Myths About Guns, Gun Owners, and Obama's Proposed Gun Bans

As a gun owner, competition shooter, and a believer in self-preservation, preparedness, and self-reliance, I see a lot of bad information out there about guns, particularly when it comes to the media, politics, and Obama's talks of banning a huge segment of firearms.

Here is some information to help and inform.

MYTH: Gun owners are odd, crazy, old-fashioned, and very rare.

TRUTH: Though that's how the media portrays gun owners, the truth is that there are more gun owners in America than doctors. There are more gun owners in America than golfers. In fact, there are more gun owners in America than doctors and golfers combined!

MYTH: "Gun-Free-Zones" stop and reduce crime. We need more of these zones.
TRUTH: Criminals are like bullies, they pick on the easy targets and avoid people that can fight back. People may be well intentioned by creating "Gun-Free-Zones," however, all it really means is that law-abiding citizens can't and won't be able to defend themselves in this area, and it therefore attracts crime and mass shootings.

Every mass shooting is in a "Gun-Free-Zone." No murderer who's bent on committing mass carnage ever shoots up a gun range or police precinct. Criminals are cowards and know that "Gun-Free-Zones" are the best place to commit their horrible deeds. The next mass shooting will be in a "Gun-Free Zone."

MYTH: We need to do something about guns because there are just too many accidents.

TRUTH: Most gun owners are very safe and thanks to the NRA and decades of safety training, today, even with millions more gun owners and guns in America, you are still more likely to be killed by a doctor or even struck by lightning.

MYTH: Bans on various types of guns stop crime.

TRUTH: Actually it’s the opposite. As gun sales have gone up and up over the past few decades, crime has actually gone down. In states where guns are banned or heavily restricted, crime is much higher per capita than in states where guns are more prevalent.

There are two great books written by economist, John Lott that analyze all the studies and numbers. “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias Against Guns.”

• http://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351271308&sr=8-1&keywords=john+lott

• http://www.amazon.com/The-Bias-Against-Guns-Everything/dp/0895261146/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1351271308&sr=8-3&keywords=john+lott

MYTH: Guns cause violence, therefore a reduction in guns must mean a reduction in violence.

TRUTH: A reduction of guns has never shown a reduction in violence, but in fact a reduction in guns shows an increase in violence.

Secondly guns don't cause violence. Guns have no morals. Anything can be a weapon in the hands of somebody meaning harm. To quote Charlton Heston, “There are no good guns. There are no bad guns. Any gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a decent person is no threat to anybody — except bad people.”

Adding more difficulties in the ability to get guns only affects those people that obey the law, and means a reduction in good people being able to defend themselves against criminals.

MYTH: We need just a few more “sensible” gun bans and restrictions.

TRUTH: Gun-banners always use the word "sensible" or "common sense" when they talk of gun bans, because it appeals to gullible and ignorant people.

We currently have about 20,000 gun laws already. When you introduce new laws and restrictions, you only affect good people, law-abiding citizens and their ability to defend themselves. You do not affect criminals because by definition, criminals break laws.

MYTH: “Assault Rifles” are only for “assaulting” and of course should be banned.

TRUTH: First, what is an “Assault Rifle?” It’s not a specific gun but in fact it’s a vague and scary term created by anti-gun groups to label any gun they don’t like. There is nothing mechanically different from what they demonize as an “Assault Rifle” to any other hunting or competition gun used today or even 50 or 100 years ago.

Calling and categorizing a gun as an “Assault Rifle” is really a way for an anti-gun group to say that they don’t like the way a gun looks cosmetically, plus it helps their cause with ignorant people who are scared by the name “Assault” and feel that scary-looking guns should be banned.

If anti-gun groups can get people to agree that some guns should be banned for arbitrary reasons that are vague and ever growing, they can quickly ban literally millions of the most popular guns in America, and then continue from there, because honestly, which gun ISN'T made for "assault?"

MYTH: “Assault Rifle” is a gun term used by the gun industry to describe machine guns, particularly named “AR” as in the “AR-15.”

TRUTH: “AR” is short for the company that invented the rifle, Armalite. And these are NOT full-auto machine guns but rather semi-auto guns, just like most every other rifle made today as well as 100 years ago, despite the fact that CNN and other news agencies constantly show video of people shooting full-auto machine guns while talking about semi-auto civilian sporting rifles.

MYTH: No one NEEDS an “Assault Rifle.”

TRUTH: How do you know what someone needs? Modern sporting rifles are used by millions of Americans to hunt, for sport, for competition, and to defend their homes. Yes, they are great for home defense as the rounds tend to stop in the body of the perpetrators or in the walls. Where other bullets tend to keep on going, a proper AR defense round is therefore safer for innocent people. Plus home invasions tend to be a group of people and not just one perpetrator, and no victim of a home-invasion ever wished they had fewer bullets on them.

MYTH: It’s okay to ban or restrict the ownership of bad guns, as long as we still allow people to own good guns.

TRUTH: What makes one gun bad and another gun good? As soon as you agree that there is a line that divides good guns from bad guns, then you open the door for every gun to fit in the “bad gun” category.

The rifle that President Roosevelt hunted with so long ago is exactly the same mechanically as what anti-gun groups consider an “Assault Rifle,” along with most pistols made and sold today.

Anti-gun groups have learned that you eat an elephant a bite at a time, and that if they can just restrict or ban one more thing, they can then move on to the next area.

MYTH: NO ONE should ever be able to own a gun that was “made for the battlefield.” (In the words of Obama.)

TRUTH: What gun then should you be able to own and who’s job is it to decide what YOU can own? The truth is that EVERY gun was first made for the battlefield. The fact that they work reliably and that fact that parts and ammo are cheaper and easier to get because the gun is popular, makes them more modular and great for everyone else who may customize them and use them for home defense, competition, hunting, and sporting uses.

MYTH: People only need guns for hunting and shouldn’t “need” guns for anything else.

TRUTH: The 2^nd Amendment is not about hunting. It’s about people having the right to defend themselves and not have to wait on the Government to come save them when seconds matter, and also being able to enjoy guns and use them for good purposes.

Guns are used every single day by for good. They’re used in self-defense, competition, for recreation, for sport, and yes even for hunting. But the right to own a gun does not stop at hunting, nor does the type of gun you “should” be able to own stop at hunting.

MYTH: People should not be able to have “too many” bullets, at home, with them, or in their gun at any one time. We should restrict what people can buy or what magazines they can have.

TRUTH: This is the basically same argument that there is a line, and on one side are good guns, good magazines, and the minimum amount of bullets, and everything on the other side of this line is bad.

So where is this line? What is too many bullets? 30? 20? 10? 7? 3? 1?

For anti-gun groups the right amount of bullets is zero. They don't want anyone to have any guns or any bullets, but they won't always say that. Instead, they only say that "X is too many."

Nobody that’s been involved in a gunfight to save their life or their family’s lives ever said that they wish they had fewer bullets.

Next, restricting the number of bullets a gun can have in it will not stop evil men who already are breaking the law by trying to commit murder. The only thing that stops a bad guy or a group of bad guys with the intent to kill, is returning gunfire from a good person. And no one should restrict how many bullets a good person can have to defend themselves.

MYTH: The 2^nd amendment is a “collective” right and not an “individual” right. That means we must all ask the Government’s permission, and it can restrict our rights at any time.

TRUTH: Are the other Bill of rights collective or individual? Do you need a government issued license to be allowed to speak your mind?

Though the Obama Administration and various parts of the Government argue that no one has a right to own a gun, and though the Government does infringe on individuals 2^nd Amendment rights, particularly in liberal states, it’s not supposed to and those laws are being challenged in the courts systematically. Nevertheless, the whole point of the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald Decisions was that it is, and has been, an individual right.

If you agree with some bans, then you have to ask yourself who in the government gets to decide what guns get to be banned? Which un-elected group of bureaucrats get to decide the list? What makes some guns good and some guns bad? What if someone likes their guns, but they don’t like what you have?

MYTH: As Obama has stated, “we need to do something about these ‘cheap handguns’ that criminals are using.”

TRUTH: This is just another way of demonizing a segment of guns so that uneducated people will agree with more “sensible” gun bans. This statement supposes that crime comes from poor criminals that can only afford cheap handguns and that they are buying them legitimately. It suggests that if we were to make guns more expensive, only good citizens would be able to get them.

Fifty years ago or so, anti-gun groups called for a similar ban, calling evil guns, “Saturday night specials.” They suggested the same thing, that crime came from some guns being cheap. They attempted to ban a segment of guns that fit their criteria, which didn’t just include small inexpensive handguns, but also large pistols (some over a foot long) as well as the most popular and one of the most expensive guns available, the 1911.

Even if you agree to only ban cheap guns, you really are keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and not criminals. You are really saying that a poor, single mom that wants to defend herself, her child and her residence, is not able to do so.

MYTH: We need to close the Gun-Show “Loop-hole.”

TRUTH: First tell us what you mean by this so-called Gun-Show Loop-Hole because there is no black hole or area void of laws simply because you walk into a gun show. There are federal and state laws that apply everywhere, and walking into a building does not change any of those laws. All of the laws that apply outside the building apply inside as well.

Sow what is this mythical loop-hole? It’s really a way for anti-gun groups to stop the giving or selling of any gun privately. It means that you can’t give a gun to your kids when you die, or sell a gun privately without having the FBI involved in every single transaction.

Americans have the right to assemble and we also have the right to sell guns privately or give them to their children without involving the FBI. This closing of the so-called “loop-hole” really is about stopping family members from inheriting guns, family members from giving guns to another family member, and individuals from selling guns to another individual when they want.

MYTH: What does it hurt to have the Government involved in doing a background check on every single person and every single private gun sale?

TRUTH: First, more and more restrictions have not stopped crime, if anything you can show that crime goes up when you make it harder for good people to get guns.

Secondly, what happens if the FBI background system goes down, even for a few days or a few hours? There are literally thousands of transactions that happen every day, all over the country through licensed gun dealers. If you add to that doing checks on all private sales, gifts, and family transfers – and all of that would stop if the government system was down. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, “A right delayed is a right denied.”

MYTH: “Fast and Furious” was just Obama’s continuation of Bush’s own program.

TRUTH: There's a big difference between Obama's gun running and Bush's gun tracking programs:

(1) Unlike other past programs Obama's had no way to track where the guns went.

(2) Obama's program had no plans to follow the guns and arrest the criminals.

(3) Obama's program told ATF agents on scene to stand down and let the guns go.

(4) Obama's program was NOT done in cooperation with the Mexican government.

(5) It seems that Obama's program only expected to eventually find the guns at murder scenes, meaning that they expected murders.
(6) Obama used Executive Order to stop people from asking more questions about the program.

So unlike any past program with no expectation of ever recovering the guns or the criminals, it seems the only expectation was to wait and find these US made guns at Mexican crime scenes where they could be held up to the cameras asking for more bans. And then when Eric Holder was found in contempt for supplying only 5% of the subpoenaed documents to Congress so that they could see how far up the program went and what it was really intended for, Obama used Executive Order to stop that.

Summary: When it comes to guns, preserving the 2nd Amendment, and preserving American tradition, Romney is far better than Obama.

Vote Romney, and until next time, America.