There are a lot of misunderstandings out there regarding guns.

I'd like to say this is surprising, but it's not. Most people don't own guns and gun ownership has been stigmatized and demonized to the point that most people who have them don't really talk about them. As a result, to most people, they're just a thing that shows up in entertainment and at crime scenes.

But there are people out there who voice their misguided opinions and with the internet, they can amplify those throughout the world, and since they don't know what they're talking about on guns, we get a lot of wrong nonsense spouted as if it's absolute fact.

Take this piece, for example. Let's start with the headline: "If She Wins, Kamala Harris Must Tackle America’s Most Pressing Issue — Guns."

Now, I'm not sure guns are the most pressing issue. After all, inflation is hitting everyone, so I'd argue that's probably a pretty big issue, whereas guns are a topic best left alone, at least for many of us. I'm sure many people think it needs to be addressed, but probably put it slightly behind having to sell their kidney to afford to go to the grocery store.

But that's just an opinion. I don't have to agree with it for it to be a valid opinion.

There's a sub-headline, though, and that's just comedy gold: "There are no 'good' and 'bad' guys. We cling to comforting myths, failing to recognise that guns are always lethal."

First, guns aren't always lethal. If they were, there would be no survivors of gunshots. There are literally millions of such survivors running around this country, not just counting military veterans. Many defensive gun uses don't even involve a single shot being fired.

Second, yes, there are "good" and "bad" guys. People who point guns at innocent people in order to hurt them or take stuff from them are what we in the field like to call "bad" guys. People who use guns to stop them are what we call "good."

Got it?

Oh, but in the body, the author goes into more detail:

There are no “good” and “bad” guys when it comes to firearms. We cling to comforting myths, failing to recognise that guns are always lethal. Far from protecting the owners, firearms promote vigilantism, and they pose the most danger to family members.

Even in the 1960s, a government commission on gun violence found that the bedroom was the most dangerous room in America. Another study found that keeping guns in vehicles made drivers more prone to road rage.

These details are from One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, a recent book by Dominic Erdozain, a research fellow at Emory University in Atlanta.

This, of course, is absolute nonsense.

First, we've addressed Erdozain before. He's hardly been an accurate writer on the issue of guns. He's someone who has used cherry-picked statistics to advance an anti-gun narrative, then ignored literally everything to the contrary, as this author did.

For example, we have tons of legitimate defensive gun uses each and every year. These are not vigilantism, either, because being a vigilante with a gun is a crime. These are legitimate cases of either self-defense or defending the lives of others.

What the author seems to believe is that we should all be required to call the police in that moment of crisis, even though the police often arrive just in time to draw a chalk outline around the victim's body. 

Frankly, nothing in the rest of the piece is worth getting into because it's all premised on the idea that guns are bad and that even good guys don't need them. That alone means the author is someone who shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone, including Kamala Harris.