Earlier today, I talked about how anti-gunners are digging in for a second Trump administration. They like their odds, all things considered, which has to be some degree of self-delusion.
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Now, at least the facts claimed in that piece make some degree of sense. I understand why the self-delusion is happening. One of those claims is that the activist base is so much larger now than it was, even larger than the pro-gun activist “army.”
I don’t have hard numbers, of course, and I doubt anyone on that side of the debate does, either, but there are a lot more anti-gun activists than there were, so I get it.
Unfortunately for them, many of those gun control-supporting voices have as terrible of a grip on reality as this author at The Good Men Project:
“We pledge allegiance to gun manufacturers and the NRA of America, and for campaign funds for which they give, we sacrifice, under God, our integrity and compassion for all.”
The Pledge Taken by Too Many Politicians
I write these words after hearing of yet another school shooting in the United States. This time a shooter killed at least four people at a private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin before killing himself. At least five others have been taken to hospital with bullet wounds.
Wait…what?
The death toll for Madison wasn’t four people, but two. Six others were wounded. The killer killed herself. The only fact the author managed to get right about the shooting is where it took place.
This is a basic fact. This piece was published on Sunday, so we can’t even chalk this up to the initial aftermath of what happened, where numbers shift with every minute. This is weeks after the shooting, and he got just about every fact of the shooting wrong.
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With two weeks left to go in 2024, there have been at least 385 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot. But gun violence in the United States is so common as to be unremarkable, almost normal. At the height of the Corona-19 pandemic in 2021, for example, gun-related violence resulted in 26,328 suicides and 20,328 homicides.
When did we have a Corona-19 pandemic? We had the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved a novel coronavirus, but there was no Corona-19 pandemic.
Honestly, when you get a basic fact so wrong that I’m willing to shrug off using the Gun Violence Archive as an authoritative source, you’ve really screwed up.
Earlier this month, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old highly educated young man from a wealthy family allegedly acted out the rage many of us have against mega-insurance companies and other blood sucking corporations by murdering, in cold blood, the CEO of one of the largest “health” insurance companies in the country.
Even a cursory glance on several social media sites shows the extent to which Luigi has already become a cultural icon, a hero in the realm of David slaying the mightily Goliath, or Robin Hood challenging the powerful Mayor of Nottingham on behalf of the poorest among us.
The Mayor of Nottingham?
Try the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Robin Hood is one of those foundational stories that pretty much everyone knows. There have been so many adaptations of it made into movies or television shows, so many versions recounted in fiction of any description, that there’s absolutely no excuse for making such a mistake.
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I honestly think I’m angrier about this than literally every other basic fact that was blown here.
I might be able to look the other way on some of this if we were talking about someone who was clearly not from a Western culture with English as a second language.
It’s not.
Dr. Blumenfeld is a professor at UMASS.
How is it that an academic in the United States–the people who are supposed to be the brightest minds in our nation, at least in their own estimation–can get such simple and basic facts wrong?
What’s more, he’s trying to position himself as an expert on firearms and gun culture.
I’m sorry, but this is someone who can’t even get those basic facts correct. How should anyone believe that he actually understands gun owners in any meaningful, accurate way?
As it stands, we know that anti-gunners get an awful lot wrong. We’ve seen it too many times to ignore it, but usually it’s things that aren’t so obvious.
If this is the army of anti-gun activists the usual suspects have mustered, I don’t think we have anything to worry about.
