Parkland might not have happened if only lawmakers had embraced the editorial board’s preferred anti-gun agenda. They’re failing to recall that the worst school shooting in modern American history was Virginia Tech. In that shooting, the killer only had a couple of handguns. He racked up a death toll well beyond Parkland and didn’t need an AR-15 to do it.

That’s what anti-gunners routinely leave out in discussion about this sort of thing. They fail to remember anything that doesn’t conform to the narrative and hope you won’t remember, either.

And most folks don’t.

This is a witch’s brew of unforeseeable consequences and wrong signals.

The waiting period isn’t only about making sure the purchaser isn’t disqualified by a prior crime or commitment to a mental institution. It helps to prevent suicides and impulse killings. When originally enacted by a 1990 constitutional amendment applying to handguns, it was commonly known as a “cooling-off” period.

The National Academy of Sciences calculated in 2017 that waiting periods in 17 states and the District of Columbia were preventing roughly 750 gun deaths each year. Expanding them nationally would save another 950 lives, the authors said.

And here we see the ever-popular “gun death” total.

Sure, if people had to wait a few days to get a gun, the might well decide not to kill themselves with a gun. What isn’t accounted for is whether those killings or suicides still happened, only not with a firearm.

That’s an important bit of information normally omitted by anti-gunners. My guess is that either they don’t know how to account for such a thing or they just don’t want to. After all, then a lot fewer lives would be “saved” by their favorite laws than they want people to think.

Personally, I don’t think anyone is comforted by the idea that their loved one was beaten to death instead of shot, yet anti-gunners seem to feel otherwise. They pretend that if a murder wasn’t carried out with a firearm then it simply doesn’t count.

Then there’s the possibility–no research has been conducted on this so far as I’m aware, though it may have been self-censored–that waiting periods cost just as many lives, all told. After all, if the neighborhood is getting rough and I save up enough to buy a firearm, I probably need that gun pretty quickly. If I’m waiting three days to get it, that might be three days I don’t have.

Further, what the editorial board also doesn’t get is that for all their kvetching, Florida’s crime rate hasn’t responded as anti-gunners like to claim it will. That’s because criminals don’t obey laws in the first place. Those laws only cause problems for the law-abiding.

But when an editorial board has an anti-gun agenda, it’s amazing how much they can get wrong.