Gabby Giffords hates guns. I get it. We all get it. She herself is a victim of a violent attack by a mentally unstable individual with a gun. Coincidentally enough, I too am a victim of a violent attack by a mentally unstable man with a gun. Sadly, I have also lost several friends and coworkers to violent criminals with guns. But unlike Gabby, rather than take the intellectually lazy route, I instead choose to blame the suspect, not the gun. What I don’t understand is why her latest repackaging of her anti-gun organization, “Giffords,” has chosen to include law enforcement as part of the “gun violence” problem.
Think I am making that up? Look at this screen grab right off her website. There, plain as day, one of the gun violence “issues” is “Police Shootings.” But you should not stop there, dig in a little.
“Police violence is gun violence—and it’s long past time that we acknowledge and address it.“
Yep, you read that right. This group is so vehemently against guns that they are claiming that the 1,000 fatal shootings by law enforcement (annual average) are now “gun violence.”
In order to make that claim, one must ignore the fact that in nearly every single one of those incidents, the cops were not only being attacked, but they were being attacked by suspects who were armed with deadly weapons. Just a few short months ago, Tucker Carlson took a close look at the fatal police shootings from 2019, and discussed them on air. While he was discussing the issue in the context of claims that cops as a whole are racist, the numbers are no different when trying to determine if cops are part of the “gun violence” issue, which is exactly what the Giffords group is stating.
To Giffords, self-defense is not justification to use a gun
In fact, one need look no further than the FBI statistics for law enforcement officers killed and assaulted (LEOKA) . While cops, on average, kill 1,000 people every year by shooting them, cops themselves are assaulted with a firearm an average of 2,208 times per year. That is just the number of times cops are assaulted with a gun. If you add in knives and other deadly weapons, cops are assaulted with deadly weapons an average of 11,362 times per year.
Nearly every officer involved shooting per year is deemed lawful, and most of the person shot by the cops were armed, those shootings are in fact lawful self-defense shootings. Since Giffords considers those lawful self-defense shootings to be “the issue,” then it is only logical to conclude that to Giffords and gang, there is no such thing as a legitimate use of a gun in self-defense.
Personally, I sure am glad the law disagrees, lest I would be rotting in prison right now for having shot the guy who attacked me with a gun.
Getting beyond their shameless, baseless attack on law enforcement, and in typical fashion for those seeking to push gun control, the website is filled with twisted statistics and flawed logic.
They throw out, in a very large font, the total number of deaths every year where a gunshot was the cause of death, then later in small print they mention that 61% of those gun deaths were suicides.
In fact, once again they lump LE shootings into the total number of “gun violence deaths,” and since those shootings are nearly all justifiable, it makes me wonder just how many of the other non-suicide gun deaths were in fact lawful shootings, shootings that they are using to justify taking guns away from people.
Are guns themselves racist?
Next, taking a cue from the “all cops are racists” crowd, they make gun violence out to be racist too.
“BLACK AMERICANS ARE AT HIGHER RISK OF GUN HOMICIDE
Gun homicides and assaults disproportionately impact historically underserved communities of color. Black Americans are 10 times more likely than white Americans to be murdered with a gun.”
Of course they fail to mention that nearly all of those black American’s killed with a gun were killed by another black American. This is not remotely a secret, but it is something few choose to acknowledge, let alone discuss. Thankfully, a recent New York Post article talked about it in depth.
Most “gun violence victims” are criminals themselves
Continuing along the path of “ignore the facts, frighten the soft headed people with big scary numbers,” the Giffords group, like all other anti-gun groups, completely ignores the inconvenient truth. What inconvenient truth am I talking about? The fact that in the vast majority of “gun violence” murders, the victims themselves were either criminals, gang members, or an innocent bystander associated with criminals and gang members.
In fact, a recent analysis of homicides that occurred in Baltimore, MD in 2019 found that 82% of the murder victims had criminal records themselves, with the average victim having more than 10 arrests. While this study was only of one city, those numbers coincide with my personal experiences as a cop for 22 years on the opposite side of the country. Honestly, I suspect a survey of homicide investigators nationwide would find the percentage of fatal shooting victims that were criminals themselves would be even higher than what they found in Baltimore.
Statistical outliers, but very scary
Last but not least, they throw in mass shootings. While mass shootings anywhere are a huge statistical anomaly, they are scary to think about. They are even scarier when you do things like look at the raw numbers per country as opposed to the frequency based on populations. It should not surprise anyone that a huge country with over 331 million people has more incidents than smaller countries with only a fraction of the population.
The fact is, statistically speaking, you are more likely to be killed by lighting than you are to be killed in a mass shooting.
However, in order to appeal to one’s emotions, they tell the story of a good man, a US Navy veteran, who had arguably the most horrific luck ever. He was present for both the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting and was sadly killed in the Borderline Bar shooting in Thousand Oaks, CA. While that is very tragic, and seemingly impossible odds, it is not a reason to support more gun control. In fact, it is a perfect example of the inability of gun control to prevent these mass shooting incidents.
Point to utter failure pretending it is the cure
You see, the shooting that took that man’s life happened in California. The state with the strictest gun laws in the country, the state that has every single law that Giffords wants to enact nationally. Every measure they are promoting is there in California, and have been for decades.
All of those laws failed to prevent the very incident that Giffords is using to push gun control. In fact, the suspect in that horrible crime legally acquired the firearm he used, just like many other suspects have, just like the suspect in the Las Vegas shooting did.
History proves again and again that trying to stop gun crime by addressing the guns does not work. What has been shown to work is addressing the criminals, and the mentally unstable. But it is much simpler for the easily swayed and emotionally driven to blame an object than to blame a person.
Oddly enough, the people whose job it is to deal with evil, namely the cops and the military, who have witnessed that evil first hand, we have no problem identifying the source of the issue. Maybe that is why Giffords decided to make the cops out to be the bad guys?
