The one thing I think people on both sides of the aisle can agree on is that guns that aren’t being used should probably be locked up where unauthorized hands can’t get to them.
It’s after that where everything breaks down. You see, folks on this side don’t like the idea of the state telling them when and how to store a gun while the other side typically jumps right to mandates. But it gets worse.
You see, they’re also willing to lie, misrepresent facts, and do anything else to try and justify the mandates while ignoring the fact there might actually be something in between.
For example, we have this piece from The Progressive and written by a researcher from Yale University.
On January 22, a seventeen-year-old boy shot and killed a fellow student before killing himself at a high school in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the first fatal school shooting of the new year; it will almost certainly not be the last. In 2024, the United States saw thirty-nine school shootings.
It doesn’t have to be this way. New national policies regarding secure gun storage could save children’s lives.
First, we don’t know how the shooter at Antioch High School got his gun in the first place. It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that he got the firearm from a parent, but we don’t actually know that. To use that when there are still so many questions unanswered is, at best, disingenuous. At worst, it’s a blatant attempt at manipulation.
Second, those 39 school shootings are based on the K-12 School Shooting Database, which counts not just shootings during school hours and school activities, but also anytime a stray bullet lands in a school parking lot at midnight in the middle of summer vacation.
In other words, the number of what most people would think of as school shootings is actually much lower.
And the author immediately jumps to national mandatory storage laws. More on that in a second. See, she’s not done trying to manipulate people.
As a scientist working to prevent public health crises, I am all too familiar with our social and political failures to embrace simple solutions that could dramatically change seemingly intractable problems. Yet ensuring that all gun-owning households secure their firearms from unauthorized users—including children—could immediately decrease school shootings.
Beyond the horrors resulting from unauthorized access to firearms in school shootings, guns now kill more children in the United States than cancer, car crashes, or any other cause. Moreover, the majority of child gun deaths involve perpetrators who are children themselves, who obtained guns from home. Making firearm owners prevent unauthorized access to firearms would have direct impacts on the safety of the nation’s fifty million school-age children.
The whole “kill more children” link leads to a study that doesn’t cut off at 19, like so many others. No, that’s not a good thing. You see, it counts people as old as 24. In what world are people old enough to have graduated college, get married, and start families considered “children” by any reasonable person?
That also includes the ages when a lot of violent gang members are full of bluster and getting shot.
Second, the “majority of child gun deaths” leads to a link about school-focused mass shootings and says nothing at all about “child gun deaths” in a more general sense, which is interesting since most of those deaths occur somewhere other than school.
The claim about them getting them from home leads to a link between suicides and unintentional shootings, not intentional homicides.
So what the author is doing is blatantly misrepresenting the data–based on her resume, one has to assume it’s intentional rather than from ignorance–to try to elicit an emotional response.
That response, of course, would be to support mandatory gun storage laws at the federal level.
The thing is, there is a middle ground here, and one that people on both sides seem to be pleased enough about. That middle ground is tax credits for gun storage devices.
See, the gun locks that come with new firearms aren’t great. If you leave your keys anywhere, your kid could still gain access to the gun at some point or another. A proper gun safe or lock box would do a far better job in a case like this, but they’re expensive. A tax credit would encourage folks to spend the money, knowing they’d get it back, and people with safes are likely to use them.
But we can’t talk about that because people like the author blatantly misrepresenting (read: lying her butt off) about what the research actually says.
This wasn’t even cleverly hidden. She just knew that most people don’t click the links or, if they did, would see what she’d already primed them to see.
This is absolutely disgusting, but it’s also telling.
It’s telling that she has to resort to this because data that actually supports this kind of thing doesn’t really exist.
Read the full article here
