Any time the media’s favorite former “gun guy”-turned-gun control advocate gets invited to speak about gun control, hold on. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Ryan Busse, Senior Advisor for Giffords gun control group, was invited to MSNBC’s “Reidout” to speak with host Joy Reid as she bemoaned that she was allegedly afraid to leave her home on Independence Day for celebrations because “America’s awash in guns” and is insane.
Busse jumped right in with all the standard gun control talking points regardless of whether they are actually true, the better to feed Reid’s fears and scare her viewer(s). The conversation went down a road of hairpin turns, over through and around the truth, then straight off the edge into outright falsehoods.
Busse likes to pass himself off to adoring gun control media types as a firearm industry “expert” but make no mistake…he’s nothing of the sort. He dresses up in Fudd-ish plaid flannel, hunts with expensive shotguns and spends more time dabbling in blue-anon progressive politics than he does actually concentrating on things like the facts.
Don’t believe him. He’s nothing more than a modern-day snake oil salesman hawking gun control as a miracle cure-all elixir.
Fast and Loose
During his MSNBC appearance Busse came right out of the gate firing some of his made up “gun facts.” None of his wild ideas were challenged by Reid, of course, who devoured them in order to validate her preconceived notions that all guns are evil and gun owners are bad (except her guest, of course).
Never once did they address the need to prosecute criminals and hold them accountable. That, of course, would take away the need to swallow the gun control medicine.
Reid asked Busse what changed in America to make it a “shooting gallery.” “We have doubled the number of guns in our society in the last 20 years,” Busse answered.
That begs the question — what’s the appropriate number for firearms in lawful private possession? Maybe the figure Busse is more comfortable with is the millions of firearms he bragged about selling when he was worked for one company in the industry.
He has told the media he worked in the firearm industry from 1995-2020. During that time, the firearm manufacturer he worked for produced 2,353,516 rifles, pistols and revolvers for the American market. That’s not counting anything that was exported.
There are in fact more guns in America now than there were 20 years ago, just as there are more cars now. The lawful sale and ownership of firearms to law-abiding customers who want to buy them doesn’t cause crime any more than the sale of cars causes drunk driving.
For the entire time the industry – with his help – was allegedly turning America into a “shooting gallery” crime was falling to record lows. Crime began to rise during the pandemic and civil unrest that occurred beginning in 2020.
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t put a quota on the Second Amendment. It doesn’t say that only a certain number of firearms can be possessed by law-abiding Americans. Liberty isn’t limited that way and America agrees.
Pew Research polls Americans annually about gun ownership and consistently comes up with a statistic that roughly one third of Americans profess to owning a gun and 40 percent of Americans say they live in a household that has a firearm present. Small Arms Survey pegs the number of firearms in the United States at 393 million. NSSF has attested in U.S. Supreme Court briefs that there are over of 425 million firearms in American private possession.
What Busse and Reid ignore is that these gun owners are law-abiding citizens, not criminals. They have the constitutional right to own firearms. Every firearm sold at retail is completed with a signed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Form 4473, attesting that the purchaser isn’t a prohibited individual. That’s verified against the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
It seems Busse’s really concerned about more Americans lawfully exercising their Second Amendment rights than it is about the number of firearms. If he’s concerned about criminals misusing firearms, he skipped over that part, leading Reid’s viewers to believe they need to fear those who obey the law and not be concerned about “progressive” prosecutors that are soft on crime.
Sin of Omission
Busse wasn’t finished. Talking about civilian gun ownership, he gravely told Reid that “In fact, nothing is more targeted at the ability to remove the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of fellow citizens in a second or two, dozens of them as we have seen than the right to own firearms.”
Busse’s committing a sin of omission, here. First, nothing in the Second Amendment allows anyone to remove anyone else’s “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of fellow citizens.” What the Second Amendment does allow, however, is the right of Americans to keep and bear arms.
As the Supreme Court said in its Heller decision, the core of the Second Amendment is the natural right of self-defense. The Supreme Court didn’t limit the number and law-abiding citizens aren’t buying firearms to murder their neighbors. They’re buying guns to protect themselves against criminals who prey on the innocent. That’s been demonstrated time and again, including during the recent gun buying surge of 2020-2021.
Busse’s factually devoid, agenda-driven attacks on the firearm industry were unsurprisingly echoed by Reid. She attempted to fault the firearm industry for convincing Asian Americans to buy guns. This thinly-veiled racist sentiment asserts that Asian Americans can’t be fully trusted to make their own decisions to exercise the full spectrum of their Constitutional rights.
The fact is, Asian-Americans were and are being targeted in race-based violent attacks and they’re refusing to be victims. Chris Cheng, a noted firearm expert, testified on Capitol Hill that the Asian-American community took ownership of their Second Amendment rights when violent crime targeted that community.
“The past year-and-a-half or so with COVID-19 has been a pressure cooker… When you couple that with calls to defund the police and taking law enforcement officers off the street…it makes citizens like me less safe,” Cheng said in testimony in 2021. “If I can’t have law enforcement there, then it is a rational conclusion that individual citizens like myself would opt to utilize my Second Amendment right to purchase a firearm and use that firearm in lawful and legal self-defense.”
Cheng’s testimony wasn’t unique. Time magazine reported that Svetlana Kim and Ericson Reduta were among the Asian American community that didn’t own guns until they saw violence targeting their community. They bought guns and got trained.
That’s their right. Busse and Reid want to denigrate that, of course. It’s okay for Busse to own guns in his Montana home but they together question why an Asian American man or woman would choose to do the same in their Los Angeles home.
Outright Lies
Accusations of the firearm industry fear-mongering are nothing short of projecting gun control’s own actions. Reid noted that when there is a heinous crime, firearm sales increase. Neither Reid nor Busse mentioned that along with these despicable crimes are the instant calls for guns bans by anti-gun politicians, coastal media elites, gun control groups like the one that employs Busse. When people become concerned they won’t be able to purchase the firearm that best suits their needs, they will exercise that right before gun-grabbing politicians steal that right away from them.
Still, there were more lies to come.
“The industry has also encouraged not — the stand your ground laws say don’t just have a gun, shoot someone. Use it,” Reid said. “Somebody rings your doorbell, shoot them because we’ll protect you under the law.”
That’s a lie. Here’s the truth. NSSF, as the Firearm Industry Trade Association, on behalf of the firearm industry has never taken a position on stand-your-ground laws. We are unaware of any individual industry member who did. Why? Because it’s not an industry issue, it’s a gun owner issue.
The industry advocates for safe and responsible firearm ownership and partners with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and 15,000 other law enforcement agencies for Real Solutions. Safer Communities.
The most notorious example of anyone advocating for blindly firing a gun at perceived but unconfirmed threats at the door was then-Vice President Biden when he said he told his wife, Jill, to “fire two blasts” from a shotgun into the night sky without knowing who or what that target might be.
Uninformed comments about the firearm industry that aren’t backed by facts should be treated the same way as errant shotgun blasts into the night. Don’t do them and don’t tolerate them.
Larry Keane is SVP for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
Gee, I was going to comment on Busse the hypocrite liar, but then I got all pissed off at the full screen Bio Fire “reserve your’s now ” ad that runs fulltime, and I thought that there’s plenty of that right here.
I don’t have a problem with them using their money to fund TTAG.
these sort of people tend to view ALL gun owners as a threat…reasoning with them is often pointless…
Question is…How much is benedict busse being paid to love on the History Confirmed agenda of racists and nazis?
The sneaky democRat lint licker ryan busse and his cohorts want all eyes on firearms and None on the fact that if a person is nutty enough to criminally misuse a firearm they will most certainly criminally misuse bricks, bats, knives, fists, feet, matches, vehicles, etc…Sounds like a Content of Character problem because it most certainly is.
The rights of the law abiding are not to be determined by what criminals do, the acts of criminals and tyrants throughout history tells us only a damned fool would lay the Second Amendment down at the feet of a Gun Control zealot.
Only thing left for benedict ryan busse and his sick in the head ilk to do is go pound sand.
Is he a traitor if he was never loyal to begin with? Not that it matters much as dishonest is still dishonest and totalitarian is the larger part of your smaller picture.
void the noid…Are you a Bigger Gun Control History illiterate or a smaller Gun Control history illiterate if you were always were a Gun Control history illiterate? Please advise.
Plow my fields serf same race no racism in roots. Get some new specs your myopia is showing peasant.
void the noid…If you had any intellect or credibility you would not have replied to my first post…You dance around twinkle toes and will not answer questions. That says you are an anal twerp who must enjoy getting their behind booted over and over.
Always about the sex stuff with you and your delusions. No thank you I have broken up with better. Also your roots are still outgrowths of basic centralized power and control and as old as civilization and older than your petty racism. You would be as much a slave as any black brown oriental or gypsie given who run things assuming that you are white and if not it’s alright they have a space for you no matter your color in their multicultural rainbow of oppression. But yes it’s sooooooo totally a race thing. Now be sure to back up how Slavery outdoes government in arms control somehow.
“You dance around twinkle toes and will not answer questions.”
Ahh, the mark of an actual fascist.
Answer widdle debs question with your back straight and at full attention, or the cruel frau will let you have it!
Please, see your doctor. She can prescribe something to make your ‘change of life’ go easier… 🙂
Damnit Geoff I am trying to get the daft dame to think her way out of a subject that will basically be dead in any reasonable way in a decade or two as the civil rights era dies out and racism becomes micro aggressions and not wanting to hang around groups based on the content of their character.
“He dresses up in Fudd-ish plaid flannel… “
Sure, but does he ever wear a tan suit?
Does his wife ever wear a sleeveless dress?
If you folks are just friggin hilarious.
MINOR Miner49er, is that the only thing you find wrong with the article? You don’t dispute that he is a charlatan?
Busse thinks his mea culpa moment will save him from “people’s justice” post rev0lution. He doesn’t realize his usefulness will end at some point and he will be on the edge of the execution pit along with other class enemies.
Yup, Robespierre thought he was indispensable to the French Revolution right up to the moment he lost his head over outliving his usefulness to The Movement.
The late Col Jeff Cooper commented in 1958, “Killing is a matter of will, not means. You cannot control the intent by passing laws about the means.”
Guns, inanimate objects, do not kill people. Defective Citizens kill people. Rather than hold firearm manufacturers responsible for guns being used to kill, maybe hold the manufacturers of Defective Citizens ….parents….responsible for the actions of their Defective Citizen offspring. Your kid does the crime, mommy/daddy share the time. But, then, solving shooting deaths is not the agenda. The true agenda is We The Little Peeps disarmament. Mass shootings by Defective Citizens are merely good for their disarmament agenda.
Having spent 20+ years in data analytics I see through most of the methods of lying with statistics. The most common is citing raw numbers with no context, if it is not expressed per capitia it is likely a false narrative. Of course there are more guns than 20 years ago, there are more people too and the reality is per capitia ownership is same or down.
Haven’t you heard? Per capita is racist.
Math in general is racist at this point unless it supports their agenda. Would have thought per capita ownership went up from the 90s to now but I guess the estates of total number of firearms by year would be a guestimate.
Math isn’t racist, demanding the correct answer to a calculation is racist…
“The most common is citing raw numbers with no context, if it is not expressed per capitia it is likely a false narrative“
To speak the truth is to shame the devil.
When “raw numbers” are nothing but padded stats, that is truly shameful.
You control freaks still “think” that a gun is the culprit. Can you tell me how a gun shoots itself?
Guns DO NOT Murder People: Criminals Do! Statistics on Violence, Gun Ownership, and Gun Control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1136Ou7p8M
guns are not the number one cause of child death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPMV6V4FAYA
42.79% of all statistics are fabricated.
45.1 % of all statistics are distorted.
2% of all statistics are accurate due to human error.
There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Mark Twain
IIRC a certain noted firearm/self defense ‘expert’ not too long ago dispensed with the notion of even answering the door, just shoot thru it with yer shotgun…………………….
but I’m getting tired of buying new doors and it shreds the girl scout cookies
I used to believe Anti 2Aers, and TDS sufferers were two different diseases, but I’ve since changed my mind about that because of the Root Condition both groups exhibit as Signs and Symptoms.
After careful analysis and study, my Professional opinion is that all Lefty Libtards suffer from a Terminal disease that should be recognized and accepted as FTFTCApathy, or Failure To Follow The Constitution Assholismopathy.
It’s Terminal, there is no cure, and though Assisted Suicide is anathema to Constitutionalists like us, this is one of the rate cases we should embrace it, just to ease these poor individuals’ anguish and pain. It’s so sad and painful to watch their Anguish and know they’re completely infected down to the Cellular Level, and knowing they’re beyond hope, that I weep for them.
Medical Science needs to recognize this disease, and the only cure of Assisted Suicide to these poor people.
Failure To Follow The Constitution Assholismopathy is very real. Sadly, we’ve witnessed it with poor Dacian, Miner 49er, and RedcoatTurncoat Albert. Please Gentlemen, I urge you to embrace the cure, as it’s so painfully sad to watch you suffer so.
super late term abortion
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Take your gunm full of bullets and rob the pizza place.
There is no reason any American citizen should go hungry.
Short History of Slavery
https://www.prageru.com/video/a-short-history-of-slavery
Ohhh ohhh the Israelites.
Get up in the morning slaving for bread Sir.
Let my people go.
And He did
And they worshiped a golden calf the first chance they got.
Ohhh ohhh ohhh the Israelites.
How big is this desert anyway, been 40 years and we and found the way out yet.
Ahhh Ahhh Ahhh aaaa
Row row row the boat
Violently into to the cream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is full of screams.
Dont spill the masters tea.
Train tracks and railroads.
Oh fck I’m tired, but gotta work two jobs to make the car payment.
$laving $laving cant do no saving.
And the Crow says
Hah,, hah,hah I’m a
Freebird
I’ve seen Desmond Dekker live.
possum, Get help!
There is more to it than just the violence of the last few years. In the 90s, voters fed up with the high crime of the 80s and the tender treatment criminals got in courts passed laws creating things like longer sentences for violent crime three strikes laws and setting high bails standards. In the following decade, panty-twisters and other liberals started claiming we had too many folks in jail and that we couldn’t stand the cost of incarcerating so many misunderstood young lads. I won’t go into the economics as I have outlined it too many times on line. Society cannot afford the cost of allowing felons to roam the streets. But the panty-twisters managed to carry the votes and we see the results, tens of thousands of felons turned out of prison. Felony levels raised to ridiculous heights, police made into criminals — I recognize that there are serious problems in many departments but throwing the baby out with the wash water isn’t the answer. All of the above is what contributed to the current crime wave and the concurrent acquisition of firearms to provide what communities are failing to provide — public safety.
“…attesting that the purchaser isn’t a prohibited individual.”
Leftist: “Whatever. How does that prevent the buyer from lying on the form?”
“You mean like Hunter Biden?”
Leftist: “…erp, nothing to see here, move along…”
…. Secret Service ends investigation into White House cocaine with no suspects (Hunter) found after ten day investigation. Meanwhile, three new suspects in Jan. 6th “riot” are named….
The media has become or always has been a propaganda outlet.
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