It’s time that gun rights advocates in America and around the world (and I’m assuming that includes you, since you’re reading this) started to demand honesty on the part of anti-2A zealots.
Of course, that honesty is something that they will fight kicking and screaming against because they desperately want to believe that they are helping to “protect the children” and to keep people safe. Never mind that that idea on their part is pure cow manure.
See, it’s time that gun rights advocates take the propaganda fight to anti-2A nutcases and start forcing them to explain the increased violence that their policies always create.
What am I talking about? Ranjit Singh gives us some of those details:
Under that [“means-ends scrutiny standard”], Washington D.C.’s total ban on handguns survived because the government’s interest in reducing “gun violence” was important and a blanket ban on handguns was “substantially related” to that goal. If the means were effective, Washington DC would have been one of the safest cities in America, but that was not the case. What the ban did accomplish was destroy the constitutional rights of lawful people.
The same can be said of numerous other gun laws that were rubber-stamped using means-ends scrutiny. Colorado’s “high capacity” magazine ban and other gun control laws had the opposite result of the government’s goal; crime increased since 2013 in Colorado, with Denver violent crime reaching its second highest in May 2023. Illinois’ Firearms Owners Identification Card (FOID) passed judicial muster under means-ends scrutiny, but Chicago’s violence was and still remains so bad that the city is called “Chiraq,” a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq. New York’s “assault weapon” ban, passed with less debate than a law making yogurt the official state snack, was also approved under means-ends scrutiny, but that didn’t result in lower crime or prevent the Buffalo massacre.
If the ends aren’t met, why are the means still kept alive?
(emphasis in the original)
Now, anti-2A politicians have access to the gun data in context, so, they can’t pretend to be ignorant about the true relationship between legal gun ownership and gun violence which shows that increased legal gun ownership decreases gun violence. The possible exception to that is AOC who is ignorant of all kinds of things (insert your joke about AOC here).
So, if anti-2A politicians know the truth and continue to push policies that see more people injured and killed, why do they keep pushing for gun control? The answer is that they want people who care about the Constitution and about freedom to be unarmed and unable to resist the type of tyrannical government that political leftists are pushing for. And we see how that caused, by some estimates, 100 million people killed by those types of governments in the last century.
As advocates for gun rights, we need to take the offensive and start demanding that gun control advocates justify with honest, in context statistics how they can pretend to be trying to save lives while pushing for policies that cause more death.
When we stop playing nice with people by being polite and courteous to those who aren’t playing nice or being honest (I’m looking at you, David Hogg) and who try to shout out the truth that we speak, then, we have a better chance of reaching both the genuinely ignorant and the undecided on the gun rights issue.
We cannot allow anti-2A nutcases and “Mao wannabes” in government to continue to control that narrative through lies and arrogance. Our rights and the rights that our children are able to exercise may be dependent on it.