Giffords’ Rhetoric Runs Headlong Into Reality Check

Folks who get their news from the gun control lobby must be absolutely terrified to leave their homes these days, what with all of the violent crime that groups like Giffords, Brady, and Everytown claim is about to be unleashed because of the Trump administration. They probably have no idea that homicides are at their lowest level since at least 1950, and that violent crime is trending down nationwide as well. 

That information isn’t helpful to their anti-gun crusade, so instead of acknowledging the good news they’re constantly predicting that things are going to get worse. On Friday, Giffords released its latest Chicken Little quote from Executive Director Emma Brown, who was responding to the news that DOJ has informed Congress it won’t appeal a decision striking down the NFA’s registration requirements, at least for those plaintiffs who sued over the restrictions.

“This decision is a failure to defend public safety. Congress put these safeguards in place nearly 100 years ago for a reason. The Trump Administration could bring us back to the days of Al Capone, when silencers and short-barreled shotguns were used in organized crime to terrorize the public. This decision creates a loophole in federal law via membership in the nation’s most extreme gun groups, fueling gun industry bottom lines, while upending public safety.”

This is just plain dumb. First of all, there’s not much evidence that suppressors and short-barreled firearms were used in a lot of crime in the days of Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde. Yes, the hearings over what would become the National Firearms Act of 1934 featured a lot of talk about the dangers of sawed-off shotguns, but there was strikingly little hard evidence of their use introduced in those hearings, and there were virtually no details of suppressors being used by criminals presented by supporters of the NFA. 

According to the ATF’s latest figures, there are more than 6 million registered suppressors in the U.S., more than 1 million registered short-barreled rifles, and over 200,000 registered short-barreled shotguns, and it’s almost unheard of for these firearms to be used in violent crimes. It doesn’t take much to illegally convert a shotgun or a rifle into a short-barreled firearm today, but even illegally converted short-barreled firearms are still rarely used in violent crime. 

The DOJ’s decision not to appeal the Jensen/Silencer Shop cases also doesn’t mean that folks can buy a suppressor or a short-barreled firearm without any restriction whatsoever. Those items are still deemed “firearms” under federal law, which means every retail sale to someone covered by the federal court’s injunction will still have to go through a background check. 

Giffords’ “the sky is falling” mentality is awfully tiresome, though I do have to say that I’m tickled to know that Giffords considers the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms one of the nation’s most “extreme gun groups”, since I serve on the board in an unpaid, volunteer capacity. 

I can’t help but wonder, though, which gun groups Giffords does not consider “extreme,” because those organizations clearly need to up their game. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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