So in reality, as civilian ownership of guns continues to rise, violent crime continues to fall in America

So in reality, as civilian ownership of guns continues to rise, violent crime continues to fall in America

Why Are Liberals So Stupid about Guns?

Any normal, reasonably intelligent person who has ever had a conversation with a liberal about guns, gun control, or any related topic has probably asked himself or herself this very question. I realize that the title for this article could easily leave off the last two words, but because I want to write an article instead of a book, I will confine myself to answering the more specific question above. While there are some people in this country who are otherwise on the Left who yet support the 2nd amendment, by and large those on the Left are strongly, even virulently anti-gun. What is it that makes them this way, however? While I understand that those at the top—the politicians, the lobbyists for the big anti-gun organizations, and so forth—specifically want a disarmed populace so that we can be more easily controlled by the government, what explains the blatant stupidity, the blinding lack of common sense, that your average rank-and-file liberal exhibits whenever the topics of firearms and the 2nd amendment come up?

I was thinking about this the other day while standing in line waiting for entry into the Raleigh Gun and Knife Show (go figure). What started this train of thought was an excellent article over at the Federalist by Daniel Payne in which he asks the question of why,http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/16/if-guns-cause-more-violence-wheres-the-exploding-crime-rate/

 if guns in the hands of the citizenry create crime, are we not seeing exploding crime rates in line with the steadily rising prevalence of civilian firearms ownership? After noting that America has the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and that some studies show that roughly half of all American households possess at least one firearm, Payne observes,

“Yet where’s the exploding crime rate? The gun control lobby has been claiming for years that the more guns in private hands, the more gun violence we’ll see; the perennial hyperventilation is given to fears of a kind of Wild West America of lawless anarchy, wherein every gun owner is prepared to shoot from the hip at the first sign of danger.

“Well. Last year the Department of Justice released a report revealing that firearm homicides declined nearly 40% between 1993 and 2011, and nonfatal firearm injuries declined nearly 70% within the same time period. Every year since 2002 has seen a rise in the number of NICS background checks performed, yet in 2011 the firearm homicide rate was lower than it was in 2002; in fact, all firearm violence, both fatal and nonfatal, was lower the former year than the latter.”

So in reality, as civilian ownership of guns continues to rise, violent crime continues to fall in America. For those of us who live in the real world, this makes sense—the more law-abiding citizens own guns, the fewer people there are who criminals will perceive as potential victims and the more likely a criminal is to think twice about breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night. Patterns of victimization bear this out, since people who live in very restrictive, anti-gun locales are more likely to be the victims of criminal activity.

Yet, liberals just can’t seem to wrap their heads around this relatively simple, straightforward, and empirically-substantiated point. Every time a state loosens its restrictions on firearms, whenever a federal “assault weapons” ban is allowed to lapse, whenever it becomes easier for law-abiding citizens to open carry or to obtain a concealed carry permit, liberals fall all over themselves predicting that the streets of our nation will turn into rivers of blood. As with most everything else they believe, the evidence that contradicts their worldview simply does not penetrate the self-imposed bubble in which liberals live.

Why?

I believe the answer to that question relates to two related phenomena—liberals’ ignorance about guns and gun ownership and the ignorance and arrogance that liberals exhibit toward the type of person who typically engages in civilian ownership of a firearm.

First, to their ignorance about guns themselves. Keep in mind that your average liberal has probably never even touched, much less fired, a gun. For them, guns are a black box, the inner workings of which they simply know nothing about. Because they know nothing about them, they fear them, much as a small child does the monster hiding in his closet when the lights are turned out. Your average liberal learns what little they know about guns primarily from media and entertainment sources—movies, televisions, and whatnot. As a result, liberals tend to lump gun users into one of three categories based on what they see from their limited repertoire of information:

The police

Criminals

Buffoons

Some (though not all) liberals believe it is okay for the police to have firearms. There tends to be the assumption that police are the only competent users of firearms, so if you do not currently belong to that category, then you’re probably just going to shoot your kid while cleaning your gun because you’re an incompetent hillbilly who just does things like that.

This belief is actually rather unrealistic once you recall that in cases where a civilian firearm user intervenes in a potentially criminal situation, only 2% of the time do they shoot an innocent person whom they mistaken believed to be committing a crime, versus 11% for the police. Civilians are also more successful at wounding, driving off, or subdue a criminal attacker than the police are (83% vs. 68% of the time). We should also note that police officers are three times as likely as civilian CCW holders to commit homicides.http://www.ammoland.com/2013/10/police-officers-likely-to-murder-than-concealed-carry-permit/#axzz2qxsVVfAv

Nevertheless, liberals go to movies and liberals see police officers using their weapons to be heroes. They then look around at the average, everyday Joes they work with who are not particularly heroic, and they assume that those people shouldn’t have guns because they, unlike the police officers they see in the movies, couldn’t shoot down a white supremacist terrorist while doing a back flip and having one arm in a sling from a previous bullet wound. Agents of the increasingly big-government state are uber-competent heroes. You people in the Tea Party are drooling morons who shouldn’t be trusted with a rubber band gun, much less a real one. That really is how many liberals think—only the government can be trusted with guns. If you’re not a government agent, then you have no business having a gun.

If someone depicted in the movies with a gun is not a police officer, then they’re likely a criminal. All criminals in the movies have guns, and pretty much any civilian with a gun is a criminal, or is going to be revealed to be a criminal by the end of the film. Liberals, being the simplistic thinkers that they are, transfer this silver screen perception over to the real world, and assume that any non-policeman who owns or wants to own a gun does so for nefarious, and likely illegal, purposes. This is why liberals seemingly make no distinction at all between hardened gangland thugs and pudgy middle-aged suburban accountants when they try to make their arguments for more and more gun control. Having a gun means you are under the spell of a magical force of nature that is going to make you commit crimes. How else can you explain the unreasonable attitudes shown by liberals and left-leaning states such as Maryland, which is now apparently using the power of metadata to flag and harass concealed-carry permit holders from other states for the crime of driving through their state?http://tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/jackson-gun-owner-unarmed-unwelcome-in-maryland-20140112/

 The guy in the linked article had left his firearm at home in Florida, yet he was still treated like a common criminal by bumbling, incompetent Maryland State Police officers. As the victim, Mr. John Filippidis of Florida, asked,

“Face red, eyes shining, John pounds his knees. “And he wants to put me in jail. He wants to put me in jail. For no reason. He wants to take my wife and children away and put me in jail. In America, how does such a thing happen? ...And after all that, he didn’t even write me a ticket.”

How, Mr. Filippidis? The reason is because the police officer was an arrogant fool acting on laws and policies put into place by other arrogant left-wing fools and signed into law by an arrogant left-wing fool of a governor. That’s why, Mr. Filippidis. You were the victim of liberals being liberals, stupidly and arrogantly violating the Constitution and other laws of the land because they are too brain-addled to think for themselves instead of letting their ignorant stereotypes of you as a gun owner override their higher brain functions.

Now, if you’re not a police officer, and you can get a liberal to charitably grant that you are not some kind of criminal, the liberal will nearly always just fall back on his or her third media-driven stereotype, which is that gun owners like you are buffoons. What liberals see in the movies and on television when a non-policeman and non-criminal gun user is depicted is a dope who is always doing something stupid with a gun like sticking into his waistband and shooting himself in the leg or something like that. In their eyes, you’re just a crazy gun-nut who walks around town shooting your gun into the air while a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ like the drunken hillbilly cowboy that you probably are. Invariably, in the course of a conversation with a liberal about guns, they will assume that you’ve probably had some sort of gun safety accident, and wonder how it is that you haven’t accidentally shot yourself yet. Liberals love to slap bumper stickers on their cars that say things like, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their kids.” Never mind the fact that children are several times more likely to drown in swimming pool accidents than they are to die from accidental discharges of firearms. Maybe the next time you run across one of these limousine liberal types who drives an Audi and who lives in one of those trendy, upscale anti-gun neighborhoods where ever house has a swimming pool, you should ask them how they can ethically justify having a proven killer of children sitting right there behind their home, just waiting to gobble up their kids the first time they forget to cover the pool with a tarp?

This point leads me to the other general reason I gave above for why liberals are so clueless about guns—which is that they are similarly clueless about gun owners. And the reason for that, in turn, is because liberals are generally ignorant of the large body of people in this nation who make up “Middle America.”

In case it isn’t obvious to you (in which case, check yourself for a pulse), liberals in America have a very different culture than do normal Americans. Liberals basically created the sort of culture that you will find in the Northeast and the Left Coast, and ones who don’t live in these regions still idolize that culture and try to create enclaves of it wherever they congregate in large numbers. This culture is secular, dependent on government, addicted to feeling and experience, hedonistic, and thus mentally focused on the here and now to the exclusion of any sort of long-term planning. That’s why, for example, liberals tend to have fewer children than normal people do—they’re too busy living it up today to saddle themselves with little people who would crimp their lifestyles. Hence, why they so desperately want to force you to pay for their birth control—liberals essentially want the rest of us to subsidize their live-for-today lifestyles. Besides, when they need kids to perpetuate liberalism, they’ll just steal yours and indoctrinate them in the publik skoolz.

If you want a quick primer on what liberal culture is like and how it differs from that of the Wrong Kind of White Person (i.e. me and you, if you’re white), check out Stuff White People Like. Hilarious parody that perfectly fits into the “it’s funny because it’s true” category of humor.http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Liberals genuinely have no idea what the rest of us living here in flyover country really are like. Because they rarely interact with normal people in situations that don’t involve them either being arrested, being hassled by their boss, or trying to mock a normal person for essentially not being a liberal, they almost never get outside their self-contained sphere of influences to see what real people in America are like. Instead, they just continue assuming that the negative stereotypes that they derive from popular culture and from their other liberal friends must be reality. When it comes to understanding Normal American culture, liberals really are like the stereotypical “ugly American,” wandering around in a foreign country wearing a Bahama shirt and wondering why all these people won’t speak English.

For instance, most liberals don’t interact with real live conservative religious people, so they take it for granted that evangelicals and fundamentalists are all like the mother in Carrie or Mrs. Carmody in Stephen King’s The Mist. It never occurs to them that we’re just people going to our jobs, raising our families, fellowshipping with our friends and neighbors in our communities…and just wanting to defend ourselves from criminals. The same can be said for the many other characteristics that apply to a lot of us out here in Normal America with our gauche tastes in entertainment, our horrific eating habits, our refusal to recycle on command, and our lack of those little shopping-cart sized “Smart Cars.”

No—it’s so much easier for liberals to go along with disarming us if they can demonize us for being Not Like Them.

And let’s face it, when liberals push for gun control, we’re the ones they’re targeting—regular, everyday, middle class Normal Americans of all types. They know perfectly well that gang members and thugs aren’t going to suddenly turn in their already-illegal guns just because you pass another law against them. Because they have been taught by decades of popular culture and politically-ambitious rabble-rousers to believe that we’re a threat because we’re Different From Them, liberals truly believe that all of us Normal Americans are crazy yokels running around shooting guns at everything while we try to force liberals to go to our churches. Part and parcel with liberal culture is the anti-gun mentality—and because of the authoritarian predilections that accompany liberal psychology, they are determined to force this aspect of their culture off onto along with all the rest.

So while their ignorance and prejudice may be understandable, given the handicaps under which they are laboring, this doesn’t make them alright. Genuine constitutional rights are our birthright, antecedent to any act, or even existence, of government. Therefore, we cannot indulge the narrow-minded chauvinism of liberals who dislike the fact that we do not live according to their culture. Our gun rights—the right to be free, the right to defend ourselves, even the right to revolution if need be—must remain with our people, no matter how much the liberals may hate it.

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX,LIVE OUT SIDE THE CAGE