A quick look at state legislative sessions across the country shows it’s clearly that time of year again for gun control advocates. Like the critters in a game of Whack-A-Mole, proposals to further restrict the right to keep and bear arms are popping up for consideration in state after state, needing to be (metaphorically) bopped back down by defenders of the Second Amendment.
As I recently explained to Minnesota state legislators, gun control advocates’ preferred policies do little more than scapegoat peaceable and lawful gun owners while completely missing the point — most violent crimes are committed by a small subset of repeat offenders who are already prohibited from owning any guns, at all. Those criminals aren’t likely to comply with new laws making it doubly illegal for them to possess a certain type of firearm. Even then, it wouldn’t matter because criminals could just as easily use “featureless” versions of the same guns (which, again, they still can’t lawfully possess) to carry out their crimes.
At the same time, gun control advocates often downplay (or even outright ignore) the fact that law-abiding Americans routinely rely on their right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves and others from actual violent criminals who ignore gun control restrictions. A 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that almost every study on the issue has found that between 500,000 and several million defensive gun uses occur every year in the United States. An extensive 2021 national survey conducted by a Georgetown professor further substantiated this reality, concluding that Americans used their firearms defensively an average of 1.2 million times a year.