Late last year, an Upstate New York newspaper called the Sunday Gazette ran an article that asked, “Are Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions Wise?”
It was presented as a pro and con debate, with the Con anti-gun side represented by Chelsea Parsons, Vice President for Gun-Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress. Right away, I could see that the “facts” she cited were in need of a reality check.
She started off by declaring that Second Amendment sanctuaries “undermine these crucial [gun] laws by tacitly (or in some cases explicitly) encouraging residents to violate them.”
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Given that her organization actively supports sanctuaries for illegal aliens, you might think she would be careful about accusing others of undermining the law.
Nope.
Illegal immigrant sanctuaries erode respect for our immigration system. They also get people killed: last month, President Trump spoke with the granddaughter of a 92-year-old woman who was raped and murdered by a criminal alien. While he had been previously arrested, New York authorities released the man rather than turn him over to ICE.
In contrast, Second Amendment sanctuaries are created to uphold the Constitution, our nation’s highest law. They also ensure that citizens are able to defend their most basic right–the right to life.
During her attempt to defend Extreme Risk Protection Orders (“red flag laws”), Parsons said they are “designed to prevent shootings by addressing different aspects of the gun-violence problem.” However, she failed to mention that these gun-confiscation orders have never been shown to do that.
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What red flags do achieve is the violation of due-process rights among lawful gun-owners. They can be issued based on as little as an anonymous accusation from an acquaintance. What’s more, innocent people have died because of them. Here’s an example.
Throughout the article, Parsons references the term “public safety,” which is a common tactic aimed at those who have already been convinced to fear guns. She claims that by not having universal background checks, we are “potentially putting the community at risk for future violence.”
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This has been debunked time and time again. As Dr. John Lott has pointed out, people with criminal records don’t obtain guns through legal channels. That’s not something the anti-gun crowd wants you to know: they’re hoping that a “universal background check” law will provide the gun-owner data-base they so desperately want. After all, the first step to confiscating guns is to figure out who owns them.
Parsons also brought up a study from the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun group Everytown. “Research by Everytown for Gun Safety found that in more than half of mass shootings between 2009 and 2018, the perpetrator shot an intimate partner as part of the attack,” she said.
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This is part of a strategy to instill fear in people who live with gun-owners. They’re encouraged to distance themselves from loved ones who own guns, with women being a particular target. Rather than empowering women with firearms training so they can protect themselves, the anti-gun crowd chooses to scare them into unarmed helplessness through an irrational fear of guns.
Parsons went on to say, “Stunningly, an Everytown analysis found that there have been at least 193 unintentional shootings by children so far in 2019.”
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The “Toddler and the Gun” encourages the reader to envision cute little diaper-bottomed babies getting a hold of loaded guns that are left laying around the house. In reality, this hardly ever happens. The “children” in these studies includes anyone under eighteen, many of whom are robbers, gang members, and drug dealers.
Finally, Parsons stressed that there are “100 people dying by gunfire every day,” which is why “nothing could be more important” than controlling guns. Here’s what she didn’t tell the reader:
Of the 39,773 gun-related deaths in 2017, 23,854 were suicides. Countries like South Korea, Latvia, and Lithuania have few guns but substantially higher suicide rates than the US, there’s no reason to think a gun ban would change the overall number of people ending their lives.
What would decrease is the ability of victims to defend themselves. That’s important because research done for the CDC by Gary Kleck found that guns are used defensively 2.5 million times every year. Further, a survey of convicts funded by the Department of Justice, 81 percent of participants agreed that “a smart criminal always tries to find out if his potential victim is armed.” Another 74 percent concurred with the statement, “One reason burglars avoid houses when people are home is they fear being shot.”
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The reason why Parsons didn’t bring up any of this information is simple: it shows that guns are far more likely to save lives than to take them.
It’s always important to get both sides of the gun story. Unfortunately, the anti-gun lobby continues to used fear tactics and skewed data to drive their cause.
Dan Wos is a nationally recognized 2nd Amendment advocate as well as the author of Good Gun Bad Guy and Good Gun Bad Guy 2. Go behind the lies of the anti-gun radicals and find out what they hoped you would never know.
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