Their own data
proves that the theory of the “good guy with a gun stopping bad guys” is an
unsupportable lie.
By Samuel Warde
Conservatives and firearm-rights activists and groups are shouting from the rooftops that “more guns saves lives.”
However, Mike
Weisser of the Huffington Post,
otherwise known as ‘Mike the Gun Guy,’ had an interesting post last September
about how “The Gun Lobby’s Own Publications Expose the Fantasy of
the ‘Good Guy With a Gun.’“
Weisser begins by relating the “story out of Detroit where a legally-armed private citizen yanked out a gun and shot a man who was running away from a bank with a pile of cash,” who – no doubt – will be “congratulated by Wayne-o [Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA] for reminding us all about the true value of our 2nd Amendment rights.”
“Indulging in a bit of hyperbole,”
Weisser goes on to point out that: “you would think that since groups like
Everytown and Brady post interviews with
victims of gun violence on their websites, the NRA would want to run stories
about citizen-defenders to promote their point of view.”
Well, as Weisser reports, the NRA has
been running those kinds of stories since 1978 in “something called the Armed Citizen, which is a monthly collection of press reports about good guys
stopping the bad guys; for the current month there are four reports, including
the incident in Detroit, which is slightly less than the average 6-7 reports
published each month.”
And those numbers are where it begins to
get interesting. Breaking the numbers down, Weisser notes – with incredulity –
that
In a country of 319 million people, in a country where civilians own more than 300 million guns, in a country in which at least 12 million good guys have concealed weapons permits, how in God’s name is it possible that only six or seven people use a gun each month to defend themselves or others from a crime?
To try to understand the numbers,
Weisser went to the Armed Citizen website,
only to find stories such as “Car fleeing from police goes through park,
nearly hits children.”
We went there today and found a headline
about “Two preteen girls charged as adults in stabbing of 12-year-old 19
times in planned murder plot.”
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but what in
the hell do either of those stories have to do with “good guys with guns
stopping bad guy” – much less anything to do with the supposed mission of the
Armed Citizen Network?
Since the dawn of time, the armed citizen has been the standard of protection against evil–both on the streets and in office.Founded in 2001, The Armed Citizen Network recognizes this, and provides you with the news and resources you need to remain informed and effective.
Citing an absurd article from a
different gun advocacy group about a woman who pulled a gun on a naked man
trying to commit an unnatural act with a dog in her backyard, Weisser pulls it
all together, writing:
Here’s the bottom line: If the same bunch which assures us that guns are used to stop crimes ‘millions’ of times each year tries to prove it by publishing stories about cars driving through playgrounds or man rapes dog, then the argument about good guys stopping bad guys bears no relationship to the truth. And maybe it’s time to stop advancing cogent, reasoned and researched arguments against gun fantasists like Gary Kleck and John Lott, and step back to take another look.
Samuel Warde
is a writer, social and political activist, and all-around troublemaker.