NRA-ILA | Vox Wants to Take Your Guns

A conspiracy relies on secrecy. Some are, perhaps, never uncovered. Others are exposed by the conspirators themselves, who cannot help but share the details whether from arrogance or anxiousness.

For years, law-abiding gun owners and the American public at large have been told by anti-gun candidates that they “aren’t coming to take your guns” but they “just want to…”

It’s a sham. It has always been a shame, and it will likely always be a sham. The stated goal of some anti-gunners is typically moral – reducing fatalities. But, as politicians are wont to do, they try to take the easy way: blame the inanimate object. Ignore the tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners who commit no crime, who do no harm every year. Cite poorly done or misconstrued research that caters to a predetermined finding.

German Lopez, writing for Vox, pulled back the curtain in a manic fit of rage this week. Lopez’s article includes the sub-heading “There should be a Medicare-for-All or Green New Deal for ending gun violence.”

Without getting into the theatrical politics of wish-lists and all-encompassing big government programs, neither proposal has advanced past the fantasy stage. We’re a single-issue organization, so let’s see what Lopez wants to see. He wants fewer guns, and he wants to add “significant barriers for even a would-be gun owner who has no ill intent or bad history.”

“A better, more immediate goal, then is to make it harder for literally anyone to buy a firearm and reduce the number of guns not just over time but right now.”

“But in a country that already has so many firearms, something also needs to be done to take out a lot of guns more quickly.”

Lopez doesn’t think the Democratic candidates for President go far enough in their gun control proposals. Keep in the mind, Cory Booker wants to require licensing (based on faulty “research”) and Eric Swalwell wants to confiscate semi-automatic rifles. Lopez’s rationale is that none of the measures anti-gun politicians and organizations push – bans on certain types of firearms, bans on standard capacity magazines, licensing requirements, red-flag laws –  would have an effect on so-called “gun violence.” Even the vaunted “Australian-style gun control” confiscation plan would have no effect, according to both research and academics.

So Lopez wants to reduce the number of firearms privately owned. Immediately after acknowledge the certain failure of gun control plans, he says “To change the status quo, Democrats should go big. They need to focus on the abundance of guns in the US and develop a suite of policies that directly tackle that issue, from licensing to confiscation to more aggressive bans of certain kinds of firearms (including, perhaps, all semiautomatic weapons or at least some types of handguns).”

He claims “the US makes it incredibly easy for people to get guns.” Of course, he ignores the actual common sense truth that criminals don’t legally acquire firearms. In Lopez’s dream scenario, President Elizabeth Warren signs into law every gun control proposal ever made. Do you know who would not turn in their guns and magazines or apply for a permit or submit fingerprints and biometric identification or take a training course or abide by court orders to not possess firearms?

Criminals. The source of the violence that leads anti-gun politicians and media hacks like German Lopez to attack gun owners. Instead of focusing on criminals (using tactics that reliable research has actually found to be effective), Lopez and the gun-free crowd want to make law-abiding gun owners jump through hoops to exercise their Constitutionally-affirmed right.

That is, until anti-gunners have enough support among the leftists to put anti-gun judges on benches throughout the country and ultimately repeal the 2^nd Amendment.

Lopez claims that Democrats have “played it safe on guns for decades.” It isn’t for lack of trying, but gun control proposals have been defeated in legislatures at both the federal and state level, and at the ballot box.  Lopez acknowledges that gun control won’t work, but thinks the policies should be enacted anyway and then more gun control on top of that.

He cites a Morning Consult poll that supposedly found that Democratic voters put gun violence second only to climate change as the issue they want to hear about in the first debate, but the same poll showed that gun control was not among the most important issues even among those planning to vote in the Democratic Primaries[MOU1] .

Cory Booker and Eric Swalwell are named in Lopez’s article as presenting “new” ideas on gun control (though the ideas are not new). Take a look at where that has put them in the Democratic Primary field over on RealClearPolitics, a website that tracks polls. Booker is 7^th nationally, 8^th in Iowa, and 7^th in New Hampshire. Swalwell isn’t even named. Probably too much for him to hope for one of his 18 rally attendees to be one of the respondents in a survey.

Another cited public opinion survey – this one conducted by Pew more than two years ago – is used as evidence that the individual elements of the gun-controllers’ policy wish list has wide support. What that survey fails to consider is three-fold. First, and of utmost importance, is that Constitutional rights are not subject to popular opinion. Second, the Pew survey did not estimate the effectiveness of any policy but merely gauged public opinion. As Lopez himself acknowledges, these policy proposals would have no effect on “gun violence.”

Lastly, the Pew survey included additional questions that are directly relevant. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they believed that a person who wanted to kill or harm other people would find a way to do it whether they had a gun or not. Nearly as many (73%) said the same for people who wanted to kill or harm themselves.

The NRA has been banging this drum for years. Gun owners know the intentions of rabid anti-gunners. Politicians and their sycophants in the media refute these claims, telling Americans that they want “common sense” “reforms.” Every now and then, one of them drops the façade and reveals their true intentions.

In an enjoyable irony, Lopez cites the NRA as an example of long-term strategy. He wrote, “the group began to push against all restrictions on firearms – under the logic that giving even a little on this issue could eventually lead to a sweeping confiscation of everyone’s guns.”

Thanks for making the case for us.