“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” —John Adams (1770)

Predictably, leftist Democrat Party cadres, as incessantly demonstrated by the White House duo, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, always label the rare instance of a so-called “mass shootings” as “gun violence.” They do so in order to call for gun confiscation starting with so-called “assault weapons.” Most of those high-profile assaults are committed by young sociopaths, and those attacks don’t involve an “assault weapon.”

Here is a data point Democrats and their media publicists won’t tell you: Rifles and shotguns of any type combined, are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Demos never let facts get in the way of their political agenda.

That notwithstanding, mass murders are so horrendous that they generate wall-to-wall advertising opportunities for commercial mass media platforms, which propagate agenda plays for political opportunists. Moreover, the Leftmedia repeatedly use the term “mass shooting,” and the resulting saturation of media coverage makes it seem like we are surrounded by “gun violence,” when in fact, we are not. Unless you are a drug dealer or gang thug, your chances of being killed murdered are very low.

Furthermore, these rare mass assaults are especially useful by Demos as political fodder if a racial motivation of the assailant fits the Demos’ “white supremacist” narrative for a “hate crime,” feeding their divisive and toxic race obsession. Racially motivated mass murders are exceedingly rare, but such incidents provide Demos the opportunity to use American flags as political rags, ordering them to half-mast nationwide to promote their anti-Second Amendment agenda.

The irony of using the symbol of American Liberty to undermine the first line of defense for American Liberty falls squarely into the Left’s cauldron of BIG Lies. And a greater irony: Democrats are the historical architects and political beneficiaries of systemic racism.

When high-profile assaults occur, Democrats default to blaming guns and those who support the Second Amendment as a diversionary distraction to avoid the politically inconvenient truth regarding the actual racial demographic of assailants responsible for the national epidemic of violent crime. It is all political smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the reality that guns don’t commit homicide; violent thugs do.

And, the hard reality Demos would most like to avoid is that violence is not a “gun problem” but in fact is highly correlated with the their most loyal constituency, and is the direct result of a Demo-induced culture problem spawned primarily by generations of failed socialist policies – resulting most notably in the disintegration of families. That is particularly true given the common denominator that most violent offenders grew up in fatherless homes.

If the race of the assailants and victims is grossly disproportionate, this is something other than a “gun problem.”

The metastasizing violence is on Demo-controlled urban poverty plantations, the violent urban centers that have been under Democrat control for generations.

Here is the inconvenient truth about that violence: A grossly disproportionate number of violent crimes nationwide are committed by black assailants, and black-on-black assault is the most prevalent violent crime in the nation.

In fact, on almost any single day, the total victim count of black-on-black and black attacks on people of other races far exceeds the death totals of any rare but high-profile mass assault. But Democrat politicians studiously avoid any discussion of this data because it would require studious consideration of the Democrat policies that have created these conditions.

If Demos actually believe “black lives matter,” if that were anything more than a pandering bumper slogan, they would not propagate the failed urban policies that proliferate black-on-black violence, while obfuscating the gross racial disparity of that violence.

Manhattan Institute fellow and nationally respected crime researcher Heather Mac Donald has compiled the data on black assailants: “Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic murder victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Blacks between the ages of ten and twenty-four are murdered at twenty-five times the rate of whites between those same ages. Their assailants are not the police, not other whites, but other blacks.”

Where victim race was known, black-on-black assault is much more prevalent than white-on-white. The fact that black citizens are 13% of the population but their murder victim rate is 22% higher than for white victims should be the starting place for every meaningful conversation about resolving the racial disparity associated with violence.

This gross racial disparity in criminal assailants is not a new issue, as made clear by a 2015 Harvard study on black-on-black violence. In that study, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted: “Ninety percent of all people killed in our city — and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes — are black and Hispanic. It is shameful that so many elected officials and editorial writers have been largely silent on these facts.”

This disparity is also true in other crime categories, which dispels the assertion that somehow prisons have more black inmates because of “systemic racism.” And regarding those policies, the most alarming data on murder is that the suspect in 88% of black murders is also black.

Sidebar: Here in Tennessee, as is the case in many states, there is one white guy on the state’s most wanted list of thugs. And in Chattanooga where our publishing offices are located, a decade ago the city’s police department was crucified for posting photos of its “worst of the worst” criminals, a “mistake” they have not made since. Unfortunately the crime surge in Chattanooga continues unabated under its recent Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hire, Celeste Murphy, whom the mayor proudly notes is the city’s first black female police chief. (In June of 2024 Murphy resigned under indictment by a grand jury for falsifying her employment application and other charges.)

But it is only on those rare occasions that a white business person is murdered, or white children are killed, that white politicians and wealthy suburban white folks take note.

Further, Mac Donald has thoroughly documented the interracial crime disparity. She notes that before Demo-controlled cities were adulterating the data: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations … between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.”

She reports: “From 2016 to 2020, blacks nationally were twice as likely to commit a hate crime as whites, according to FBI data. … In New York City, from 2010 to 2020, blacks were 2.42 times as likely as whites to commit a hate crime. … Blacks in Los Angeles committed anti-Asian hate crimes at 4.8 times the rate of whites in 2021 and committed anti-gay hate crimes at seven times the rate of whites, and anti-Semitic hate crimes at 2.4 times the rate of whites.”

These disparities are better understood in context when considering as noted, that black Americans represent just 13% of our population but perpetrate 90% of violent interracial crimes — and the young black males who committed most of those crimes represent less than 3% of the population. That imbalance is staggering.

Mac Donald adds: “That ratio is becoming more skewed. … In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.” Mac Donald concludes: “Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to recent Justice Department data; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.”

However, as I have argued, ALL murders are “hate crimes,” as every murder deprives a victim of his or her most fundamental civil rights.

Further, as investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield notes about murder case closure rates: “In the 1960s, 90% of murders were solved. That fell to 75% in 1980, and 60% in 2000. In the year of Black Lives Matter, the homicide clearance rate fell so low that it became a ‘coin flip’.” That’s right, now only 50% of murders are being solved.

In fact, in 2020, the year the Demos’ Marxist so-called Black Lives Matter (BLM) constituency led the “defund the police” chorus, more than half of black teenagers (15–19) who died, were murdered. And not only is the murder closure rate for black people substantially lower now because the murder rate for blacks is exponentially higher, but after the vilification of police officers, departments are now unable to fill critical positions.

For the record, Kamala Harris was a cheerleader for the 2020 Demo Defund Police chorus, insisting, “For far too long, the status quo thinking has been to believe that by putting more police on the street, you’re going to have more safety – and that’s just wrong.” Put fewer cops on the street, what could go wrong?

“We’re on the verge of being the first developed nation where the majority of homicides go uncleared,” according to Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project. That abysmal case closure rate has been confirmed by the leftist Marshall Project.

And those rates are overstated because the FBI is counting a case solved if the prime suspect is being tried for another crime.

Again, not only is interracial violence predominantly perpetrated by black offenders, but violent assaults on black people are predominantly perpetrated by other black people. Of course, the high-profile Democrat constituency group, which ostensibly represents “black victims,” the BLM consortium of black supremacists, is also silent on violent black-on-black crime data.

(Update: Despite the much-heralded but incomplete data indicating, according to the FBI’s 2022 summary, that murder and violent assault declined, what Biden and his cadre are not saying is amplifies the racial disparity. In 2022, there were 11,565 black people murdered (27.5 per 100,000 population), versus in 2019 when there were 8,438 black people murdered (20.5 per 100,000 population) – before the Demos’ Summer of Rage.)

And not a word on the, likewise, disproportionate murder of black children. According to Pew Research, “In 2021, 46% of all gun deaths among children and teens involved Black victims, even though only 14% of the U.S. under-18 population that year was Black.”

So, how are Democrats solving this “inconvenient truth”?

By deception — concealing the data. They have done a masterful job of concealing the real data on violent crime. Apparently, they subscribe to the maxim offered by management advisor Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Conversely, computer magnate Michael Dell concluded, “Anything that can be measured can be improved.”

Democrats fomented the violent “summer of rage” riots in 2020, unleashing a record surge of murder and violent assaults across the nation, and that surge continues. Thus, they have gotten “creative” in order to conceal the truth from crime databases. The violence claimed the lives of more than 21,000 Americans in 2020 and about estimated to be higher in 2021 and 2022.

Demos know these inconvenient truths, and they are colluding to cover up the crime scene. Major U.S. cities with district attorneys backed by billionaire leftist George Soros are both refusing to prosecute crimes and refusing to provide the Justice Department with racial data regarding violent crimes. Thus, they are concealing the key demographics about who is committing those crimes in order to conceal the root causes of violent crime, and at the same time claiming their failed policies are working.

Of course, when a black Soros-backed district attorney exposes the truth about leftist “criminal justice reforms,” as did Albany County, NY DA David Soares, he quickly became a target of the Left.

Democrats don’t care about inner-city black Americans despite the fact they know who suffers most. They are ignoring black racism and gang violence. Apparently, black victims are expendable.

I should note further that the surging number of murdered black Americans is also the result of the Demos’ defund police movement in 2020, and the residual effect continues to be deadly.

Ah, yes, cops, the second-favorite whipping boy of race-hustling leftists.

Blame-shifting to the men and women in blue, who are on the front lines protecting Americans from the effluent of generations of Democrat policies, is a deadly ruse, given the black-on-black slaughter taking place every day in our major cities. That is not a “police problem,” and every person involved in the diversionary protests, ostensibly about the death of one Minneapolis resident, have the blood of THOUSANDS of mostly black men, women, and children on their hands.

The Demos’ war on cops has resulted in a couple of immediate consequences.

First would be the escalating numbers of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. That, combined with the failure of urban leaders to back them, has prompted mass resignations nationwide, leaving major departments critically short of patrol officers, who risk their lives every day for ungrateful legions.

The second would be the fact that when Beltway and big-city Demos pander to the racist “Burn, Loot, Murder” (BLM) radicals, bowing to their hateful Marxist legions, while simultaneously throwing their police under the bus, they are throwing their black constituents under that same bus.

After a lifetime observing how leftists manipulate black constituents, Walter E. Williams concluded, “The true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called ‘systemic racism.’” He adds, “We need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.”

The Left’s claims that “cops are racist” and that there’s an “epidemic” of racially motivated police shootings are dangerous fabrications.

Again, I turn to the research of Heather Mac Donald, who affirms there is no such epidemic.

According to Mac Donald’s exhaustive analysis: “The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. The number of unarmed Black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began. There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total. Ideally, officers would never take anyone’s life in the course of their duties.” She argues that, “given the number of arrests they make each year (around 10 million) and the number of deadly-weapons attacks on officers (an average of 27 per day in just two-thirds of the nation’s police departments),” there is no evidence of an epidemic of racist police shootings.

That is confirmed by a National Academy of Sciences study that found no such racial link. As Mac Donald concludes: “It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley notes: “Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. … Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior. The problem isn’t a shortage of data but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.”

Indeed, as Mac Donald notes, “The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization.” According to the latest data, “Nationally, African Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans.”

So, what happens when police are condemned by their political leaders and told to stand down? Mac Donald, author of the definitive book The War on Cops, notes in a report: “Today’s violent-crime increase — call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect — has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned — but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history. Every day, another mainstream institution — from McDonald’s to Harvard — denounces the police, claiming without evidence that law enforcement is a threat to black lives.”

(Read more in the Law and Liberty study on “Race, Crime, and Policing in America.”)

Of course, as I noted previously, Democrats never let facts get in the way of their political agenda.

As for the epidemic of blame-shifting, Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, observed, “Politically, there are few ideas more potent than the notion that all your problems are caused by other people and their unfairness to you.”

He also declared flatly: “Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on Election Day.”

That deception comes at a very heavy price.

Meanwhile, here is another stat that Demos won’t mention.

Beyond their boilerplate anti-2A rhetoric, as we have documented consistently, if you don’t have a violent criminal record and are not associated with the violent sociopathic thug, drug, or gang subcultures that commit the vast majority of crimes in America, your chances of being shot or killed by an assailant are extraordinarily low — as low as in most Western European nations with strict gun control laws. Oh, and in Switzerland, which has a higher concentration of “assault weapons” per capita than any nation in the world, the murder rate is one of the lowest in the world.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen, your statistical probability of being killed by a drunk driver is much higher than being murdered by an assailant with a firearm. (Oddly, no one is organizing marches to ban automobiles or ask for a federal background check before purchasing a beer.)

For the record, if Democrats actually wanted to “take action to keep American communities, schools, workplaces, and homes safe,” as Joe Biden claimed in one of his gun-control rants, they would turn their attention to the illegal drugs killing more than five times more Americans each year than those killed by assailants with illegal firearms.

In 2022, there were an estimated 110,000 drug overdoses, most of them due to fentanyl, which is pouring across our open southern border. Fentanyl deaths surged again in 2022, and despite the fact the Biden administration is trying to put a smiley-face on it, almost all of it is being muled into the U.S. by the more than three million illegal immigrants Biden has invited in. And the fastest growing overdose demographic is infants and toddlers who are exposed to the deadly drug.

And on the subject of immigrants and crime…

Take a look at the faces and names of those on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Not much diversity there. Or take a look at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Ten Most Wanted. Not much diversity there. Same for the FBI’s most wanted murderers, domestic terrorists, and even “white collar” criminals. Same lack of diversity is evident in the U.S. Marshals Service most wanted and the DEA most wanted.“

Sidebar: The crime data I want to see the FBI collect annually, under threat of funding reductions by House Republicans, is a national database on violent crimes committed by illegal aliens — so there can be some accountability for Biden’s open border policy. Every violent crime committed by Biden’s illegal pawns needs to be hung around his neck.

Of course the obstacle to reliable data is the same as it is with the FBI’s overall crime surge data and the race of both assailants and victims – some Demo-controlled states and urban centers, especially those so-called sanctuary cities, will also refuse to submit information on crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

Finally, in the timeless words of Ronald Reagan: "You won’t get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. … There’s only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and the criminals, lock them up, and if you don’t actually throw away the key, at least lose it for a long time.” He declared after the assassination attempt against him: “It’s a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience.”

Of course, only law-abiding citizens abide by laws, and making lawful citizens helpless clearly does not make outlaws harmless. Remember: The vast majority of mass assaults occur in “gun-free zones.”

Commenting on urban violence recently, Virginia’s Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, a black woman who understands violence is a culture problem not a “gun problem,” declared: “This is not about law-abiding gun owners. Even if you took all guns…from law abiding citizens, the others who mean harm, who mean to kill and maim, they’re still going to have guns. So we have to figure out what is going on in our communities…to figure out the real problems so we can determine the real solutions. … If we don’t lock [offenders] up and just release them back into the community so they can keep killing, when do we say ‘enough is enough’? … Who is in charge? Is that the mayor? Is that the chief? Let’s start naming names, because otherwise no-one is accountable… We need leadership, true leadership, because this is not happening where the movers and shakers live. … This has to stop, and we know where it starts. … The people who elected here, they are in charge, they must make the adjustments so the shootings don’t keep happening.”

The bottom line regarding the epidemic of violence: Democrats institutionalized lawlessness in the name of “social justice,” beginning with their “Summer of Rage” riots in 2020, when they intentionally provoked and promoted violence. They simultaneously villainized law enforcement and cut police budgets. The result was, and continues to be, a one-two sucker punch against victims of violence and those charged with protecting them.

Surging violence today is the direct result of empowering leftist mobs in the name of “social justice,” in effect sending the message that Democrat constituents are entitled to be violent – and that sense of entitlement continues unabated. The implications, given the rising generation of sociopaths, is dire. It will take years to restore real justice – rule of law – but leftists politicians are not going to do that when they can label the violent cultural devolution they have created a “gun problem,” and avoid the inconvenient truth about race and violence.

And a note to parents about the rare mass shootings on a school campus.

Again, Democrats are quick to use high-profile acts of violence invoking a highly-emotive response, as political fodder for their gun control agenda. A single murder on any campus or anywhere else, is a murder too many, but here is something parents should know: Young people between the ages of 6 and 22 are far safer on a campus than they are off campus.

Consider this: About 20% of the U.S. population is between ages 6 and 22, and a majority in that age group are on school campuses 6-8 hours a day, five days a week, 9-10 months per year. In a typical year, there are between 4-5,000 murders in that age group, again, almost all but a small percentage in the upper third of that age bracket, and most drug thug or gang related. Only a split fraction of those victims are on a school campus or in a school building, despite the fact that a very large percentage of young people in that age bracket spend much of the year on a school campus.

Again, statistically, young people are much safer on campus than off campus.

Finally, after years of record firearm sales and conservative estimates that more than half of all adults are legal gun owners, it turns out that the fastest growing demographic of new handgun owners is women, and more specifically black women.

Much to the dismay of all those wealthy suburban white women who are Demo pawns advocating policies to suppress Second Amendment rights – self defense being the primary reason Americans acquire firearms – women are now the fastest growing group of new firearm owners. And given the inconvenient truth that a grossly disproportionate number of murders and violent crimes are perpetrated in urban centers by black assailants on black victims, 30 percent of the women purchasing firearms are black urban residents.

In other words, what we have here is mostly wealthy white privilege suburban women attempting to dictate to mostly poor urban black women, what they can and can’t do to defend themselves. I suggest a cage match – game on!

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NOTES:

The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

What follows are a few key notes that all defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate, in order to refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

While some of this data is based on annual findings, most of that data does not vary significantly year over year.

FOOTNOTE 1: Regarding so-called “gun violence,” there were approximately 19,600 homicides involving firearms in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state. Fortunately, there are indications that homicides may be declining after the significant surge of violence unleashed by Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020. The 2022 homicide rate was 30% higher than in 2019.

The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded as “gun violence,” and they focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile “mass shootings,” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed in Democrat-controlled urban centers.

In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers — mostly thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence and indoctrinated with mass-media glorification of violence — it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not 10 times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their decaying urban poverty plantations, because they want to avoid the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. In fact, black people (13% of the population), are 12 times more likely to be murdered, per capita, than white people (62% of the population).

That gross racial disparity in murder rates isn’t useful for the gun control narrative Democrats invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, who form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.

FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding so-called “mass shootings,” for the record, murders of multiple people by one assailant are very rare in our nation of 335 million people. Less than 1% of all murders nationwide are classified as “mass shootings” and high-profile attacks, such as the 2017 mass murder in Las Vegas, are extremely rare.

The FBI defines “active shooter incidents” as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2022, the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020 when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded).

A broader record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and they range between 20 and 40 incidents. But notably, over the last 30 years, the number of black mass assailants is almost as high as the number of white assailants.

Democrats focus on these rare instances of multiple murders because these high-profile tragedies are political fodder to foment fear — most notably when they can toss out their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug-associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.

The fear and angst Demos intentionally propagate are taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers, in particular, is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fabricated fear Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.

(Notably, the deadliest school assault in American history did not involve a firearm. A sociopathic school board member in Bath, Michigan detonated a bomb outside an elementary school, murdering 38 children and six adults.)

FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding what Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists ubiquitously and falsely label “assault weapons,” an actual assault weapon, commonly known as a “machine gun,” is select-fire and can rapidly cycle rounds in fully automatic sequence. Very few select-fire weapons are in civilian hands, and only then subject to stringent licensing requirements.

In fact, civilian firearms in common use, like the AR-15 and other semiautomatic sporting and hunting rifles, are not “assault rifles.”

For much the same reason the Demo/Media talkingheads focus only on rare high-profile “mass shootings” to generate fear and angst, they also call semi-automatic rifles sometimes used in those attacks, “assault weapons.” Predictably, Demos then call for what Hillary Clinton framed decades ago as “common sense gun laws,” inevitably followed by calls for an “assault weapons ban.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton banned the sale of “military-style assault weapons,” but that ban was not renewed 10 years later because it was determined the ban had no effect on crime reduction. According to Rand Research, “We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.”

The fact is, rifles and shotguns combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their “assault weapon ban” political agenda.

Both the Clintons were prolific prevaricators, masterful obfuscators of the truth. And Joe Biden has followed their template, establishing himself as the standard bearer of the “lying dog-faced pony soldier” cavalry.

FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, almost 60% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drug or alcohol abuse. But the big numbers promoted in “gun violence” reports do not distinguish between murder and suicide, thus implying that homicide rates are much higher. And does this mean that Demo support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control?

FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol versus firearm deaths, if Democrats are serious about protecting Americans, they should outlaw alcohol. Alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 178,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year — that’s NINE times the number of homicides associated with firearms. Drunk drivers are responsible for 37 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is a key factor in at least 30% of homicides where the assailant uses a firearm. (Include drug dealing or use as a factor and that number jumps to about 60%.)

Of course, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws.

BOTTOM LINE: Let me restate this point — only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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NOTE: The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

All defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate and refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

See these updated Footnotes for key points of rebuttal: Firearm Fiction v. Facts.

Only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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