It’s Time To Give Gun Control Advocates an Offramp

By
Jennifer Sensiba
-
134

A recent tweet by David Hogg reveals the angst many gun control activists are feeling right now.

In another article, I covered the big losses Everytown and Moms Demand Action have taken in recent years. They brag on their “wins,” only to have most of it unravel like a sweater that gets a loose string stuck in the side of the dryer.

But I don’t want to be mean and poke more fun at them while celebrating their losses. Instead, let’s take a look at why they’re losing and some constructive things they can do with their time.

Gun Control Is Dead

As Hogg’s tweet makes clear, proponents of gun control have made the mistake of thinking that the NRA was the center of the gun rights movement, and that Wayne LaPierre was holding the whole thing up singlehandedly. With that false premise in mind, they set out to strike what they thought was the Death Star’s main reactor.

But, when the NRA was significantly weakened with various investigations swirling around the association and LaPierre, they found — to their dawning horror — that the gun rights movement didn’t blow up. That’s because the power of the opposition to limits on Second Amendment rights has never been with the NRA. It lies in the hands of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans who own and (increasingly) carry firearms.

Worse for them, it civilian gun ownership and opposition to gun control have only accelerated over the past two-plus years.

What the empire of civilian disarmament failed to realize is that, despite being generously funded by billionaires and cash-flush left wing foundations, the gun control movement — restricting the average citizen’s right to keep and bear arms — is on the ropes when it comes to public opinion.

This website has chronicled the shift in Americans’ attitudes . . .

Gun control advocates hoped that maybe someday, when the young people who support them get into government and more of us older gun-toting troglodytes die off, they’d finally get what they want and make the United States more like Europe. Or maybe even Australia. Alas, none of that has come to pass. And support for their anti-gun positions is plummeting…even among young people.

So while they would never admit it publicly, gun gun-grabbing community is gradually coming to realize that gun control has no real future. That’s gotta be depressing for them. On top of that, their ability to keep people from accessing firearms is disappearing faster than a display of affordably-priced ammo at your local retailer.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of 3D-printed guns, or as the gun-grabbers like to call them, “ghost guns.” At first, 3D-printed guns were fairly flimsy single-shot things that were potentially dangerous to fire. But the state of the art has progressed since then. A lot. Designers like Jstark (who died under suspicious circumstances) have come up with plans and files for guns that can be built without even needing parts that are regulated in places like Europe.

That leaves the very concept of gun control completely unworkable. Sure, police can theoretically catch a person with a homebuilt gun here and there and prosecute them after the fact. But they can no longer do anything to prevent people from obtaining firearms if they want them. Even in repressive societies like Burma, the military junta that runs the country can’t stop the signal.

Of course, we can’t expect all gun control advocates to come to this realization immediately. After all, the first stage of grief is denial. Some are moving through anger and bargaining, and our friend David, above, seems to be all the way to stage four. But there’s still a long way to go before a significant number of the gun control industry finally reaches acceptance.

There Are Alternatives To Gun Control

So to all of you civilian disarmament advocates out there…I feel your pain. Really I do.

Still, why should you listen to me? Well, I’m most of the way done with master’s degree in Emergency Management and Homeland Security and I’ve been through a police academy. So I understand public safety issues better than the average person.

I’m also not a Republican and on most issues, I’m not even what anyone would consider right wing. I’m a lesbian who writes for a popular electric car and clean energy website when I’m not writing here. So I’m not going to offer simplistic solutions and tell you something like “everyone just needs more Jesus in their lives” (although, I don’t think sincere worship is a bad thing at all).

Look, I understand that most of you red-shirted moms sincerely care about your communities and public safety. While I think you’re misguided and that some of the leaders of the gun control movement have authoritarian ulterior motives, the fundamental drive most of you feel to make the world a better place makes you a fundamentally good person. Don’t give that good part of you up or slide into depression just because you’ve lost the argument on gun control.

With getting gun control enacted becoming increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible, especially in the United States, it’s time to take that energy of yourse and direct it in more productive and less futile directions.

Community safety simply can’t hinge on passing more gun control laws. It’s just a fig leaf covering (but not actually addressing) the real problem: non-defensive violence. Banning guns while not addressing the root causes of violence is like putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound and hoping the patient will get better.

You probably agree with me that poverty, racism, bigotry, employment discrimination, drug addiction, homelessness, untreated mental illness, a broken education system, the school-to-prison pipeline, prisons that warehouse people instead of rehabilitating them, the War on Drugs™, political divisiveness, rigged and gerrymandered elections, and many other unfair aspects of society and politics drive a significant portion of violence through desperation.

Instead of focusing your efforts on gun control, maybe it’s time to do what Putin should be doing right now and look for an offramp out of a losing conflict. Focus your efforts on doing things to address the real problems that drive people to commit non-defensive violence in your community. There’s so much work to be done on those issues and there is no shortage of organizations you can get involved with to work on them.

Or, do what I did and become a certified firearms instructor and teach people how to properly store, handle, and use guns so there are fewer accidents and they can safely defend themselves and their families

Don’t wait for the government to enact another gun control law. Even if it happens, it’s worse than useless. Instead, keep being a good person and help us work toward making the world a better place. For real.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

134 COMMENTS

      • Looks like Hogg has reached an age where he might have pubes. He is still hammering on subjects he has no experience in I see.

    • “…need to be ridiculed and mocked at every opportunity.”

      Once again, Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’, popular with Leftist Scum everywhere, speaks on this :

      Number 5 – “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

      Laugh at them, and make it *mean* laughter. Turn up the hatred. Everyone is free to practice on my demented little-boy troll, peeegee2.

      Experiment! But most of all, have FUN! 🙂 🙂

      • Geoff,

        Well, your little boy-toy troll IS a fun target to play “Whack-a-mole” with, but . . . he’s really not much of a challenge. A halfwit wanker with delusions of gender is a better description than “challenge”. He couldn’t craft a competent insult to save his worthless life.

  2. “…or slide into depression…”
    eau contraire, please do so immediately.
    quite a bit of feel good superlatives here. our progressive friends to the north interested in creating a false sense of security?
    as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, i find renewable energy interesting.
    but i’d bring back kawi pre- mix two strokes.

  5. The polling amoung young people has been moving in a pro-gun direction since the mid 2000’s. There were even a few years in the 20-teens where polls of college kids found greater 2A support among the <25 cohort than any other age group.

    It infuriated both sides of the political aisle. The Left was mad as hell about young people liking guns and the Right was ticked that young people supported guns and abortion.

    Hogg was always fighting a losing statistical battle. But he had money and media thrown his way over something he was obviously, on some level, way too emo about. So, he put the horse before the cart.

    Cool, but from the other side there are other areas of the data that should be concerning for the country overall.

    • Horse was before the cart (well funded and on message for the 80-90’s) but horse was dead and being beaten (AWB sunset and more shall/constitutional carry states every year since the late 90’s). Now if we could only get the money issue out of the hands of those who like inflation as a hidden tax.

    • “There were even a few years in the 20-teens where polls of college kids found greater 2A support among the <25 cohort than any other age group."

      I believe a driver in that was the surging popularity of the first-person shooter video games, where they modeled real guns in the game play. They got an urge to try it for themselves, and they *liked it*.

      You gotta love the fact that a Leftist controlled industry is providing ample rope to hang gun control by the neck until dead. Along with Hollywood glorifying guns in their movies, stopping evil, saving the girl, etc, they are doing a *massive* part of the heavy lifting for us… 🙂

      • RF believed this to be true.

        I concur. I know several people who saved up and bought a Vector because of MW3.

        My personal “want” from a shooter game is the GLOO gun from Prey.

  6. Thanks for telling us you are a lezbun. As if anyone gives a shit. I’ll never understand the need for people in certain segments of society to have to disclose their sexual preferences. WGAF?

        • “Yeah, not so much.”

          You seem to be kinda threatened by it, Vahn, otherwise, why say anything? 🙂

      • They have PRIDE parades, PRIDE month, they’ll get you fired if you have a traditional perspective on human sexuality and marriage, they’ll call you a bigot if you object to them indoctrinating and grooming your children to accept sexual degeneracy, they’ll put their pronouns in their Bio or on their lapel, Hell, they even have their own FLAGS.

        Trust me, they WANT you to care. They do everything to MAKE you care.

        I say again, these people are the symptoms of a dying society. Our civilization was not made great by embracing sexual degeneracy and confusion.

    • She was using that declaration to juxtapose herself with the typical moderate or right wing gun owner to emphasize just how much gun control PR is failing. I’m positive she didnt mean to hurt your feelings, bro.

      • I’m positive she didn’t hurt my feelings bro. I’m also positive she is very insecure as well as she detracted from her main messaging.

    • RE: “That’s because the power of the opposition to limits on Second Amendment rights has never been with the NRA. It lies in the hands of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans who own and (increasingly) carry firearms.”

      For far too long Gun Control zealots have been allowed to put a sugar and spice and everything nice smiley face on Gun Control. A headline shooting occurs and here comes Gun Control to the rescue wearing the good guy white hat. Until Gun control is defined according to its history of racism and genocide Gun Control will continue to attract useful idiots. Useful idiots who are clueless about the baggage full of insanity that comes with Gun Control where ever it’s been or where ever it goes.

      The only way to stop Gun Control in its tracks is by tens of millions of law-abiding Gun Owners properly defining Gun Control by its diabolical history. It’s not rocket science…For the Second Amendment to survive requires bombarding spoon fed America with the Truth About Gun Control.

    • @Geoff, threatened? Trying to cancel me now Geoff? Funny. For all you know, I might be a gay man. Or a transgender FTM. Point being is, it isn’t germane to the discussion save for one thing: agenda.

      • “Trying to cancel me now Geoff? ”

        You are apparently too stupid to know what ‘canceling’ even is.

        Exactly how did I STOP YOU from making a comment? Did I get your comment deleted? Were you unable to make a comment? No.

        That’s what canceling is, Vahn… 🙁

        • Oh wow, thanks for the lesson Geoff. I feel so much better now. As the lepper said to the prostitute, keep the tip.

    • She’s saying that because idiots like Hogg want to paint all of us as knuckle-dragging klansmen and people like her need guns because freaks target her community.

  8. At this point I’d like to thank dacian for all the help he gives towards making guns acceptable to the masses. Without the help of guys like dacian it would have been a much tougher battle.

  9. The gun controllers do not want to address the root causes of violent crime.

    Gun control is about people control.

    The only way to force leftist policies on “normal” Americans is to disarm us.

    So reasoning with them is useless.

    • Exactly this. And their disciples aren’t against guns per say as long as those guns are only in the hands of the ‘proper authorities’ (read: those very same “gun controllers”). What an insanely dangerous mind set. In the (more) natural world this would be the evolutionary equivalent of ungulates willingly giving up a leg in the name of Herd Defense, a policy preached to them by the Herd Leaders who will, of course, retain all four legs, also in the name of Herd Defense. It goes well beyond mere stoopidity. Boggles the mind. But baaa baaa, mooo mooo.

  10. I really wish people would read what they have typed before publishing. I’ve read one or two posts a day from multiple contributors for a week now and all of them have had at least one sophomoric error that detracts greatly from the content. Makes it difficult to share these contributions with educated people that aren’t POTG but are persuadable.

  11. Mr. Hogg:
    It is the Democrats that don’t care. If they care about anything at all, it’s theirselves and their own self aggrandizement.

    This is not about the NRA. You have not takin down the NRA. If this organization has problems then it’s because of their own failings combined with the insanity of the Democrat party.

    You so obviously have not learned anything in this experience. People have the right to protect themselves. Criminals do not obey laws. Permitless carry is not there for our government to grant us rights. We have mental cases running Washington right now and they are doing everything they can to destroy us…and your helping them. You have allowed yourself to become a slave.

    Stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

    • So right. If the gun controllers put the same energy and resources into the real problems and causes
      of violence in society, they might actually accomplish something useful

  12. This whole “can’t stop the signal” argument is a false sense of security. It just means that increasingly the focus will be on controlling ammunition. Sure you can reload brass and cast bullets, but good luck manufacturing your own primers of satisfactory quality.

    • Appropriate sized punch, hammer, and hard sturdy surface and several kinds of primer compound substitutes are readily available and would cover plinking ammo to a poor to acceptable quality. Powder is surprisingly more tricky for the smokeless variety via redneck engineering. For defensive or match grade ammo yeah SOL for remanufacturing primers at home.

    • How many primers do you think the average reloader has?

      Can’t speak for myself, but I know two that could supply a battalion.

      However, point taken – the weakest link in the supply chain is primers (and powder – hat tip to SAFEupstateFML). There’s a brave guy on THR that documented how to “reload” primers. Good enough for practice rounds.

      • While I had the punch and cast iron plate for a hard surface I went with strike anywhere match tips and tended towards a 70ish percent function in 308 reloads. Might be able to get it more reliable over time with more practice but got pretty familiar with hangfire drills last September. Thankfully primers and cheaper ammo are trickling back but it was a fun experiment.

    • If the basic general mechanical design and function of firearms is to continue then someone will at some point come up with a reliable and sustainable means of home based manufacturing of something to replace primers. All this really means is technological advancement marching on. There was a time when something like 3D printing of guns were considered impossible as being the stuff of science fiction. Like driverless cars or Manchurian presidents.

  13. While I think you’re misguided and that some of the leaders of the gun control movement have authoritarian ulterior motives, the fundamental drive most of you feel to make the world a better place makes you a fundamentally good person.

    Don’t fool yourself that there needs to be some divide between “a drive to make the world better” and “authoritarian ulterior motives”. The pages of history are littered with evil tyrants who thought they were doing God’s work. Maybe individual rights and human freedom didn’t figure highly in their vision of “a better world”. Maybe they were just acceptable sacrifices for what they judged to be a higher good. Either way, a drive to make the world better didn’t make them “fundamentally good people”, it made them monsters.

  14. “poverty, racism, bigotry, employment discrimination, drug addiction, homelessness, untreated mental illness, a broken education system, the school-to-prison pipeline, prisons that warehouse people instead of rehabilitating them, the War on Drugs™, political divisiveness, rigged and gerrymandered elections, and many other unfair aspects of society and politics drive a significant portion of violence through desperation.”

    Utter nonsense. What drives criminal violence is a toxic inner-city culture created and/or supported by the people who live there and who refuse to take responsibility for it.

    • Yup. That’s her ‘woke spot’ (blind spot) speaking. Odd how a person can grasp the fundamental wrong of “gun control” yet utterly fail to apply their (newfound?) critical reasoning skills to other issues.

      • Self awareness requires inward reflection, if someone is rotten in their core of being would they even want to look inwards let alone be able to learn something of value?

        • Good point. Explains our less imaginative trolls nicely as well. Also explains the idiot manchild in Ottawa to a great degree (although I could happily add to that…).

  15. While I agree with Jennifer on the principle, I think they have roadblocks to switching gears.
    Money is a major factor.
    They have built an industry around the idea of pushing gun control. Their lively hood is based on pushing the “lie” narrative.
    Not only are they realize their industry is dying, but they also are realizing they will soon by unemployed.

    • That sucks………guess they may have to get a real job now in one of the most available and high income job markets where no one wants to work I have ever seen………..second thought they can go piss up a rope with their issues.

    • Right in one.

      Like so many activist organizations, the money and benefits only keep flowing only as long as they can convince donors that the sky is falling and that they can do something to stop it. Once the rubes figure out that either (1) the sky is not in fact falling, and/or (2) the organization isn’t able to do what it claims about it, then someone will have to find a new hustle or learn to code. They aren’t interested in an “off ramp.”

      And, of course, a lot of these people define themselves through their commitment to the cause. Hogg is the perfect example. Except for his self-promotion as a face for more gun control, does he have any actual talents or skills? Nope. If he takes the L and a proffered “off ramp,” what’s he left with? Zilch.

      The best part is that the despair levels of Hogg, Watts, etc., are going to go through the roof if SCOTUS delivers what most legal observers think is coming (possibly as early as this Thursday) in NYSR&PA. I gleefully await the opportunity “to hear the lamentations of their women” . . . as well as their soibois.

      • Exactly. And absolutely. And a little barbarous schadenfreude can be quite uplifting. Crom for the win.

      • “The best part is that the despair levels of Hogg, Watts, etc., are going to go through the roof if SCOTUS delivers what most legal observers think is coming (possibly as early as this Thursday) in NYSR&PA.”

        Don’t they usually save the biggest cases for the last day and hour?

        • Not necessarily.

          When a case is argued in the first part of the term (Oct-Dec), it’s pretty unusual for the opinion to be delayed all the way to May. There is always a mad dash in the last couple of months of the term to get everything finished (example: there are ten cases — including some big ones — that will be argued in April, and all those cases will have to be completed before the court breaks in June), so there is pressure on the justices to get the early cases out the door so that they can then focus on the remaining ones.

          And let’s not lose perspective . . . while we here at TTAG see the NYSR&PA case as the highlight of the term (and we’ve been waiting for a case like it for years and years), in the overall scheme of things there are lots of cases that most people (including, probably, all the SCOTUS justices) will view as much more important and controversial. Dobbs [abortion case] will likely be considered to be the big case of the term, especially if it overrules Roe / Casey.

          I’ve been keeping track — of the nine cases argued in October, seven have been decided. Of the ten in November, six have (NYSR&PA and three others have not). Of the ten in December, only one has.

          When you then look at the distribution of which judges have written majority opinions from October and November arguments (and just as importantly, which judges haven’t), I give it very good odds that Kavanaugh has the pencil for the NYSR&PA opinion. Alito, Roberts, Breyer, and Gorsuch have each written two; Sotomajor has two plus a dismissal opinion; Thomas, Kagan, and Barrett have one each . . . Kavanaugh has none.

          Ergo, unlikely that it’ll be Roberts, Alito, or Gorsuch — they’ve already issued two opinions. Unlikely that something of this magnitude would be given to the juniormost justice, so probably not Barrett. No way it’ll be Breyer (2 opinions issued), Kagan (1), or Sotomajor (3).

          That leaves Kavanaugh and Thomas. I’d love to see it be Thomas, but highly likely that Roberts has likely voted with the majority so that he could assign it to Kavanaugh — if Roberts voted with the minority, Thomas would have the right to assign the opinion, and would probably take it for himself.

          Anyway, SCOTUS will be announcing opinions at 9AM Thursday morning. While Cody W. disagrees with me, I think there’s a decent chance we will get an opinion this week or next.

      • I’m still waiting for the news article where Hogg-boy and buzzcut girl are found dead in a motel room having overdosed on heroin.

        • Pure Fentanyl is brutally toxic in it’s pure form.

          I’ve heard mentions that all it takes for a fatal dose is the equivalent of something like 3 grains of table salt. Not sea salt or kosher salt, table salt.

          That would make it a nice murder weapon if someone could get close enough to the victim to casually brush a sleeve with that on it while walking past them… 🙁

    • Your point is a salient one, perhaps even more so that you have considered. The March of Dimes was established to fund the fight against polio.

      Polio has effectively been eradicated. The March of Dimes? In a less broken world, the organization would have thrown a victory party on New Year’s Day, given everybody a paycheck through the end of the year, paid all their outstanding bills, and closed their doors forever. THAT was an activist group “on the right side of history” that WON their fight, how much more dysfunctional is a movement that is on the wrong side (morally and ethically) going to be as it loses?

    • No doubt. And I’d still rather push them off the edge than provide them an easy out. Call me vindictive but they’ve earned every bit of the hate.

        • Crickets, Safe (not that I’m much tuned into our/the “media”). Guess it just doesn’t fit their agenda. That and it’s based on such obvious lies and so obviously fabricated they may be giving it a wide berth; in the various court cases opposing the idiot manchilds abuse of an Order in Council (your Executive Order, sorta) they refuse to supply their ‘evidence’, now defying multiple court orders to do so, demonstrating “good and sufficient cause” claiming “national security interests”. We are left to wonder exactly why that might be 🙄 and exactly how such ‘evidence’ could possibly be a big enough secret that would undermine our national security if the knowledge that guns have been used to shoot people (although not any of the so afflicted models of guns save one; a Ruger Mini14 decades ago) is released unto the public. It’s all laughable at this point, along with the little league Mafioso crew behind it. Thanks for showing interest, Safe, there’s a disturbing lack of it north and south, what with being Freedom and Liberty n all. Frustrating.

        • Rider if not for the chans and a few occasional visitors to my area we wouldn’t even have known you had confiscations looming let alone delayed. Your description sounds like the SOP of NY during covid for pretty much every bit of nonsense they put out that is slowly getting unraveled in court now. Good luck up there and if you need to border hop on the east coast region may I suggest New Hampshire as many of its neighbors can get a bit weird. And if you are in other provinces best guess.

        • Thanks Safe. And yes it’s pretty obvious by now they all get their marching orders from the same source and their widely distributed script. I’m in Beautiful British Columbia (unfortunate connotation in the name) and I would find it unpossible to give ground to The Enemy (this is my home, not their compound) but Idaho looks very attractive as of late… Cheers.

  17. Zealots don’t want an offramp.
    There is no shortage of outs for these people but they always double down and dig in.
    Covid is still killing 99%, Nazis never came to work for the US, BLM never rioted or embezzled millions, the Russia dossier is fact, Azov are saints and Ukraine is a bastion of liberal ideals, etc…

    At any time they can just stop. They don’t even have to admit they’re wrong or apologize. All they need to do is shut up.

      • But they may need to find a new dead horse to beat if funding dries up as return on investment evaporates. Thats optimistic of me but see what happens in the next few months re court cases big and small.

        • True. None of the pushers are true believers but that works both ways as others have pointed out above; given the abject stoopidity of so very many they will always beat that horse unless/until that corpse truly turns to dust and finally blows away in the wind, which it likely never will. And many will have no mount at all without that horse, they just aren’t that talented as grifters go and thus eternal resurrection will be their game with plenty of professional panderers available to pander to the panderable… who are legion.

        • From poverty pimps to safety simps you just defined a range of lefty graft quite well.

        • Riderless/ShootOff Canuck,
          Great run-on-sentence. Still haven’t taken the remedial English course I see.

        • Safe, yeah, they’re a pretty despicable lot, aren’t they? Pretty much the lowest of the low, right beside domestic and child abusers. But I prob repeat myself (cue beverly the third from Gilligans Island).

        • Riderless/ShootOff Canuck. I have found that liars like you are the lowest of the low.

          Again, it’s Mr Beverly or Sergeant to you. If you can’t respect your betters, respect your betters.

      • Yo man you just gonna let ‘Walter E. Beverly III’ mock you without a response?

        • Ha! Nope: “geez, beverly, is that all you got after all this time?” In truth he ain’t worth a response, merely a calling out. Again, stay tuned.

        • Say It Ain’t So I did not mock Riderless/ShootOff Canuck I told the truth.

          And like for the Riderless/ShootOff Canuck, it’s Mr Beverly to you or Sergeant/ if you can’t respect your elders, respect your betters.

          I’ll venture a guess, you are RIDERLESS!

        • Beverly dear, you aren’t capable of mocking me; 1) there’s nothing to ‘mock’. 2) you simply are not possessed of an intelligence level adequate to the task. 3) you are in no way “my better” nor are you even likely my elder. 4) it is not I, beverly, who is the liar, but you.
          And I am most certainly not “riderless” in either of the two senses I suspect you are trying to convey with your awkward and ridiculous attempt at word usage. Once again your entire post is a desecration of your own native tongue. How embarrassing for you, beverly. But then I don’t imagine a liar such as yourself embarrasses easily.

  18. quote——————What the empire of civilian disarmament failed to realize is that, despite being generously funded by billionaires and cash-flush left wing foundations, the gun control movement — restricting the average citizen’s right to keep and bear arms — is on the ropes when it comes to public opinion.————–quote

    Total falsehood. Even the majority of Republicans are in favor of Universal Background Checks. When the horrific double mass murders in Texas and in Ohio only hours apart happened Mitch McConnell stated that the Republicans were ready to pass gun control measures if Trump gave them the green light. Of course rather than take the moral high ground and save thousands of lives the coward Trump bent over to the will of the gangster criminals of the NRA where big money made a prostitute out of Trump.

    Universal Background Checks

    Given these statistics, a universal background check seems like a solution to the issue of gun violence in the United States. In fact, according to a Public Policy Polling survey, 83 percent of gun owners support expanded background checks on sales of all firearms, including 72 percent of all NRA members. As a result, it would seem strange that the NRA has not come out in full support of universal background checks. One explanation is that the NRA only represents about 5 million of the 105 million Americans who own guns, which means they may have a skewed representation of gun owners. Even this explanation, however, doesn’t suffice, since the same survey found that 72 percent of NRA members also supported universal background checks. Regardless of how representative the NRA and its leaders are of gun owners and their own members, they are the most powerful gun lobby and one of the most powerful interest groups in general so they have a huge impact on any discussion of gun legislation.

    https://iop.harvard.edu/get-involved/harvard-political-review/vast-majority-americans-support-universal-background-checks

    • Ok Vlad give it a rest and take the L you will have other civil rights to bitch and moan about people exercising.

    • Yeah, I actually read that study and it’s bullsh*t. Specially, the people that asked the questions of NRA members specially changed the definition of ‘background check’. Switching between referencing the current NICS system when they asked an NRA member about it but inserting ‘universal background checks’ when asking a non-NRA member.

      This is also an example of how leftoid SCUM that run the MSM operate. The used cherry picked data and specially sculpted opinions pools to present the illusion of wide support.

      • to Dog of War

        The average person knows damn well what Universal Background Checks are and that includes both gun owners and non-gun owners, its not rocket science. The both know that the current Brady Bill only vets new guns not used ones.

        • Appealingly to some supposed majority is the comment tactic of the leftoid when they don’t have an actual point. It has no validity. It’s just the fiction you want to push upon everyone.

        • “The both know that the current Brady Bill only vets new guns not used ones.”[sic]

          Well skippy, where to begin. How about this, from the article you cited.

          “Under current federal law, individuals do not have to obtain a background check when buying guns online or from private sellers at a gun show.”

          I don’t know where you hail from, but in the U.S., firearms that are purchased online by non-FFL persons must be shipped to an FFL for processing of the 4473 and, wait for it, the NICS check. And that includes used firearms purchased online. Alden had to send that used Cheetah I bought to my local FFL, no doubt about it.

        • dacian, the Dunderhead. Yes, we do know what your “universal background checks” are and we all know they are as useless as you are. Too many courts do not turn in their dispositions to FBI like they are supposed to and because of HIPPA mentally deficient people are not listed.

        • dacian the stupid,

          “The average person knows damn well what Universal Background Checks are . . . ” REALLY, dacian the stupid??? Is that how come literally EVERY piece of legislation proposed by you gun-grabbing Leftst/fascist @$$holes define it differently??? Does it include temporary “loans” of guns to people you know? Don’t bother lying further, dacian the stupid, you’re not very good at it.

        • And when I say Universal background checks, I’m talking about government registries. Yes. I know. You can’t have a universal background check, period, unless we have a list of all you people, selling and trading guns to each other. We need lists of you people. It’s very important we identify all the cisgendered heteronormative white male patriarch owning guns. The reason? Because these people are the problem in the america, and and is a real issue. It is the “The MAGA question” of our time. These people are insurrectionists, and I am clutching my pearls so hard, my sack is going to explode if we don’t get some gun control passed immediately.

          And once the gun control is passed. I will feel better about everything. When the government controls me, tells me what to do, and regulates my activities and manages my life, I feel fulfilled as a democrat. We need to get rid of state’s rights, and rule the total of the US as an imperialistic leftist utopia. Safety will be supreme, we can get rid of individual rights, and freeeeeeeeedumb, and usher in a new world of happiness, progress, and good feelings, and a government taking care of us.

        • dacian, the Dunderhead, What part of these “Universal Background Checks” are not complete to begin with. Many courts don’t report the dispositions on matters that he hear and HIPPA prevents mentally diffident patients from being included?

          You are going to have a long wait for “gun control” laws being passed. For every one you sneak through, four laws are passed blocking your efforts to take our guns.

    • Thank you herr dacian the nazi. I believe you have contributed greatly to the destruction of the gun control movement in America.

      The fact that you are obviously very mentally ill and cannot grasp this truth does not detract from your efforts to make every man, woman and child in America a gun owner.

      • jwm,

        No kidding. With “spokespeople” like Shannon Watts, David “Camera” Hogg, “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg, dacian the stupid and MinorIQ, one would think a rational person would run, not walk, away from the fascist idiots at “Moms Against Everything”. If that’s the best you can offer, it isn’t very appealing to rational folk. Shannon the Shrew and Mini-Mike may be the best arguments against “gun control” out there. David “Camera” Hogg is just a witless buffoon, like our own dacian the stupid and MinorIQ.

    • As if on cue, Dacian posts right after there’s a discussion about how the idgits just can’t help themselves. Priceless, no one can make this stuff up.

    • dacian, the Dunderhead. If your universal background checks” were the “answer”, can you tell me how you are going to get the black marketers to do your :universal background checks” not to mention, the information in NICS is deficient. Courts are not reporting the dispositions in many cases and HIPPA law prevents mentally deficients from being listed.

      • “HIPPA law prevents mentally deficients from being listed”

        How dacian the stupid and MinorIQ have managed to skate, I am sure.

    • And when I say Universal background checks, I’m talking about government registries. Yes. I know. You can’t have a universal background check, period, unless we have a list of all you people, selling and trading guns to each other. We need lists of you people. It’s very important we identify all the cisgendered heteronormative white male patriarch owning guns. The reason? Because these people are the problem in the america, and and is a real issue. It is the “The MAGA question” of our time. These people are insurrectionists, and I am clutching my pearls so hard, my sack is going to explode if we don’t get some gun control passed immediately.

      And once the gun control is passed. I will feel better about everything. When the government controls me, tells me what to do, and regulates my activities and manages my life, I feel fulfilled as a democrat. We need to get rid of state’s rights, and rule the total of the US as an imperialistic leftist utopia. Safety will be supreme, we can get rid of individual rights, and freeeeeeeeedumb, and usher in a new world of happiness, progress, and good feelings, and a government taking care of us.

    • And will the felons who currently sell heroin obey the law or just import guns for sale? Even lawful, handguns are about $300/pound. I suspect drug dealers would just hide handguns inside cocaine shipments where they will never be noticed.

  19. The people of the Ukraine figured it out.

    then this…

    “..who writes for a popular electric car and clean energy website when I’m not writing here….”

    EVs? Seriously?! Listen, when I’m not at the range, you can find me under a hood or modifying something on our vehicles. EVs are a pipe-dream for now. Forcing people into them will not work as some think.

    • It will work great once you eliminate 70-90% of drivers to get the energy generation needs down to something that we could support in 30 years as we likely reduce power generation further. But I just assume that eliminating freedom of movement is a feature not a bug in this program especially with remote deactivation being a commonly available feature.

      • @Manse and SAFE

        A friend of mine who is a retired electric generation engineer ran some numbers recently for his own grins and giggles…he came up with something like the US having to build over 300 @3,000MW each new nuke plants to feed the increased electric demand if everyone exchanged their gas burners for EV’s overnight.

        That is a shtpot of energy…conventional wind and PV generation CANNOT produce that level of capacity.

        • If that is even halfway correct it’s way more grim than I had as a worst case estimate. Also wtf re mining procedure as I seem to recall cobalt is a nasty and expensive cleanup issue.

        • Montana and Safe, exactly. Like everything these middling mafioso do and say it’s merely lies and talking points that they can graft onto and continue to line their pockets at our (great) expense. It is their complete raison de entre or whatever. History, nor our children’s children, will look on us kindly if we allow it to continue.

        • I’m a retired EE and I ran those figures over a decade ago.

          This is why I think that EV’s are intellectual onanism, writ large.

          We could have had 100 MPG automobiles using hybrid technology and small diesel engines[*], which would have eliminated range issues, enabled plug-in charging for short suburban/urban trips, etc. But noooo. We had to have the Holy Grail of shrub-snugglers: “Zero emissions!” and down the useless dead-end of EV’s we went.

          [*] VW produced a prototype vehicle using a diesel hybrid drivetrain that was able to achieve over 200 MPG. I think a less austere and more useful configuration would lose some efficiency.

    • Green energy is a myth. It’s advocated hyper-focus on carbon dioxide emissions exclusively. Most of them act like the car will never wear out and need to be replaced. And producing an EV has a sharp environmental cost on it’s own. Something that is NEVER mentioned when they come out with charts that say that EVs are supposedly so much better for the planet than gas burners. And that’s even before we have to have a talk about what how much electricity it takes to power even one EV.

      One of the things that’s really disgusting about EV propaganda is how much they bait and switch statistics about what it takes to make even one EV. The mining of lithium, cobalt, and nickle is very inefficient. Lithium mining is only about 1% to 2% percent efficient. And COBALT is going to bit the EV market in the ass VERY soon. Lithium and nickle is fairly abutment, but cobalt is not. The industry admits that it’s not at all sustainable even at the current rate of production. Not to mention that mining these materials is incredibly toxic… and it’s often done by child laborers in Africa.

      • Why do I get the feeling more than half of the mining/reserves are a mix of Russia and China?

        • Russia? Not really. The biggest lithium mines are in Australia, but basically 97% of the lithium processing is done in China. Nickel production is all over Asia and Australia. But Cobalt is pretty much ONLY found in the Democratic Republic of Congo…. but pretty much all the mines are owned by Chinese corporations.

        • Well got half the idea right but thought Russia and Australia were minor cobalt mine/producing countries as well. Sucks to be a tesla owner if we kick off a trade war once those batteries need replacing. Lot of other things will suck too but this one anyone should see coming.

        • @SAFE

          There is a fairly large reserve of cobalt located in Idaho. Search for the “General Mining Law of 1872”. This law is antiquated and allows foreign companies to come in and, essentially, rape US minerals / metals and then dissolve the company and leave without paying to restore the ravaged lands they pillaged.

          A foreign company is actively trying to get permission to exploit that cobalt.

    • “EVs are a pipe-dream for now.”

      I refuse to buy a vehicle that the government can shut down remotely, if they wanted.

      And some EV manufacturers are calling just that an anti-theft ‘Feature’… 🙁

  20. @KenW,

    If that is what she meant, she could have just said that. But that indeed is not what she meant.

  21. Guess the citizens of the US are realizing none of the gun control proposals would do anything to make anyone but the criminals and the authoritarians/Statists safer. Secondly, there is no way of enforcing “Universal Background Checks”. For the very reason being those who would not pass such a check don’t bother with it. Nor would they register their guns, nor bother with mandatory storage requirements. If the gun control crowd could somehow eliminate every gun from the North American Continent, within minutes someone would be on line, or on the phone working out the details of getting shipping containers of guns and ammo shipped in or smuggled into the country.
    Yes, there are some underlying issues that contribute to violent crime. Most of which are the result of leftist/socialist/progressive/Marxist government programs and edicts.
    Gun control has never been about guns, public safety, or crime reduction. But fully about control over people and wealth.

  22. They really believe that the NRA is the true cause of their pain, and that only an astroturfed, top-down well-funded and industry-shill org can accomplish anything, because that’s how it works on their end.

    • This is far from the first time you posted something wonderfully insightful. Wonder if it’s because they subverted everything a generation ago and the current crop no longer understand how the previous generation made it happen.

      • No need to wonder Safe, we see evidence of exactly that on a daily basis. Everywhere. It isn’t just the good people who’ve gotten more stoopider…

  23. ” …the fundamental drive most of you feel to make the world a better place makes you a fundamentally good person”

    This right here, the power of political Left comes from deeply cynical (borderline sociopathic) power brokers dragging gentle people around by their heartstrings. In 2016 the Republican Party, for all its faults, ultimately bowed to the will of their constituency when they demanded Trump. Can we say the same for the Democrats when they foisted swamp monsters like Biden, Obama or the Clintons on the public?

  25. It is useful to examine the history of gun control. Gun control started in the post-Civil War era, as a way to keep guns out of the hands of freed blacks.

    With some notable cases along the way (eg, Miller), it resumed being about “scary black men with guns” in the 1960’s and through the 1980’s.

    Welllll… the problem for the gun controllers is that some black females got truly educated on eight-figure levels of grift, and they started an organization that impresses even the truly professional grifters like the SPLC. The organization to which they claimed affiliation was involved in burning down whole inner city blocks. I’m talking of course about BLM – Burn, Loot, Murder.

    BLM has as their agenda, a two-pronged approach that made quite an impression on taxpaying citizens:

    1. Burning down large areas of productive real estate, looting anything of value, and
    2. Calling for the reduction or elimination of police forces.

    Oddly enough, this combination of policies resulted in lots of folks feeling rather insecure in their homes, businesses and neighborhoods. So… what did these poor folks do?

    They went out and bought themselves guns. Scary ones, even. Some of these scared people bought guns with the “shoulder thing that goes up” – real nasty guns.

    A large cohort of these new gun owners are (pssst) black. Their grandmothers might have been Dutch, but they look blacker than Rachel Dolezal, so in other words “close enough for government work.”

    So the gun control folks should look at these results and say “Whoops. Own goal – didn’t see that one coming. We got a whole lot more black folks owning guns than before. Let’s stop while we’re ahead…”

    But no, that’s not how they work.

    Someone needs to tell the termagant Mothers to be quiet and do something productive. Might I suggest that they take classes in sandwich-making?

    • “1. Burning down large areas of productive real estate, looting anything of value, and
      2. Calling for the reduction or elimination of police forces.”

      And in ten years, the complaints will be “food deserts” (because no grocery store wants to be burned out again), and no jobs for young black men (because most employers have moved somewhere that protects property.

    • It’s just all such a huge, self perpetuating clownshow out there now that I wonder if it’s even possible at this point in the show for the circus to break for intermission, much less the ride to actually end. It’s just one fabulous hit after another. Geez, if a guy, or gal, had no principles one could prob really cash in on it somehow…

  26. Not a good time to keep insisting on gun control when defunding the police and lax prosecution of criminals continues to make gun purchases the more rational decision. Rittenhouse case proves self defense won’t be supported by corrupt prosecutors. Persecution of law abiding gun owners is miscarriage of justice.

    The best approach is return the Democratic Party to supporting our civil servants like the police, firefighters, military, and border control. They won’t in the current political environment. The current Supreme Court justice candidate is soft on crime and child exploitation. That’s why the public needs to arm themselves.

  27. It is so sad that people genuinely concerned with serious social problems concentrated in a small number of zipcodes will not ask why the problem is concentrated there, while most of America has almost no murder. There are SERIOUS social problems that underlie the violence, poverty, abuse of women (both adult and young), but gun control has become the magic solution to a problem that seems to just hit a small number of zipcodes.

  28. “I’m also not a Republican and on most issues, I’m not even what anyone would consider right wing. ”

    So you don’t want to actually stop voting for the people who brought us gun control; you just want to take the issue off the table so you can win more elections and force your own agenda down America’s throat.

    Here’s your offramp: Canada’s just to the north and they agree with you on the trash you love so dear. Take your offramp there and stop telling Americans how to live.

    • Yeah, no. Don’t you dare send her up here. She’s all yours, born and bred, we already have our own thank you kindly. And by the way Dave, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and the CBC ain’t all of Canada you know. It’s a big country. Jus sayin…

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