The Patriot Post® · Leftists Dredge Up Sandy Hook for Gun Control — Again

Democrat leaders finally recognize the important role guns play in self-defense.

Now that’s a headline we’ll never see.

One of the main problems in the gun debate is the fact that gun control proponents always focus on the tool causing injuries or deaths, while conveniently neglecting the fact that guns save a significant number of lives in comparison. And even that misses the bigger point about constitutional rights and Liberty. In other words, there’s no real debate at all.

A favorite technique of gun control advocates is to focus less on statistics and concrete evidence and more on public relations. In particular, this involves using tragedies of the past to make Americans forget all about the inconvenient data proving that guns are an effective crime deterrent.

Exploiting survivors of the Pulse night club, Harvest Music Festival, Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook is designed to pull on our heartstrings and force us to think with emotion rather than with reason. This, of course, assumes that gun owners don’t care about the victims of gun violence, which is absurd and patently offensive.

Although the media point to all of the above mass shootings as examples of why we need more gun control, Sandy Hook is their go-to massacre. After all, nothing tugs at the American people more than images of scared children being led across a parking lot by their teachers or weeping parents calling for Congress to take action on guns.

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of Sandy Hook, and Democrats once again stood on the caskets of 20 children and six adults in order to remind us that “caring” about an issue is more important than our God-given right to protect ourselves from those who seek to harm us.

Everyone cares about the victims of violence. But caring doesn’t solve a problem. Certainly, no amount of guns in this country will prevent a future mass shooting from taking place, but at the same time there isn’t a gun control law we can pass today that would prevent another shooting. Confiscating every gun from law-abiding citizens wouldn’t stop the majority of people who commit these horrific crimes against society.

Gun sales are on the increase, but those who want to take away our ability to buy guns misinterpret the reasons.

Melissa Healy writes in the Los Angeles Times, “One often-overlooked fact about mass shootings is that they have been very good for the gun business. Americans’ anxieties are stoked both by the random violence itself and the ensuing debates over gun control. Customers, including some who’ve never owned a gun, race to buy weapons they fear may be denied them down the road. And gun sales soar.”

Notice how the gun grabbers never mention the real reason why gun sales spike after mass shootings: Many Americans are fully aware of what’s going on with the anti-gun and anti-Liberty agenda. They see what’s going in places like Washington, DC, and Chicago, where guns are highly regulated and it’s not safe for people to leave their homes, and they know leftists would happily make all of America suffer under the same regime.

Nonetheless, millions of responsible gun owners will be blamed when the next Sandy Hook takes place. Here we are five years out, and leftists continue to use that particular massacre to push their agenda. A study published last week by the journal Science makes a direct correlation between accidental gun deaths and Sandy Hook.

The authors of the study, economists Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight, noted a “27 percent increase in accidental shooting deaths overall between December 2012 and April 2013, according to data mined from the Centers for Disease Control. The rate among children spiked 64 percent, according to the study.”

What’s interesting is that, according to Christen Smith, “in the paper itself, Levine and McKnight caution against interpreting their results” as a “direct link between the greater gun sales and these additional deaths.” Levine and McKnight added “we cannot determine the extent to which the impact is driven by sales or greater exposure to existing guns.”

That disclaimer is the whole point. But the gun control schemers will use anything, even faulty surveys or contradictory evidence, to push their goal of chipping away at our right to keep and bear arms.

Another survey being criticized by those who can’t back up their claims is the National Self Defense Survey (NSDS). The survey estimates that more than two million DGUs (Defensive Gun Uses) occur each year in the United States.

Evan DiFilippis and Devin Hughes claim in a Politico article that the statistics in the National Self Defense Survey are exaggerated. One of two professors who conducted the NSDS responded in the same publication by stating the survey does not “overestimate the number of DGUs (or anything else crime-related), and at least 18 national surveys have consistently confirmed that DGUs are very common, probably more common than criminal uses of guns.”

Again, gun control advocates like to cherry-pick the evidence, or distort statistics to their own advantage. Occasionally, though, an honest Democrat surfaces and admits the painful truth.

Former National Public Radio CEO Ken Stern admitted that “DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.”

In the end that’s what it’s all about. Protecting ourselves and our families from criminal individuals … and tyrannical agents of the government.

Democrats and others have long manipulated data and twisted the truth in order to convince Americans that guns are the problem, while supporting policies that have created the social maladies necessitating gun ownership in the first place.

All Americans want violence to end, but the Second Amendment isn’t the problem. Leftists know this, too, but they’re hoping enough Americans will fall for their charade and keep voting for political gimmicks presented as real solutions.

No system of government will ever figure out how to perfect human nature. Our Founding Fathers understood this, and they gave us a Constitution to serve as a bulwark against those who don’t.