Debunking the Left’s Favorite Anti-Gun Claims

Gun control nuts are full of stupid comments. You’ve probably had to roll your eyes when they talk about “silencers” or assault weapons. They seem to love showing off their ignorance. Despite how wrong they are about everything, they have still convinced many Americans of a few stupid myths.

Even worse, media portrayals have convinced the rest of the world of these backwards liberal notions. This is a brief debunking of those myths that you can share with the gun control activists who drive you nuts.

Most Gun Owners Will Have an Accident

This is a really popular myth on the left, especially in TV and movies. It’s based on a claim that gun owners are statistically more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. The statistic that originated this claim was based on 2012 numbers. In that year, there were an estimated 250 court justified gun killings. That means in 250 different cases, armed citizens killed someone and it was ruled an act of self-defense. In that same year, there were roughly 500 accidental gun deaths. Based on that, liberals assume that all gun owners are reckless time bombs and that self-harm is inevitable.

There are so many problems with this logic that it’s hard to find a starting point. Let’s talk about the fact that there are at least 71 million gun owners in the U.S. right now. Of those, the average number of accidental deaths is around 550 a year. That means only 0.000077 percent of gun owners have an accident each year. Those statistics suggest that American gun owners are some of the safest and most responsible people in the world.

But, there’s an additional problem with this particular liberal myth. It ignores the fact that the vast majority of gun-involved self-defense cases don’t result in a death. Far more often than not, simply pulling the gun is enough to deter a crime and shots are never fired. Even when they are, the majority of fired shots are not lethal. Now, this is not intended to promote bad safety. Every gun owner should understand the basic premise: never pull a weapon you don’t intend to use. Still, the numbers don’t lie, and very few American gun owners ever have an accident.

Guns Kill More Americans than War

A number of prominent figures on the left have touted this lie. The LA Times went as far as to suggest that domestic gun violence has killed more Americans than every war since the Revolution. If this sounds absurd, it’s because it is. From the Revolutionary War to the end of Vietnam, approximately 1.2 million Americans died defending our freedom. In the entire history of our country, fewer than 1 million have died from domestic gun violence (an exact number is impossible to determine, but most estimates put it around 800,000).

This already debunks the outright lie, but it’s more tilted than most people realize. You might be aware, but two-thirds of all gun deaths in the States are suicide. The left wants to paint some anarchist picture of America where people are dying in the streets left and right, but the truth is that gun homicides have been in decline for about 30 years. In fact, if you exclude suicide numbers, the U.S. has one of the lowest gun death rates in the world. There isn’t a problem with gun ownership or crime; there’s a problem with mental health.

Mass Shootings Happen Every Day

This one is a little trickier. The definition of mass shooting changes depending on who is asked. Wikipedia defines a mass shooting as a single incident where four or more people are killed by gunfire. More than a few gun control activists have suggested that there are more than 365 mass shootings every year, and that the number is on the rise. In reality, there have been 146 mass shootings since 1967. That’s pretty far short of one a day.

Like the other myths, this one is more misleading than it seems. The narrative of a mass shooting ridden America also suggests that Western Europe is so much safer. In fact, France has suffered more deaths and injuries to mass shootings since 2015 than the U.S. Full statistics aren’t readily available for all of Europe, but France isn’t the only country with a bigger problem than we see here.

These are the most popular myths at the moment, but they’re all equally dishonest. Liberals hate guns. Some of them simply don’t understand firearms, but many more actively want to seize power. They know that the gun-owning constituents of this country pose a clear and ever-present threat to true tyranny, and so they can’t push their loftier goals until they disarm us.

~ American Gun News