Guess what? Now that the number of fatal and non-fatal injuries may hit an all-time high for one year, a new gun-control organization has appeared. I’m talking about an outfit called 97Percent, which is basically a website touting a new piece of research allegedly proving that just about everyone in America will support laws that reduce the violence committed with the use of guns.
Well, it’s not really new research unless you define research as getting on the phone and talking to a bunch of pre-screened people who will answer questions that you believe are relevant or germane to the issue or issues being researched.
But what if the questions you ask the so-called ‘balanced’ group of respondents are full of sh*t? What if the questions exhibit a complete lack of understanding about how and why gun violence occurs?
What this new group is very good at doing is getting noticed by the national media, such as a major article in The Washington Post. The author of this piece publishes regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, et. al., and she has a hyphenated last name. She’s really going to know how to understand and explain the issue of guns, right?
But let’s get back to the so-called research that 97Percent believes creates a solid basis for figuring out how we can go about reducing the behavior which has killed and seriously injured at least 223 Americans over past three days – and that’s a serious undercount, believe me, okay?
Incidentally, the research being promoted by 97Percent came out of the Tufts University Medical School, so we have to take it seriously because as we all know, medical research is always supposed to be aligned with facts, or what is called ‘evidence-based’ research.
What this research shows is that there is solid support among gun owners for laws and regulations that will reduce gun violence and make America a much safer place.
Before I say something about the research, I should add that 97Percent will be holding their first annual conference on November 17, which will bring together “Members of Congress, activists and leading policy experts to discuss the current state of, and path forward for, the gun safety movement.”
Activists who are concerned about gun violence love to go to conferences. They meet their friends, they listen to a couple of interesting spiels, there’s usually something good to eat. These conferences have been going on regularly since the terrible 2012 slaughter at Sandy Hook. Know what difference they’ve made? To quote Grandpa, ‘gurnisht helfen,’ (read: nothing at all.)
And the reason these meetings and all these efforts to reduce gun violence have had no effect is quite simple. You can’t figure out what to do about a problem – any problem – if you continue to explain why the problem occurs by promoting an explanation for the problem which is simply wrong.
Okay, I’m repeating myself again. So now it’s time to get down to what Grandpa would call ‘tachlis’ (read: the real deal) and explain why gun violence actually occurs. Ready?
The United States is the only country in the entire world which sanctions the legal ownership of a product which is designed and used only for the purpose of ending human life. There is no other country anywhere on this Earth where someone can walk into a retail establishment, plunk down some hard-earned dough and walk out five minutes later with a bottom-loading, semi-automatic pistol chambered for military-grade ammunition and also have three or four additional magazines so that the gun owner can get off 50 or 60 man-killing shots in one minute or less.
There is not single word in the entire report issued by 97Percent which mentions this point at all. Nobody was asked over the phone or in some kind of ‘focus group’ whether or not Americans should be able to get their hands on such guns. Which, by the way, is the reason we have gun violence.
How do you make a Glock 17 or a Sig P320 safe? You don’t because you can’t. These guns happen to be ‘weapons of war,’ designed for military use and carried today by military troopers worldwide. And a gun-control activist is going to sit down across the table from someone who owns one of these guns and come up with a plan to make their gun ‘safe?’
Give me a break, okay?