Defeat the Lies of Gun Control with Facts

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went on a rant that targeted conservative media and the Second Amendment. It’s one that Second Amendment supporters should pay some heed to, even though Wallace these days is little more than a Beltway version of Regina George.

Wallace may be a NeverTrump “mean girl” these days, but she also was – at least putatively – a one-time Second Amendment supporter (and she worked for a President who appointed two of the five justices in the Heller majority). She also was a White House communications director, and as much as we may want to dismiss her, dummies don’t become White House communications directors. People who show loyalty and competence usually get that job.

This is why her claim that America has a gun crisis needs to be taken on, forcefully. Like David Frum’s lie about responsible gun ownership and the phony bologna claims about the origins of the Second Amendment from Carol Anderson (via the ACLU), we must push back. These lies are not small potatoes.

How do we fight back? With the facts.

Some of these facts come from looking over the latest FBI stats. In 2020, a total of 455 homicides were carried out with rifles, with another 203 carried out by shotguns. To put that into perspective, “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet, etc.) killed 662 people or more than rifles and shotguns of all types combined. Handguns and “firearms, type not stated” were used in 8,209 and 4,863 homicides, respectively.

There are roughly 150 million handguns in the United States, according to an NRA-ILA Fact Sheet. That means in 2020, .0054 percent of handguns were used in homicides or one in 18,272.627603. It should be noted that since the landmark Heller ruling in 2008, the Supreme Court has held that handgun bans are unconstitutional.

The next fact that Wallace ignores is that we know what has caused the latest upswing in violent crime: No prosecuting the violent offenders. Take some of the outrageous decisions from Chicago, for instance, or for the prosecutors whose campaigns George Soros has funded. Even if authorities can’t get murder charges perhaps some of the rarely-used provisions of 18 USC 922 and 18 USC 924 could make a dent. The problem is, these aren’t used, and similar state-level provisions also aren’t used.

Second Amendment supporters can debate the wisdom of various gun laws, but the laws that Project Exile enforced can and would make a huge difference in the places that are seeing the worst of violent crime. Part of the way dishonest hacks and anti-Second Amendment extremists will sell the false notion of a ”gun crisis” (especially in the “public health” arena) is to point to murder rates and violent crime.

The ultimate task for Second Amendment supporters is to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level – not to mention in corporate boardrooms and elsewhere. However, to do that, they need to not only prove claims of a “gun crisis” are phony, they need to show that the solution to the real crisis is not found in attacking the Second Amendment.