Having been at this for a while now, there are certain things that keep coming up over and over again. They're touted by gun control advocates as things that absolutely have to be restricted and restricted immediately if we want to ensure public safety. That is always the reason they give, or some variation of it.
But, well, we know they're not interested in safety. If they were, they'd be asking for things like improved mental health resources, tougher sentences for violent offenders, increased funding for law enforcement, and so on. They'd be calling for the very things that we know help, even if they do nothing but lock away dangerous people so they can't hurt anyone else.
Instead, they focus on a handful of completely different things, things that people like you and I argue are part of our right to keep and bear arms. They even claim that the science is on their side, which we've discussed before.
So, let's take a look at the boogiemen for a moment and break them down.
First, let's revisit a piece from yesterday, which sort of kick-started the thinking for this one. Let's look at just how deadly full-auto conversion switches actually are.
As noted on Wednesday, between January 1, 2021, and May 28th of this year, there have been 43 people killed by a firearm equipped with such a device. Two of those are this year, which means over the previous five years, 41 people were killed. That's an average of 8.2 per year, and while there's a slight upward trend over the last few years, we're still dealing with really low numbers compared to the total number of homicides. It's basically statistical noise at this point.
Ha, but "ghost guns" are a thing, right? We keep being told how awful those are and how common they are these days. States are so alarmed by them that they're trying to regulate 3D printers, for crying out loud. This has to be a serious problem, right?
Well, not really.
First, understand that the term "ghost gun" is being applied to anything that lacks a readable serial number. This includes guns that predate the law mandating them, guns where the serial number has been scratched out, and firearms that have been privately made. It's the latter that people think of when they hear the term, but many officials count the other two as being in the same category.
Still, as bad as everyone's trying to keep them from existing, they must represent a major problem.
The problem is that it's hard to find current numbers of how often these are tied to homicides. I've asked for those numbers in the past and the ATF has told me they don't track them, but Reuters got an answer from them in January, 2025. In that time, they noted that between 2017 and 2023, about 1,700 so-called ghost guns were tied to homicides.
That averages out to 242.9 such guns tied to homicides per year.
But that brings us to the granddaddy of demonic firepower, the so-called assault weapon. Those get the headlines, particularly when they're used in a mass shooting. Those have got to have a massive number of murders tied to them.
Well, in 2024, rifles--not just firearms like AR-15s, but every kind of rifle--accounted for 401 homicides. In 2019, they were used in 364, and that was up from the previous year, so let's roll with the 2024 numbers for the sake of argument.
So, if we add that to the averages for switch-equipped firearm homicides and "ghost gun" homicides, we end up with a total of 652.1. Now, in the interest of fairness, we're talking about different numbers from different places and different years, and not exactly the most unified of data collection. I'm a writer, not a professional scientific researcher, but I doubt we're suddenly going to find that my numbers were massively off.
Now, let's think, 652.1 homicides per year, roughly, in a nation of 330 million people. That suddenly doesn't look earth-shattering anymore, does it? Not even if you look at the average homicide rate over the last decade.
Meanwhile, this study reports that 900 people per year die from constipation in the US. In other words, you're more likely to die from being full of crap than you are from one of these prime targets for gun control, which is ironic because so many advocates for gun control are, in fact, full of crap.
More than 10,000 people die from accidental suffocation or strangulation while in bed each year. Another 1,000--still more than "ghost guns," "assault weapons," and full-auto conversion devices combined on average--are killed by their lawn mowers.
That's not getting into things like tobacco, alcohol, drugs, heart disease, or a million other things that kill far more people than firearms in total, and not just these ever-so-popular targets.
No, I didn't address "high-capacity magazines," but primarily because they're the default magazine for most handguns and rifles, which would skew the numbers. However, a study found that the average number of gunshots per gunshot fatality is fewer than four rounds, which means that magazine restrictions don't seem to be the answer, either.
Plus, we also know that while concealed carry is a popular anti-gun target, people with concealed carry permits are less likely to be convicted of a crime than even police officers.
So, again, if this is about public safety, why is it that the focus of so much of their efforts is on these things that have no real statistical impact on violent crime as a whole? Why not start looking at things like harsher sentencing? Why not go after judges who refuse to lock up violent offenders, giving them things like suspended sentences or probation when prison is clearly warranted? Why not try any of a thousand other things beyond targeting such insignificant threats?
Or is the goal really about trying to gaslight the American public into believing that these will make some kind of difference, all so when they don't, they can keep trying to restrict rights more and more until there's nothing else?
I think we all know the answer.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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