Get Ready for the Ultimate Blame Game

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Prepare yourself for the inevitable. By the end of the year — if current trends continue and there is a spike in the murder rates — anti-gun liberals will be blaming the Second Amendment for the increase in violence.

After all, they are already telegraphing their punches. Consider a couple of examples:

• In talking about the violence around the nation, Fox News’ Juan Williams claimed: “It’s all really being accelerated by easy access to guns. We are looking at gun violence.”
• Philadelphia City Council President Darrell L. Clarke believes the spike in crime was being driven by several factors, including the “easy access to guns.”

It’s the same ole tired mantra: “Easy access to guns is the problem. We are less safe because of the Second Amendment.”

So get ready. The “woke” anti-gunners are going to blame your gun rights for the problems that they’ve created.

But it’s the ultimate blame game. Why? Because anti-gun liberals want you to completely disregard everything else that’s happened this year:

• They want you to ignore the fact that criminals who were thrown back onto the street, because of COVID-19, have later committed murder now that they were free.
• They want you to forget that police around the country were told to stand down and give the rioters “their space” during the violent protests.
• They want you to overlook how in response to ill-treatment of police, they have stayed home in silent protest with the “Blue flu.”
• They want you to disregard the budget cuts and the “defund the police” propaganda that has demonized our men and women and blue — to the point that many of them are incredibly demoralized and are now retiring early.

If you discourage officers from enforcing the law, you’ll get more crime. It’s that simple. The wisest man to walk the planet, the famed King Solomon, predicted this two millennia ago: “When a crime is not punished quickly, people feel it is safe to do wrong.”

This is not rocket science. When criminals don’t fear punishment, they will be emboldened to commit more crimes. This has already been a problem in Democrat-run cities like St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore, to name a few. These cities are atrocious when it comes to solving murders and putting killers behind bars.

Fifty years ago, the national clearance rate was over 90 percent. But in the Democratic cities mentioned above, the rate for solving murders has dropped to below 50 percent — and this was before the recent riots. Add to the fact that each of these cities also discourages gun ownership or self-defense, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Rather than fixing this problem, these bastions of the counter-culture agenda want to blame our access to firearms. This is a farce. There is no such thing as “easy access” to firearms when it comes to purchasing firearms. This is a lie that has been perpetuated by Hollywood and the national media.

Consider that while gun sales are at record highs right now — millions of purchases every month — gun store employees around the country estimate that 40 percent are new gun buyers. And many of these new buyers are outraged by the gun restrictions which they formerly supported.

Some have commented that they were told their whole lives (falsely) that it was easier to buy a firearm than to get an abortion. And several wondered why they have to fill out so many federal forms when it seemed so easy to purchase a gun on TV. How ironic that anti-gun liberals have become victims of their own propaganda.

Thankfully, many anti-gunners have “seen the light” and are grateful that pro-gun organizations have been fighting for their Second Amendment-protected rights for all these years. They are even indicating it will change how they vote. But others will choose to stay in the Dark Ages and will look for a scapegoat to impugn.

One of the more laughable examples can be found in Seattle, where a councilmen blamed Capitalism for the shootings in the district formerly known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone). You got it? We should blame freedom for the violence there. Not the fact that the police were booted from CHAZ. Not the fact that police were prevented from responding to reports of rape and violence. None of that matters. According to this member of the anti-gun “intelligentsia,” freedom was the culprit.

There is a simple solution to this madness, although it will require Americans to stop electing politicians who are pro-criminal and anti-gun — a lesson that may already be sinking in. When Staunton, Virginia, held elections for city council in May, voters defeated every Democrat officeholder who was running for reelection. This was stunning, given that the city of Staunton had twice voted for Obama … voted for Hillary … and for the current Democrat governor.
 
But Virginia has been a hotbed for gun control this year, and voters are rebelling. This was not lost on the media which reported that “gun control legislation” was a key issue in the transformational election. The election results shocked the political intelligentsia — one of whom noted that what happened in Staunton was “stunning almost beyond words.”

Time will tell what will actually happen across the country. But if a conservative is a “liberal who got mugged,” there may be a lot more pro-gun conservatives turning out on Election Day this November.

About Erich Pratt

Erich Pratt is the Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America, a gun rights organization representing more than two million gun owners.