Just last week, Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of the evangelical Liberty University, told students at the school’s convocation they should carry guns because “I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.”
A Gun Dealer Talks Straight About Guns
But walk up to a guy (and it’s still almost always a guy) who is lovingly caressing the gun he just bought and tell him that what he’s holding is a lethal weapon and he’ll stare at you in disbelief. Ask him why he just plunked down $600 and he’ll stare at you again. He bought that gun because he likes buying guns — it’s as simple as that. He may mumble something about the 2nd Amendment because that’s what he’s been told, but if you think picking up a gun is any less impulsive than buying any other nonessential consumer item, think again.
.. But gun owners should be willing to support sensible responses to gun violence like background checks and safe storage laws. Rather than considering them as participants in a modern morality play, they need to be engaged as consumers who, above all, don’t want to lose their ability to quickly and easily purchase guns. The trick is to convince gun owners that by helping to find ways to protect us from gun violence they won’t lose what they love. But that’s a conversation of a very different kind.
Why People Own Guns in New Hampshire
Seasoned gun owners and new shooters talk about why they take the right to own a gun seriously.
Some Inconvenient Gun Facts for Liberals
Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws: With some 13 million Americans now licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime (as conservatives had predicted) nor a spike in killings (as liberals had expected). Liberals were closer to the truth, for the increase in carrying loaded guns does appear to have led to more aggravated assaults with guns, but the fears were overblown.
.. So why does nothing get done? One reason is that liberals often inadvertently antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association by coming across as supercilious, condescending and spectacularly uninformed about the guns they propose to regulate. A classic of gun ignorance: New York passed a law three years ago banning gun magazines holding more than seven bullets — without realizing that for most guns there is no such thing as a magazine for seven bullets or less.
.. Just since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than all the Americans who died in wars going back to the American Revolution (about 1.45 million vs. 1.4 million). That gun toll includes suicides, murders and accidents, and these days it amounts to 92 bodies a day.