Yesterday, I stumbled upon an editorial piece in the Baltimore Sun, and it was really tough to read. It was assembled by their editorial board and was titled “Rising gun sales put more lives at risk.”
As with everything else coming out of a liberal echo chamber “news” organization, of course the whole thing starts off by blaming Trump, white racism, and you know, because orange man bad. They bemoan Trump’s talking “about violence in ‘Democrat-run cities’ and how he supports the Second Amendment, but Democrats do not.”
They complain about those statements by Trump, but they never once deny either of them, and they cannot because both are demonstrably true.
The article points out their main fear is the fact that more households will now have guns. Mind you, this is the same exact editorial board that only four short months ago wrote an article defending the liberal left’s idea of “defunding the police.” Ironically, they did that while completely ignoring the skyrocketing violent crime and murder rates in their very own city. Those rising crime rates are the direct result of the police being less proactive after the Freddy Gray saga.
But I digress…
The board accuses Trump of ginning up his supporters by talking about the violent “protests” that have erupted across the country, protests supposedly against what is claimed as rampant police brutality. They continue defending their statement by tossing out that “93% of BLM protest were non-violent,” which means a full 7% of BLM protests were in fact violent. Somehow, that is a rationale to oppose gun ownership? Only 220 riots occurred this year…
These are the same people who claim that police brutality is rampant because a whopping .003% of police contacts result in the use of deadly force.
In other words, 7% violent protests is low, but .003% police brutality is a national epidemic…
To use a quote from their article, “The logic here is inescapable,” or is it?
After two full paragraphs of “Trump bad,” they finally begin discussing the increase in firearm sales. They cite a 76% increase in background checks for Maryland as compared to last year. Maryland is about as blue as a state can get. A full 61% of the registered voters in Maryland are democrats. Are they suggesting the 36% that are republicans account for the 76% increase in gun sales? Or could they perhaps be completely ignoring the fact that liberals too are buying guns?
I might be getting ahead of myself here, but the increased gun sales probably has to do with racism, or something.
“What’s worrisome here is not that the gun industry has profited from scaring people or that Mr. Trump once again found a way to tap white insecurity and racial resentment, but that now a lot more households will be stocked with firearms.”
Ah, there we go. See, racism…
But wait, is it just us ignorant white folk buying guns?
It would appear they are completely ignoring the very well documented spike in gun ownership among black Americans. Hell, even Time magazine, hardly a conservative source, has discussed the surge in gun ownership amongst blacks.
In fact, the largest increase in a single group of gun buyers was with black men and women. According to an NSSF survey from earlier this year, black males represented 9.3% of all gun buyers. Seeing as black males only account for 6.3% of the entire US population, that puts them as the largest represented group of gun buyers based on percentages.
Seems to me the Baltimore Sun Editorial Board is suggesting lots of those black men are having their “white insecurity” tapped by Trump…
Baltimore Sun uses suicide stats to prove guns are bad
Next, the editorial board dives into “public health studies” in an attempt to convince the reader that guns will kill you. Don’t take my word for it, take theirs.
“Having a gun in your home makes you less safe.”
To prove that, they drop this bombshell:
“Men who own handguns, for example, are eight times more likely to die of a gun suicide than those who do not, according to a California study published in June in The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Hang on, let me get this straight… Men who own guns were able to commit suicide with a gun more successfully than men who did not own guns? Uh, really? Say it isn’t so…
If you do not have something, it makes it very hard to kill yourself with that something. Did they also find similar results for men killing themselves with swords, or poison? I would suspect that men who do not live anywhere near a bridge also have a much lower suicide rate by jumping off a bridge than men who live near bridges. If we could only outlaw bridges, and poisons, and sharp cutting instruments, and ropes, and belts, and sleeping pills, or any medication people routinely commit suicide by taking an intentional overdose with…
While any suicide due to mental health issues is bad, they cannot be blamed on guns. In fact there are countries with far higher suicide rates than the United States where civilian firearms ownership is not legal. Something they also choose to ignore are the suicides that are committed because the person is dying and just wants to end their suffering. Many of the firearm related suicides I responded to fit that category.
Oddly enough, something they did not consider was the 100% (I pulled that number out of thin air) of non gun owners who were unsuccessful in defending themselves with a firearm from a violent criminal.
But what about positive uses of guns?
People are victimized by violent criminals thousands of times a day in the United States, but hundreds of times a day, armed citizens defend themselves and others from those criminals. Victims who did not have a gun were not able to use a gun to deter the criminal. Again, inescapable logic.
In fact, guns are used in self-defense an average of 2.2-2.5 Million times a year in the United States. That number is argued by those who push gun control, and they do so by only considering cases where the gun is fired as using a gun in self-defense. The fact of the matter is, merely displaying a gun while resisting a crime more often than not deters the criminal, but there is no national reporting of that type of use. The only reporting occurs when the gun is fired.
That said, even if you accept the numbers and the twisted definition of what constitutes a self-defense gun use pushed by those who seek to limit gun ownership, it is still a large number of uses. According to an NPR article from 2018 in which the author argues against gun ownership, they state that “people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.”
While .9% is a small percentage of the time, just how many people avoided being a victim of a violent crime by using a gun?
Well, according to the very same report they are pointing to, “In 2007-11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender.”
So again, they are suggesting .9% is such a low number that we can disregard it, but .003% (police brutality) is a nationwide epidemic…
COVID, be scared, COVID…
Seeing as this is 2020, they saw fit to throw in the obligatory paragraph about COVID. Granted, the only thing they could say about it is that it had nothing to do with anything. The suicide rate has not changed, but I guess they want you to think COVID might use your gun to kill you?
Baltimore Sun says Biden is not anti-2A…
The editorial board followed all of that up by attempting to convince the reader that Joe Biden is not against the second amendment.
“Meanwhile, don’t blame Joe Biden for raising public interest in gun buying, blame how Republicans have fueled an irrational fear of Mr. Biden’s gun policies.”
I mean the fact that Biden quite literally has said he wants to outlaw the most popular single family of long gun in American history (the AR family of rifles), and all other rifles that are similar to it, that would not possibly motivate people to purchase one, would it?
Or the fact that he promised America that if elected, he was going to appoint Robert Francis O’Rourke (his name is not Beto, he is Irish, not Hispanic) as his “gun czar.” O’Rourke can be seen on video stating “Hell yes we’re going to take your AR-15!” That probably has nothing to do with the surge in gun purchases either, right?
But hey, seems to be that the Baltimore Sun Editorial Board is suggesting those tricky republicans are somehow putting words in Biden’s mouth, or that we are merely stupid and misunderstand what Biden has planned.
In defense of Biden’s anti-gun policies, they hit the reader with the following:
“…he’s (Biden) against high-capacity magazines and assault rifles and for universal background checks. To suggest this is gun-grabbing is the equivalent of protesting speed limits as an unconstitutional violation of freedom of movement.”
Talk about a false comparison. If they want to use cars and driving as the comparison, the more accurate comparison would be Biden telling you that you can only own certain cars, that you have to be approved to purchase one by the government, and that your gas tank could only hold 3 gallons of fuel.
To top that off, if you owned any gas cans or cars they did not approve of, they are going to make you register every single one of those with the federal government and pay an additional tax that in some cases is 20 times more than the cost of the actual item ($200 tax stamp for a standard capacity AR magazine).
Sadly, this Baltimore Sun article is nothing more than a compilation of the lamentations of three very obviously anti-gun liberals who use twisted statistics examined in a vacuum to come to their conclusion that guns are bad.
The only thing that is inescapably clear to me from this article is that the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun does not like guns, Trump or conservatives.
