The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion this week revealed that the second-most annoying phrase in casual conversation is “fake news,” but the college overlooked the fact that falsehoods posing as facts seem to be abundant from a variety of sources, not the least of which is the gun prohibition lobby.
No better example of this may be found than in a Tuesday fund-raising appeal from the anti-gun Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America in which Moms founder Shannon Watts declared, “The NRA spent $50 million to elect dangerous Donald Trump and extremist allies in Congress, but we’re fighting their reckless ‘guns everywhere’ agenda (sic) every step of the way.”
The National Rifle Association has no such agenda, while the organization and other gun rights groups do, in fact, support Concealed Carry Reciprocity legislation now facing a tough fight in the U.S. Senate after passing the House on a 231-198 somewhat party-line vote with all but six Democrats voting against the measure. Fourteen Republicans also voted against it, but not for the same reasons Democrats did.
By no small coincidence, on Tuesday the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms also issued a fund raising appeal so it can support grassroots efforts to push H.R. 38 through the Senate battlefield. CCRKBA also uses its funds for grassroots education in the states, and the group says anti-gun legislation is in the works in “more than a dozen states.” That’s not “fake news” as anyone residing in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Virginia, Illinois and Florida can attest.
“We must hit the ground running to make sure that the U.S. Senate also passes of the National Reciprocity Concealed Carry Bill,” said the message from CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb.
Another gun prohibition lobbying group declared in a Dec. 13 e-mail that following the Sandy Hook tragedy, “We swore that enough was enough. But then came Navy Yard. Charleston. Umpqua Community College. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. Sutherland Springs. The list keeps growing and growing.”
Overlooked in that recitation of tragic events was the fact that they all amount to gun control failures. Background checks were passed, and in the case of Sutherland Springs, the system failed. Second Amendment advocates have long maintained that suggesting “one more law” might prevent what all the preceding laws didn’t prevent is at best delusional.
Ignored altogether in the incessant crusade for increasingly restrictive gun laws is the fact that murder, assault, armed robbery and other misbehavior with firearms is already illegal. Those laws didn’t deter the criminals, either.
The Delaware state Supreme Court recently handed down an opinion that nullified a long-standing gun prohibition in state parks in which the court majority observed that a lower court ruling upholding the ban was “based on the questionable notion — unsupported by reference to any evidence – that outlawing possession of firearms in an area makes law-abiding citizens safer because criminals will, for some reason, obey the regulations,” according to the Delaware State News.
If “Navy Yard. Charleston. Umpqua Community College. San Bernardino. Orlando. Las Vegas. Sutherland Springs” demonstrated anything it would be that the Delaware justices were right. Criminals do not “obey the regulations.” That’s what makes them criminals.
Long story short, perhaps the biggest “fake news” of all is that gun control has worked and will work even better if laws restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens are made stricter.
The consensus among firearms owners is that such nonsense – as opposed to common sense – takes a distant second, especially at this time of year, to believing in Santa Claus.
