We’ve all seen the polls: the majority of Americans want more gun control. 89% of Americans want to make it illegal to sell a gun to someone who has been flagged as dangerous by a mental health provider, without needing a court order. 88% want background checks on all gun sales. 82% want the legal age to buy ‘assault style weapons’ (whatever that means) raised to 21. 78% want a national database of gun owners, showing every gun each owner owns. 78% want a three day waiting period on all guns. 76% want laws regulating how owners have to store guns. 68% want to ban ‘assault-style’ weapons (whatever that means). 66% want to limit the amount of ammunition someone can buy. 65% want to limit the number of guns someone can buy. 50% want to ban guns from all work environments. 47% want to ban all guns, except those that someone can show a ‘legitimate need’ to own, such as a shot gun or bolt-action rifle for a hunter, or a hand gun for a law enforcement agent.
Some of these gun control ideas are constitutional, while others are not. Support for measures like these tend to spike after mass-shooting events, and recede after, and there is no evidence that any of these measures would make any difference at all (though some of them may merit further review). The efficacy of some of these possible measures have been studied, and the popularity for them varies greatly over time.
What has not been studied, but what needs to be studied, is the impact media reporting, and mass marches, have on public opinion, and these are important questions when considering that today’s media tries to sway public opinion rather than reflect it, and that people like George Soros are spending a great deal of money funding large marches, including paying students $300 a piece to march on Washington (and other places) to demand action on guns.
At the same time, 90% of all media people see in the United States, is controlled by but six companies, and to make matters worse, there is a fair amount of stock inter-ownership between those companies, giving them a fair degree of shared interest.
Public opinion is being manipulated by powerful actors, and someone needs to study the impact.
Against this backdrop, the public is being sold on a bunch of things that are not true. Most Americans, for example, believe that mass shootings are on the rise, but they are not. Also, in spite of the hype, mass shootings are, very rare, with only about four a year.
Most Americans think America is unique when it comes to mass killings. We may be unique in terms of the weapon used, but unless you think that someone killed by a gun is somehow more dead than is someone killed by a bomb, a weaponized fire, or some other weapon, we are not unique at all. I recently did a comparison between the United States and England, and very similar comparisons could be done between the United States and other countries. Our media likes to do poor comparisons, looking at the number of mass killings in the United States, and comparing it to, for example, the number of mass killings in Germany, but Germany only has about a quarter the population as the United States. When population levels are taken into account, we fare pretty well.
When I was a kid, school shootings were rare, but shootings at post offices and fast food restaurants were more common. Of course, when I was a kid, there was no such thing as an unsecured space. You’ll notice that I used the term ‘unsecured space,’ rather than, ‘gun free zone’. That’s because nobody can guarantee that there are no guns in a so-called ‘gun free zone.’ Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, in Parkland, FL, for example, was not gun free when Nikolas Cruz entered it, but it was unsecured, with the police officer who was responsible for security at the school sleeping in his car, and then refusing to enter the building. There were in fact four police officers parked outside the school when this shooting took place. Those officers were instructed to stand fast, outside the building – ordered to keep the school as an unsecured space even while the shooting was going on.
Many want to pin the blame for what happened in Parkland Florida on responsible gun owners, like me. I was not there, and disarming me would have saved exactly zero children. The blame rests with Nikolas Cruz, with the police officer who was sleeping in his car instead of standing his post, and with Jan Jordan, the police captain in charge of Parkland, Florida, who ordered police to form a perimeter around the building, and to not enter, while the shooter killed students. What possible motive did Jan Jordan have to order police officers not to enter the school?!? At best, Jan Jordan put the safety of her own officers ahead of the lives of students. At worse, Jan Jordan is an anti-gun grabber who decided that leaving the police outside the school would lead to a better news story, and a better chance at seeing guns banned. Whatever the case, Jan Jordan has blood on her hands, and few Americans even know who she is. She should be a household name, held in almost as much infamy as is Nikolas Cruz, with whom she will be forever linked.
Banning ‘assault style rifles’ would have zero impact on school shootings, if for no other reason than that the so-called ‘assault style rifles’ are not assault rifles. The military has never issued an AR-15, and it would be very easy to change the appearance of the AR-15 to make it look like any other civilian rifle. The idea that banning rifles like the AR-15 would make students safer, is absurd.
The idea that there will be enough support, in the foreseeable future, to amend the Constitution, to either change, or repeal, the Second Amendment, is likewise absurd.
There are things we can do, but those are not the things the media wants to discuss, and when the media is owned by as few people as it is, and is speaking all in one voice, one has to wonder who the media truly represents. We do not have news. We have only propaganda, and if we listen to the propaganda, we will lose far more than just the Second Amendment.
One thing we can do that the media has not mentioned at all, is to have the left stop teaching hate. The left normalizes hate. Is it really surprising that some who hate also kill?
