02-22-2018, 12:31 PM
(02-22-2018, 12:07 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: I think the reality is most people aren't extreme, but the loudest voices are telling us that it's either ban guns or make them free of any regulations.
With the NRA throwing so much money around, we can't even discuss researching gun violence and mental health as a simple first step.
One of the biggest problems is that the anti-gun crowd has consistently proven themselves to be highly disingenuous. You will routinely hear them state that 36k are killed by gun violence per year. This deliberately ignores that 24k of those are suicides. A suicide, while certainly tragic, is not "gun violence" anymore than a person who hangs themselves or OD's on pills is rope violence or pill violence. So why the deliberate subterfuge?
After the FL shooting you heard a lot about "18 school shootings already this year". This is another deliberate lie. This one was so egregious that even the Washington Post had to refute it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/no-there-havent-been-18-school-shooting-in-2018-that-number-is-flat-wrong/2018/02/15/65b6cf72-1264-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html?utm_term=.c9910507f55a
If you feel you have a good argument, why would you need to lie? Maybe because you don't have a good argument or you have an agenda that doesn't require truth. In the late 80's when CA banned standard capacity magazines, limiting the number of rounds to ten, they stated they would never come after the magazines of that type that were already owned by the citizenry. Then in 2016, they did exactly that, passing a law that banned all of them and made failure to surrender the previously lawfully owned property a criminal act. Thankfully a judge put a stop to that, at least temporarily.
If you're a gun owner, or just someone who believes the 2nd amendment is important, how could you trust people who have routinely demonstrated a willingness to engage in blatant falsehoods to push their agenda? How could you trust people who say they want "x" but will never want "y and z" and then come for both of them a few years later? The answer is you can't and you shouldn't. This, more than any other reason, is why you don't see the pro-gun side give even an inch, because they know the anti-gun side will then take a mile. Not a recipe for getting "common sense" (and I mean real common sense not Everytown or Moms Demand Action's idea of common sense) gun control through, is it?
