Who are you gonna believe…me or your lying eyes? That is, in effect, the narrative relentlessly pushed by the anti-gun rights left in this country. That’s nothing new, of course, but after 18 months of blistering gun sales and rising violent crime, the firearm prohibitionists, their media stenographers, and the politicians who share their goal of civilian disarmament are getting a little panicky.
Take, for instance, this recent assertion by Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen, a member of the House Judiciary Committee . . .
#ICYMI: @RepCohen just said he’d never seen a case where a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun.
Countless Americans, who’ve had their lives saved by the Second Amendment, would disagree. pic.twitter.com/TfTTjHRety
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) October 27, 2021
Show me a case, please — we didn’t have them in Memphis — where a good man or woman with a gun protected and stopped the use of a weapon. That canard doesn’t occur. That just…dog won’t hunt.
I couldn’t find who Cohen was addressing that remark to. He was probably talking in reference to the employee who went postal in a Memphis post office earlier this month, but it really doesn’t matter.
To be clear, Rep. Cohen is lying. He isn’t simply ignorant or misinformed. He didn’t misspeak and he wasn’t misunderstood. He’s lying his ass off in order to support the narrative that civilian gun ownership represents an unalloyed evil in society that benefits no one.
We have a feature here called Defensive Gun Use of the Day that chronicles scores of instances every year in which gun-owning individuals use their Second Amendment rights to defend themselves and their families. The Centers for Disease Control — surely an institution the Congressman trusts, at least since January — recognizes studies that have found defensive gun uses happen anywhere between 60,000 and 2.5 million times a year, depending on who’s doing the counting.
Some will claim, of course, that the Congresman was actually talking about citizens using guns to stop mass shootings. You know, that whole Wayne LaPierre ‘good guy with a gun’ thing that drives the hoplophobic harridans so insane.
We’re sorry to burst the Congressman’s well-insulated, Beltway-bound bubble, but surely even he heard about the shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ outside Fort Worth that was stopped by a congregant with a pistol? It was caught on video for all the world to see.
But that was almost two years ago! Someone as busy and important as a U.S. Congressman can’t be expected to remember something like that!
OK then, let’s jump in the WayBack Machine and go all the way back to…last week. That’s when an employee of a grain elevator in Nebraska who was armed with a shotgun stopped a workplace shooting after a man who had been fired early that day opened fire. CNN even reported it so it must be true!
Could someone as intelligent, erudite, and informed as the distinguished Congressman possibly be so woefully ignorant of the tens of thousands (millions?) of times each year that Americans use guns in this country to defend themselves against assault, robbery, rape and murder?
Spoiler alert: he isn’t.
No, instead Rep. Cohen simply can’t allow himself to acknowledge the good that civilian firearms ownership represents in this country. To do so would undermine his agenda and piss off some of his most loyal supporters in the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex. Lord knows he can’t let that happen.
Instead, Cohen spouts plainly false, easily-refuted garbage like he did in the video above. He’d rather expose himself to ridicule from those on the other side of the political spectrum — and then label it fake news, white supremacy, or right wing insurrectionism — than antagonize his funders and those who keep him in office.
In other words, it’s politics. Better to spout a lie and look the fool than acknowledge an inconvenient truth. And so it goes.
