But for me to buy that they’re right, they’d need a lot more evidence that it would work. I wouldn’t support it anyway, of course, but I could at least accept that they had a point.

While they can point to heavily biased studies as “proof,” we’ve got reality showing us otherwise.

Take this situation in Pennsylvania, for example.

A man who was 15 when he was involved in a gun battle outside a high school football game that set off a chain of events that ended in the death of an 8-year-old girl in Sharon Hill has been sentenced to 14 to 28 years in prison.

Nineteen-year-old Angelo Ford was sentenced Friday in Delaware County on several cases including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and related convictions stemming from the 2021 gunfire in Sharon Hill that eventually led to the death of Fanta Bility.

Prosecutors said Ford and a group of other males got into an argument while leaving an Academy Park High School football game in August 2021. Ford, then 15, pulled a handgun and exchanged gunfire with a 21-year-old man about a block away from the stadium, firing five times as the other person fired twice, authorities said.

Authorities said two shots went in the direction of three Sharon Hill police officers monitoring the crowd leaving the game. The officers returned fire toward a car they believed was involved, and one of the rounds hit Bility, who was leaving the game with her family, authorities said.

“There is not loss of life that night if AJ Ford doesn’t bring a gun,” Deputy District Attorney Laurie Moore said. “Fanta would still be here. She’d be 11 years old.”

Moore sought a term of 32 to 67 years, citing the trauma of the child’s family and the community. She also said Ford had never displayed an ounce of remorse, fleeing a juvenile facility after the arrest and eluding police for more than a year as he posted Instagram videos taunting his pursuers and waving guns around. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Yet, according to the polls, if it were that important, gun control candidates would win hands down. The polls all claim that a massive majority of people want gun control of various kinds. That didn’t seem to pan out in the least. We can see that in part based on the “Leaders We Deserve” being handed their collective posteriors anywhere they faced a real challenge, with the only exception being someone who never talked about gun control.

At the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, they’re not thrilled with the outcome of the election, and the cope is strong there.

Common-sense gun laws, such as universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), continue to stall in Congress and struggle to pass in many states—even though most Americans support these policies: Over 80% support universal background checks, and about 70% support ERPOs.

So why is gun policy so out of step with the preferences of most Americans?

Silvia Villarreal, MPP, director of research translation at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, says that today, the support of the majority of the population, including most gun owners, is being drowned out by a highly organized and committed group spurred by a powerful gun lobby that perpetuates the myths that owning guns makes people safer and that common-sense gun laws threaten Second Amendment rights.

The fact that they keep using the term “common sense” for these anti-gun proposals just tells you where their priorities are, not that we needed to figure it out. Bloomberg’s name is on the school, for crying out loud. We know what the agenda is. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

While, as of this writing, we’re still waiting on results from Arizona, but they’re not going to have any ramifications on who the president will be come January. There are some House races that might have an impact on who holds the majority in that chamber, but that’s just about it as far as national ramifications go.

But the polls were…questionable.

RealClearPolitics, which doesn’t play with the numbers at all, simply averages the polls together, had Kamala Harris with a slight lead. FiveThirtyEight had her winning with a slightly larger lead, but it was still close. Yet Trump won the popular vote entirely, and by a couple of percentage points, meaning they missed it by a fairly significant margin.

That’s interesting, because nearly a week before the election, pollster Nate Silver called out his colleagues. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Johnson captured the hearts and minds of Democrats around the country when she and two other Memphis-area legislators led protests for more gun control laws from the floor of the state House after the Covenant School Shootings last year. Johnson was hoping to use her newfound celebrity on the left as a springboard to the Senate, but even before the first returns came in there were clear signs that her campaign was struggling.

Last week the New York Times ran a glowing profile of Johnson, but admitted in the headline that her campaign “appears destined to fail.” Instead of seeking victory, Johnson moved the goalposts for her campaign and said she was really thinking about “the importance of flipping the State House and the State Senate.”

Well, that’s not going to happen either. Though Democrats may pick up a couple of seats in both chambers, it looks like Republicans will keep control of the state House and Senate this year. And though Johnson won’t be heading to Washington, D.C., she will be returning to Nashville.

Regardless of the Senate outcome, Ms. Johnson is guaranteed to remain in office: She is also running unopposed for her seat in the State Legislature. She was first elected in 2012 and represents part of Knoxville.

Her position within the state party has also shaped her alliance with a number of first-time candidates, many of whom cite the aftermath of the 2023 school shooting as motivation for running.

Few are expected to flip Republican-held seats. But even contesting some of these seats is a signal of progress for the party, which has repeatedly failed to recruit any candidates or secure national support for those who do run. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

After all, if every gun buyer anywhere in the nation has to undergo a background check, convicted felons aren’t going to be able to buy them.

That makes a lost of sense. At least, it does until you finish the second grade and realize that this assumes that everyone is going to follow the law while they’re trying to break the law.

Yes, that’s really what it does.

It basically assumes that everyone will conduct a transaction as if everyone is law-abiding rather than some people simply buying guns from those who don’t care about such things. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Sure, we could argue that shootings tend to act almost like a virus, starting in one place, and then spreading out as various people retaliate, so if we look at it via a public health framework that way, we might be able to stop the cycle in its tracks.

But too many people want to go well beyond that, people like Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry and director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.

It seems he wants a public health view of gun violence, too, but he’s focusing on the wrong word in that term.

Metzl referenced his newest book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, where he explores how the topic of guns is not only a conversation about safety or law, but one of identity.

“There are issues about identity that I think are important to think about, which is the polarization where people’s identities become oppositional to each other,” Metzl said. “People get on different sides of these issues, about issues of safety, and for them that’s a really deeply existential and deeply psychoanalytic topic of asking how exactly these identities form.”

Metzl said that drastically different opinions across the country create a polarized political sphere among voters, politicians, and legislators when it comes to gun violence.

“Americans basically are divided almost down the middle about what mass shootings mean,” Metzl said. “Half of our country thinks we need more regulation, and the other half of the country says this means we need more guns.”

While the U.S. has made powerful strides toward resolving other public safety concerns by enacting a ban on smoking or educating the public about its associated risks, the same cannot be said about gun safety, Metzl said.

“We made people believe, and rightly so, that secondhand smoke is a risk, that being in a car without a seatbelt is a risk,” Metzl said. “The question is, why didn’t we convince the entire country to do the same thing, but with guns?” […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Then David Hogg got in after being turned down by much lesser schools than Harvard claims to be. It became clear that the Ivy League’s prestige is based on history more than anything else.

But one would hope that most who end up at Harvard have at least some inkling of an idea of how to think. I’d like to think that. I can’t, but I’d like to, and this point-counterpoint article on guns certainly didn’t help.

I’m going to to delve too far into the pro-gun arguments because, well, they’ll all look familiar enough. I’ll only use summarize them to frame some of the anti-gun arguments.

It starts with the pro-gun perspective saying that we need guns for self-defense. The author points out that defensive gun uses are far more common than offensive gun uses, etc. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Bias exists in who they call experts, for example. They often cite groups like Giffords, Brady, and Everytown as if they’re not active gun control organizations, while generally presenting groups like the NRA, GOA, or NSSF as something else entirely.

But it’s not just what they include that demonstrates bias. It’s also what they don’t talk about.

To bring up this point, we have this piece from the Washington Times about the coverage of a congressional race and an associated debate.

Fortunately, News 12 provides access to the entire February debate. I watched it. My source was correct: Mr. Suozzi advanced misinformed and arguably authoritarian positions that were never challenged in the debate or by news organizations covering the discussion.

Namely, an audience member asked a question about guns during the program. Ms. Pilip said that she opposed automatic weapons (which have long been illegal nationwide) and “weapons of war.”

Mr. Suozzi then pounced, declaring that “semiautomatic weapons are the problem.” He hectored her with his view that “semiautomatics are the problem” and demanded, “Will you vote to ban semiautomatic weapons?”

…

Perhaps most amazing in this saga is the lack of news coverage of this pivotal debate and special election. To my knowledge, no Long Island, New York City or national news organization reported on Mr. Suozzi’s shocking desire to ban semiautomatic weapons nationwide. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners have been putting out the individual fires as they pop up, filing lawsuits against each community that enacts such a law.

So far, so good. It’s annoying and expensive for gun rights groups, but it’s doable.

Except now a judge wants the organization to provide evidence of something that should be pretty obvious.

The federal judge presiding over a lawsuit regarding various Boulder County assault weapon bans ordered Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the National Association for Gun Rights to provide further evidence or risk having the case thrown out.

…

In a document filed Monday, Federal Judge Nina Wang wrote that the plaintiffs, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, failed to present sufficient evidence that the ordinances prohibit them from their current and future conduct, and cause direct injury. Wang stated that the plaintiff’s provided no evidence that show the ordinances “make it difficult or impossible for the organizations to fulfill any of their essential goals or purposes.”

The ordinances ban people in the county from the “manufacture, import, purchase, sell or transfer” of any assault weapons or large capacity magazines. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners conceded that the ordinance does not necessarily prohibit the possession of assault weapons, according to the order. […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com

And once again, the media is playing good little ally and pushing a narrative.

The problem is that this particular narrative is that these replica guns are somehow the reason people are dying.

In 2023, more than 12 million BB and pellet guns were bought in the United States. Many have roughly the same weight, markings and finishes as real guns. But these look-alike replica guns aren’t federally required to have any clear indicators that they don’t shoot bullets. In most states they are available for adults to purchase without background checks or restrictions.

Despite not being classified as lethal weapons, having one has gotten people killed.

Just this year, 12 people have been shot and killed by police while in possession of a replica gun. Three of them were under the age of 18. Since 2014, at least 320 people have been shot and killed by police while holding replica guns, according to a Washington Post database and CBS News review of incidents. Nineteen of those victims were minors.

As more of these guns get into peoples’ hands each year, police, lawmakers and activists are struggling to find ways to keep them safe […]

— Read More: bearingarms.com