There Really Is A Way To End Gun Violence.
One of the favorite games played by members of
Gun-Control Nation (myself included) over the last couple of years was to look
at the monthly background check report issued by FBI-NICS and announce
with glee that the number of checks for gun transfers each month was going
down. We all figured that if the slide continued through four years of Trump
(and God forbid eight years if he won again) that the problem of gun violence
would take care of itself because as a consumer item, the guns would simply go
away.
Guess what? We forgot that gun sales have always been
pushed or pulled by the fear that guns might disappear. And now that virtually
every 2020 Democratic candidate has promised to do ‘something’ about gun
violence, the fear has returned within the ranks of Gun-nut Nation and the
virus is beginning to spread.
When it comes to gun retailing, August is always the
slowest month of the year. Guns can’t compete with the beach. By the time you
pay for that beach house rental, buy some sand toys for the kids and eat at the
Clam Shack every night, the five hundred bucks you stashed away because you
just have to have that little walkaround Glock, is money that has been
spent.
It turns out that not only did the August NICS
numbers show a 15% increase over the August numbers for 2018, they were the
highest numbers for any August going all the way back through the years
of the hated Obama regime. The increase was strongest in the ‘other’ category,
which happens to be the category which usually designates ‘black’ guns, a.k.a.,
AR-15’s. In Florida, where our friends are trying
to get a Constitutional ban on assault rifles on the 2020 ballot, the increase
in ‘other’ background checks was 48.7 percent.
The good news for gun nuts is that this spike in sales
has not yet generated any upward movement in prices for either ammunition or
guns. One of the big online resellers, Cheaper Than Dirt, is listing
quality 22LR ammunition for five cents a round, which is a price in adjusted
dollars out of 1975. Another outfit has fully-assembled AR’s for less than $500
bucks. When Obama was turning America into a Muslim state, you couldn’t find a
black gun anywhere for under a thou.
My friends in Gun-control Nation who are busily
promoting an expansion of background checks or Red Flag laws or some other type
of ‘reasonable’ restriction that will keep guns out of the ‘wrong’ hands, need
to remember that every, single one of the more than one million NICS checks
done in August represents a gun being transferred into the ‘right’ hands. How do
any of those new additions to the civilian gun arsenal wind up being used by
someone to blow someone else away, which happens to be most of the gun injuries
which happen every day? We have
absolutely no idea.
Back in 1993 and 1994, Art Kellerman and Fred Rivara
published research which definitively found that access to guns increased homicide
and suicide
risk. And by the way, these studies didn’t differentiate between guns that were,
or were not safely stored. These studies got the gun industry to push their
friends in Congress to delete gun research from the budget of the CDC, a
budget item that my friends in public health are now clamoring to restore.
If there had been a grass-roots movement for gun
control in the 1990’s, the findings by Kellerman and Rivara might have been
translated into a law to strictly regulate the ownership of assault rifles and
semi-automatic pistols. This kind of law exists in every other advanced
nation-state, which is why they don’t suffer from gun violence and we do.
With all due respect to my liberal friends who remain enthralled by the 2nd Amendment, we don’t need no stinkin’ research, we don’t need no stinkin’ reasonable laws. We just need to get rid of certain guns which were never designed for hunting or sport.
Gee, that was a tough one to figure out.
