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‘The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”’-Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.

Should one have the double misfortune to listen to, and believe, D/S/Cs America is a cesspool of “gun violence,” unparalleled in all the world.  Anyone daring to step outdoors is certain to be filled with lead, and always by “Ultra-MAGA white supremacists,” and lately by radical Catholics, you know, people who like the Latin Mass?   None are more violent than people who speak and/or understand Latin.

I’ve written about this in the past, but objective reality—the truth—always needs reiteration.  A quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain notes:

A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put its pants on.

D/S/Cs would have us believe outright lies, all in the service of disarming Normal Americans.  It’s an issue I last addressed in June in Gun Violent America.  

The truth is America has more guns in private hands than any other nation, and Americans, no dummies, they, have been buying more than 1,000,000 guns a month for the last 47 months.  Actually, that figure derives from a million federal background checks per month, and since one may buy multiple guns with a single background check–a single visit to a dealer—the number of guns sold is surely significantly higher.  Yet, America is far safer than most nations, as This classic Bill Whittle video illustrates: America is 111th in the world in per capita homicides.  The video was produced some years ago, but the numbers are little, if at all, changed.

And if we eliminated the statistics from our most murderous, D/S/C ruled cities, if we had the same per capita murder rate as Plano, Texas–-.4 per 100,000–which Whittle affirms is one of the best armed cities in America, we’d be not 111th in the world, but 211th in the world:

Let’s take a minute to briefly review the actual science on such matters—self-defense gun use–courtesy of RedState:

*The National Crime Victimization Survey is administered twice a year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and provides the most conservative estimate of SDGU at about 100,000 cases per year. Of note, the survey requires individuals to self-report to the federal government that they used a firearm in self-defense while providing their name and contact information. Most will be hesitant to do so for obvious reasons, so this estimate should be taken as the absolute minimum.

*A 1994 survey conducted by Bill Clinton’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 500,000 times per year.

*Obama’s CDC conducted a gun control study in 2013, finding that ‘Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million…’

*Criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz published a study back in 1995 in which they found that gun use accounted more for defensive gun use than it did for criminal activity.  A literature review of thirteen studies in their paper provides a range of between 800,000-2.5 million SDGUs. A follow-on study in 1997 argues that that SDGU accounted for more than 80% of all gun use in America.

*CDC survey data from the 1990s that was unpublished but accessed and analyzed in 2018 by Kleck implies roughly 1 million SDGUs per year.

*According to the National Survey of Private Firearms Ownership, there are 1.5 million self-defensive gun uses every year.

*According to a paper by David Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen, “[F]irearms are used over half a million times a year against home invasion burglars; usually the burglar flees as soon as he finds out that the victim is armed, and no shot is ever fired, and ‘Annually, three to six times as many victims successfully defend themselves with handguns as criminals misuse handguns (thus handguns do up to six times more good than harm).’

But wait a minute.  The CDC knew, back in the late 90s, how often Americans use guns in legitimate self-defense?  Why haven’t we heard about this before?  Here’s why not:

…the CDC quietly conducted its own surveys about defensive gun use in 1996, 1997, and 1998. The results are stunning.

‘During the last 12 months,’ respondents were asked, ‘have you confronted another person with a firearm, even if you did not fire it, to protect yourself, your property, or someone else?’

In each of the three surveys, the researchers—who carefully worded their questions to exclude occupations which involve regular gun use (e.g., police officers)—found evidence that using firearms in self-defense is more common than many would believe.

This is a devastating admission from the CDC considering that its former director, Dr. Mark Rosenberg, once opined in 1994: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. . . It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”

So why are we only hearing about these results now, over 20 years after the surveys were conducted?

The CDC, which has an annual budget of $11 billion, was banned from using federal funds to ‘advocate or promote gun control’ in 1996 by the so-called Dickey Amendment, which was created in response to gun controllers in the Clinton administration. (That ban was quietly lifted in the dreaded 2018 budget omnibus, though apparently no funding has been allocated to researching gun violence yet.)

We know the CDC and other “public health” organizations want to treat gun ownership as a pandemic, and control it in the same way they “controlled” the response to Covid.  So why didn’t they report the results of their multiple surveys?

But in the late 1990s the CDC could still research gun violence, which it did—and then decided not to publish its findings. As Kleck said, the ‘CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of [defensive gun use] frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.’

The results didn’t fit the anti-liberty/gun narrative, nor did they provide the slightest justification for gun control, so just like their response to Covid, they lied, obfuscated and covered up.  Just one more reason to be certain the CDC, like virtually every other federal agency, cannot be believed without independent verification.  What can be believed is their determination to deprive Americans of fundamental liberties.  A long time ago, Patrick Henry warned us of just this certainty:

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun. 

The SMM June article also proves America is not remotely the world leader in mass shootings:

Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, the US had less than 1.13% of the world’s share of mass public shooters and 1.77% of its mass public shooting murders. That’s much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population.

Final Thoughts: Even though Heller, McDonald and Bruen have affirmed the Second Amendment is an individual right which is legitimately exercised not only on one’s property, but in public, D/S/Cs continue to pass laws they know to be blatantly unconstitutional.  They know it could take years to strike such laws down, but they’re spending the money of honest Americans to defend their illegal actions, so they don’t care how much it costs, how long it takes, or how many innocents they put in jail or impoverish.

Among the most effective weapons against such enemies of liberty and of America is the truth.  They claim to be the party of science.  Well now, gentle readers, in the first article, and now this, you have that science, and the links to it in greater detail.  As Calvin Coolidge said on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

D/S/Cs are all about “progress,” but diminishing in the least any of our liberties is the opposite.  It’s always a regression toward despotism and degradation, and the eternally necessary step to achieve that is the disarmament of those who pose a threat only to tyrants.