What Happened To All Those ‘Reasonable’ Gun Owners?
Yesterday I spent some time looking at various YouTube videos
of the gun ‘rights’ demo in Richmond, VA. Frankly, I was surprised by the size
of the crowd, if only because the organization that was the primary sponsor of the event,
the Virginia Citizens Defense League, isn’t exactly as big or as financially
well-endowed as AARP. But to the group’s credit, they not only pulled off a
large-scale event, they did it without having to worry about any of the
violence that occurred in Charlottesville, the last time a large group of
gun-owners went marching around a town in
Virginia showing off their guns.
The media mentioned something about a counter-demo that
occurred at the event, but the pro-gun rally not only dwarfed the numbers who
showed up to protest gun ‘rights,’ but the gun-toters showed little or no
concern for the presence of protestors from the other side. The truth is that
if Gun-control Nation were to put together a public event to support Governor
Northam’s new gun bill, I would be pleasantly surprised if 500 people showed
up, and I suspect that most of them would have to be brought down from
somewhere in and around D.C.
Despite Schmuck-o Trump’s claim that the mainstream media is
the ‘enemy of the people,’ the last thing the mainstream media ever figures out
is how to report anything that isn’t within their usual scope of news and
events. And a pro-gun rally just isn’t something that the mainstream media is
going to understand, if only because most educated, liberal-minded people
(which is who usually ends up working for the mainstream media) don’t happen to
own guns.
When I went to the Virginia Citizens Defense League website,
I noticed there are now 136 counties, cities and towns in Virginia that have
become or are becoming ‘2nd-Amendment ‘sanctuaries,’ a pro-gun
movement that I suspect is gathering steam in other gun-rich states as well. Does
this development align itself with the 2020 Trump campaign? Of course. But how
come I don’t see where Gun-control Nation has attempted to enroll a single jurisdiction
in any kind of sanctuary movement that would protect residents from the
violence caused by guns?
What we have instead on the gun-control agenda are the continued
efforts by gun-control organizations and gun-control researchers to come up with
‘reasonable’ laws that will be supported by both sides. According to our
friends at the Bloomberg School, gun owners are almost as strong as non-gun
owners in their support
for the following laws: “universal background checks, greater accountability for
licensed gun dealers unable to account for their inventory, higher safety
training standards for concealed carry permit holders, improved reporting of
records related to mental illness for background checks, gun prohibitions for
persons subject to temporary domestic violence restraining orders, and gun
violence restraining orders.”
How come the researchers didn’t ask these same gun owners how
they feel about being able to walk around in public with an AR-15? How come all
these ‘reasonable’ gun guys, like the gun guys who showed up yesterday at the
Richmond rally, weren’t asked how they feel about gun-free zones? Why is it
that every time Gun-control Nation tries to figure out what the other side
thinks about gun violence, they always ask questions that gun owners don’t
consider to be important at all?
I am still waiting for one, single researcher from the
gun-control community to sit down and ask a group of gun owners what they
believe needs to be done in order to reduce the violence caused by guns. Come
to think of it, if Daniel Webster from Bloomberg or David Hemenway from Harvard
really wanted to know what gun owners think would reduce the 125,000 intentional
injuries that we suffer annually from guns, they could have come down to
Richmond yesterday and talked to some of the thousands of gun nuts who were
happily milling around.
And by the way, let me tell you something that all gun nuts hold
in common – they love to talk about their guns.
