Tag: gun control

14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns

Guns can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But so are articles about guns written by people who don’t understand anything about them.

There’s sadly no excuse to be ignorant about firearms. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. They’re owned and operated safely by tens of millions of Americans each year. Our Constitution guarantees our individual right to possess guns so that we might be able to defend ourselves from those who would violently take away our freedom. Many gun controllers, however — some of whom have bylines for major media organizations — don’t actually know the first thing about firearms.

Here’s a good example of the kind of self-inflicted injury that can result from weaponizing an ill-informed opinion about guns and gun-related paraphernalia, courtesy of Ryan J. Reilly of Huffington Post:

I believe these are rubber bullets, can anyone confirm? #Fergurson pic.twitter.com/iCsFi6qoIa

Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 17, 2014

Unfortunately, Reilly is hardly alone in his complete ignorance of how guns work. Our nation is facing an epidemic of gun-related misreporting. As a public service to those who have opinions about guns but don’t really want to spend much time learning anything about them, I’ve compiled a simple list of 14 basic things everyone should understand before writing or talking about guns.

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School Calls Cops on 12-Year-Old Boy Who Held Toy Gun During Zoom Class

Isaiah Elliott, a 12-year-old boy who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is fond of his neon green Nerf gun—which has the words “ZOMBIE HUNTER” written on it.

Last week, during a virtual classroom session, Elliott briefly picked up his toy gun, causing it to appear on screen for just a few seconds. This was noticed by his teacher, who promptly alerted the authorities. As a result, the police paid a visit to Elliott’s home and the school suspended him for five days.

The teacher was fairly certain the gun was a toy, according to local news station KDVR. But instead of checking with the parents to assuage any doubts, the school went straight to the cops.

In a statement, the district explained that all school board policies would be enforced regardless of whether “we are in-person learning or distance learning.”

“We take the safety of all our students and staff very seriously,” said the district. “Safety is always our number one priority.”

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Joe Biden Does Not Understand the Second Amendment

When it overturned California’s 10-round magazine limit last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit emphasized what Americans commonly do when they exercise their constitutional right to armed self-defense. Joe Biden, by contrast, thinks the relevant question is how many shells Americans are allowed to have in their shotguns when they hunt migratory birds.

Those two approaches represent the difference between judges who take the Second Amendment seriously and politicians who only pay lip service to it. Biden’s presidential campaign, which promises a raft of new gun restrictions while barely nodding toward the Constitution, shows the extent to which the right to keep and bear arms has become a partisan issue, a development that does not bode well for civil liberties.

The Biden campaign’s website mentions the Second Amendment just once, saying, “It’s within our grasp to end our gun violence epidemic and respect the Second Amendment, which is limited.” Even that grudging acknowledgment is more than the Democratic Party’s platform offers.

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Kamala Harris Brings Gun Confiscation Support to Dem Presidential Ticket

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has done something unprecedented with his pick of Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) as his running mate: put a candidate on the presidential ticket who publicly supports gun confiscation.

During her failed primary campaign, Harris was one of only a handful of candidates to explicitly advocate for the confiscation of what she estimated to be tens of millions of legally owned firearms.

“We have to have a buyback program and I support a mandatory gun buyback program,” she said during an October policy forum hosted by the gun-control group March for Our Lives. “It’s got to be smart. We’ve got to do it the right way but there are five million [assault weapons] at least, some estimate as many as 10 million, and we’re going to have to have smart public policy that’s about taking those off the streets but doing it the right way.”

While Hillary Clinton advocated for a sales ban and even the reversal of the Supreme Court precedent overturning Washington, D.C.’s total ban on handgun ownership during her 2016 campaign, she never expressed support for any form of direct firearms confiscation. And though Joe Biden has advocated for even more stringent gun-control policies than Clinton—including a ban on all guns without “smart” features—he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last year there is “no legal way” to confiscate guns Americans already own.

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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