Them Killer Guns

"Civil wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not." -- A. E. Samaan

OK, in the spirit of full transparency, I'm a deacon and I also own a few firearms. Nothing weird about that. I know many other brother deacons who enjoy shooting. As for me, I used to engage in occasional target shooting, but really don't have the time now. So, in truth, I clean my firearms every so often, just to keep them operable, but really haven't used them very much in recent years. And like virtually all legal firearm owners, I obey the laws, even unjust, un-Constitutional laws. This, of course, separates law-abiding owners of firearms from gun-toting criminals who, as you might expect, don't really pay attention to laws. 

A while ago, a parishioner, having heard that I owned some firearms, suggested that, "as a man of God, it's immoral for you to own guns." When I suggested that automobiles, knives, baseball bats, and fists also killed a bunch of people every year, some more than guns, he said, "That's different." When I asked why it was different, he had no answer. "It's just not the same," he said. (By the way, every year knives kill far more people than rifles.)

Of course, it's not different. Cars and knives and firearms are simply tools, and there's certainly nothing immoral about owning any or all of them. Sadly, though, this man was the victim of an intentional misinformation campaign that has apparently achieved some of its hoped-for goals. When Americans were polled recently and asked to guess the leading cause of gun-related deaths, the results were interesting. Check it out:

I'll spell out the results since the captions on the graph are rather small. Their guesses:

• 4% - Don't know
• 25% - Mass Shooting
• 33% - Non-Mass Homicide
• 23% - Suicide
• 14% - Unintentional

As you can see from the above, most Americans seem to believe homicides and mass shootings are the leading causes of gun-related deaths, with suicides and unintentional (presumably accidental) coming in third and fourth. 

Now let's look at the actual data from the Center for Disease Control:

•  0.3% - Mass Shooting
• 36.8% - Non-Mass Homicide
• 60.8% - Suicide
• 0.9% - Undetermined
• 1.2% - Unintentional

The CDC, a government agency, keeps track of all causes of death, and their latest data on gun-related deaths (from 2017)  show how misinformed most folks are. I can only assume their ignorance results from a media and uninformed politicians that feed them grossly inaccurate information on firearms. 

Note that the actual leading cause of gun-related deaths -- over 60% -- is suicide. But more striking is the figure for mass shootings: less than 1% as opposed to the 25% result from the poll. 

To read more on the results of this poll, including a demographic breakdown of those participating, click here: Washington Free Beacon.

I've also embedded the following video of Amy Swearer, a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. By the way, her statistics are absolutely correct...I checked.

Read what Teddy Roosevelt said over 100 years ago:

"The great body of our citizens shoot less as time goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world...The first step -- in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come -- is to teach men to shoot."

Teddy Roosevelt understood that the 2nd Amendment wasn't designed to protect hunters or target shooters, but to protect the people from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Interestiingly, in 1962 I graduated from a Catholic high school in New York's Westchester County. Our school had a rifle team and a indoor rifle range. I suspect that school no longer has either. Perhaps the range has been replaced with a safe room where students can escape from those ever present microaggressions.