By Matthew Howe
If you haven’t seen the 1980 Robert Zemeckis, Kurt Russell film Used Cars, put it in your queue. It’s a raw, vulgar, and hilarious snobs vs. slobs story of dueling used car dealerships. Our heroes are the lovable rogues working at the downscale lot, humorous misfits who will tell any lie, use any trick to offload the junkers in their inventory. Rupert Neate and Mae Ryan at The Guardian are like those car salesmen. Only they’re not quite so lovable. They do lie, however, just as big and boldly as Kurt Russell’s Rudy Russo ever did . . .
From a recent TTAG-highlighted story in The Guardian about the Las Vegas SHOT Show:
People are buying guns as part of the American dream of freedom and liberty,” said Brauer, who is based at the Hull College of Business at Augusta University. “And also, the hope and the dream of being able to use guns in self-defense.
The “hope and dream” of being able to use a gun in self defense? This is clearly a fellow who hasn’t read much Massad Ayoob. Typical projection, where the gun-control advocate assumes that gun owners are all just itching for the chance to plug someone. Preferably someone of color. Because in their minds, we’re all trigger-happy racists.
As anyone who’s actually familiar with America’s gun owners’s knows, that’s bunk, of course. The correct sentiment would be “in case they need one for self-defense.” It’s a cliche, but no one buys a fire extinguisher for their kitchen dreaming of the day they’ll heroically snuff out a grease fire. You have it there in case of emergency, and hope you’ll never need it.
The same goes for a gun, whether it’s carried or kept at home.
But the shill doesn’t stop there. The Guardian continues:
People very rarely get to live out that dream, with FBI data showing that gun owners are 78 times more likely to kill themselves than they are to carry out a “justifiable homicide”, which the agency describes as “the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen”.
That sentence is a con-artist’s dream as it’s both factually correct while also perfectly illustrating the unabashed dishonesty of the gun control movement. It’s a spurious correlation that sounds terrible, but is actually meaningless. It’s the big letters painted on a used car’s windshield which read RUNS QUIET!…a car with no engine.
Research has shown, over and over again, that in more than 90% of defensive gun uses, a shot isn’t even fired much less anyone struck or killed. (And using the author’s logic, the effectiveness of the police would only be measured by how many criminals they send to the morgue.)
Defensive gun uses encompass many types of events. Events where merely brandishing a gun is enough to send a criminal packing, events in which a shot is fired but no one is hurt, events where a suspect is wounded (then often arrested at a local hospital) and, finally — the smallest subset — those where the bad guy is actually killed by an armed citizen.
The authors purposefully ignore the vast majority of defensive gun uses and choose only the smallest subset of events for their comparison. They do this knowingly and willfully because if they compared suicides (which number around 20,000 per year) to even the smallest estimate of total defensive gun use events, (which comes from fellow used car salesman and public health researcher David Hemenway) they’d still find that guns are used 2.5 times more often for self-defense than for suicide.
If they used total defensive gun use figures from a source less committed to the disarmament of the American citizen, such as those by Gary Kleck, they’d discover that there are 37 to 100 times as many defensive gun uses than gun suicides.
But the entire notion is false because defensive gun uses and suicides are completely different animals. You simply can’t make a meaningful comparison between the two, especially since there is no data showing that gun ownership has a significant effect on the overall suicide rate.
So yes, they lie. The brakes are supposed to make that sound! That’s not rust, it’s undercoat! The original owner was a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays! Every single day, in each article they write, and they know they’re doing it. They lie because their goal is not improved public safety, it’s civilian disarmament and whatever tall tale they need to tell to seal the deal is a means to that end.
This is why there can be no compromise. Because, like trying to get a square deal from a dishonest used car salesman, you can’t negotiate with someone who won’t tell you the truth.
