The media outcry against increasing gun ownership by lawful citizens has grown shriller over the past five years as Americans have purchased over 1 million guns each year. The fact that people understand they need to take charge of their own protection just doesn’t make sense to many in well-protected newsrooms across the nation.
Vox.com is the latest to go over the edge concerning guns in America, with a recent headline posing the question, “What happens when everyone decides they need a gun?” The hand wringing op-ed just can’t find an answer to that question, but takes plenty of shots at those who fear our big cities mean streets and feel a need for self-protection.
“Millions more guns, both legal and not, flooded into the country during the pandemic,” the op-ed stated. “Recent Supreme Court decisions made meaningful regulation all but impossible. No one is completely immune from the risks of this new era of gun violence, not even the former president of the United States.
“And though homicide and violent crime have dropped from their pandemic spike, guns are not like iPhones. They don’t outlive their purpose after a few deadly years, and they’re extremely difficult to get rid of safely. They can be deadly for generations to come.”
Oh, the horror! People buying guns who might not ever even need them in a self-defense situation. The author has apparently never heard the term, “It’s better to have a gun and not need one than need a gun and not have one.”
After lengthy discussion on gun purchases and demographics of gun buyers, the op-ed rolls around to the main premise—guns are bad, not good. The editorial quotes John Roman, author of an NORC study out of the University of Chicago.
“It’s conclusive that buying a gun doesn’t make you safer,” Roman said. “If you’re a woman in a household with a gun, your chance of being a victim of firearm homicide goes way up. If you are a teenage or 20-something boy or man, your chance of committing suicide goes up fourfold. We underestimate the cost of gun ownership, in terms of risk of somebody in our household being seriously injured or killed by that gun.”
Of course, another thing that Roman vastly underestimates is how many people buying a gun does make safer. Multiple studies have shown that literally hundreds of thousands of Americans successfully use a firearm in self-defense every single year.
Of course, the Vox article makes no discussion of that, just as you would expect. Telling both sides of the story might make it a little harder to convince readers of their erroneous conclusions.
Vox then turns to an anti-gun Democratic politician to get another take—from the same side—on the issue.
“We haven’t helped people feel safe enough,” said Illinois state Rep. Robin Kelly, whose district includes part of Chicago’s south side. “I can’t tell people how to feel, especially when they see things on the news.”
That statement brings up one of the biggest problems with Democrats’ “solutions” to the problem of burgeoning violent crime. They seem to think their duty is to make people “feel safer,” rather than to actually make them safer. Of course, there’s a big difference.
In the end, while the Vox piece appears to try to be thoughtful, it’s mainly a regurgitation of the same tired anti-gun logic we’ve been hearing for years, simply packaged a little differently. We’d like to say we were surprised, but…
Back to the title of the Vox article, “What happens when everyone decides they need a gun?” As criminals get bolder and more violent and cynical politicians continue to push for gun bans and other restrictions, the time might be now that all lawful citizens need a gun. Criminals already have them anyway.
Read the full article here
