A Liberal Realizes She Was Wrong About Gun Control

Now those are words I thought I’d never type out or say out loud. The whole premise seems impossible and crazy. A liberal realizing she was wrong about gun control? That is both astonishing and promising. It honestly gives me some hope that not every Leftist out there is set in their ways and can be converted to conservatism (and hopefully, Christianity).
 
Now, here’s what I’m talking about. Leah Lebrisco, a statistician and former news writer at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site, wrote an article published in the Washington Post. “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”
 
That’s another thing I thought I’d never see: a liberal doing research. But jokes aside, this is quite eye-opening. This woman begins by saying she thought Leftist gun control measures were the answer to stopping mass shootings and homicides and says that, upon doing research, her perspective was changed entirely.
 
It’s also quite astonishing to see this being published on the Washington Post. That’s typically a Mainstream Media source, so to see this article on their site is quite unbelievable.
 
The article begins: “Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.”
 
Now, this is usually the time in which I carefully deconstruct and debate every single point by the Leftist writer, but I don’t actually have to do that. She does it herself later in the article.
 
The article continues: “Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.” Again, that’s not something I thought I’d see a liberal write. She admits that every point she had for gun control policy crumbled when she examined the evidence. I just wish more Leftists would do the same.
 
In the article, she even says that she “researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun-related crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.”
 
She says that she found out that no gun owner simply “walks into the store to buy an ‘assault weapon.’ It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip.”
 
And that silencers “deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.”
 
Wow, she is really tearing into her previous beliefs on gun control. She also happened to have destroyed one of Hillary Clinton’s arguments after the shooting. In a tweet, Hillary said: “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.”
 
So if silencers only benefit the shooter’s hearing, then the shots still would’ve been heard and no lives would’ve been saved that day… then again, silencers melt when fired by automatic weapons. There’s this video I saw where someone fires an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon with a suppressor on it. (silencers are different from suppressors, but not too much). The guy fired 700 continuous rounds until it caught on fire and eventually melted entirely. Oh, and it was insanely loud. Even the guy firing had to use noise-cancelling earphones while using the gun.
 
Now, an M249 is VERY different from an AR, but still. The suppressor on the M249 did nearly nothing to make the gun any quieter and eventually melted off. If Paddock had used a silencer on his gun, still firing fully automatic, maybe some more people would’ve come out alive. He would’ve had to either let the silencer cool off to avoid melting, or used another weapon entirely. That takes time away from him firing his weapons, and maybe at least one more person would’ve been spared. He still would’ve caused tremendous damage, but a silencer might’ve actually saved some people that night. Hmm. 

But returning to the awakened liberal, she continues by stating that “two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them.” That’s also not something you see on the news often.
 
When people mention gun deaths in America, the assumption is always that they are all homicides or mass shootings. In reality, two-thirds of them are suicides, one-fifths of them were homicides of people expected to be murdered (gang members, and the such). And that 1,700 of the 33,000 gun deaths were women as a result of domestic violence. “Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.”
 
She explains that the proposed gun-control measures would do nothing to help these numbers drop, because these are individual cases with different circumstances. Guns were merely the tools used in these cases, but the deaths still would’ve happened, gun or no gun. If a suicidal person wants to take the coward’s way out, he will do it with any tool. If a gang member wants to kill a rival gang member, he will do it with any tool. If a poor excuse for a man wants to kill his wife or girlfriend, he will do it with any tool.
 
The key word here, as you can tell, is: TOOL. Much in the same way we use tools to build things, repair things, and do things, guns are tools as well.
 
And think about this for a moment. Remember the statistic I told you about in the previous article? The one that said the “number of privately owned firearms in U.S. increased from about 185 million in 1993 to 357 million in 2013”? Let’s use that 2013 number, shall we? Even though it’s almost certainly gone up since then, let’s just use that newest statistic.
 
If there are 357 million PRIVATELY OWNED firearms in the U.S., why aren’t there more mass shootings occurring every single day? According to Wikipedia, there have been 42 “mass shootings” between 2013 and 2017. Now, that’s still 42 too many, but considering how many weapons there are in the country, why isn’t that number far higher?
 
If there are more guns out there than there are PEOPLE in the U.S., how is it that a mass shooting doesn’t happen every day in the country? Now, murders happen every day in Democrat-owned places such as Chicago and Detroit, but mass shootings are quite rare, considering the number of people who own guns in the country. In fact, I’d say that number is quite low by comparison.
 
And we’ve also seen in that previous article, that gun homicide rate has gone down between 1993 and 2013, when gun ownership went up at the same time.
 
So this woman is entirely right to point out that no gun control legislation would be helpful for anyone. Now, she does say that she’s “still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits.” So she’s still somewhat liberal on this, but at least she’s bright enough to realize that gun control policies wouldn’t do anything to help the number of gun-related crimes go down.
 
I’m sure she’s smart enough that she’ll eventually realize it’s better for her to have a gun in her house as long as she’s experienced with it, since experience means less risk. Now, I could understand if there are children in the house and she’s worried about them, but that’s why you have to make sure the guns are out of reach of the children. And if they are, the benefit certainly outweighs the risk, and she’d be better prepared to face someone who would want to harm her or her family.
 
I have hope for this woman. If she’s smart enough to realize gun control measures proposed by the Left won’t work, she’s smart enough to realize that with the proper training and measures, she can have a gun in her house without running the risk of an accident occurring.
 
And if this woman is smart enough to figure this out, I can only imagine there are others like her that will figure these things out as well, if they only look at the evidence and stop listening to the fact-less nonsense the Left spews.
 
Proverbs 1:5
“Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance.”