Dismantling an Attack on Pro-Gun Lawmaker

There are too many members of Congress for anyone to really know all of them. However, you don’t need to know them all to recognize a bad-faith attack on one who happens to support the Second Amendment.

Now, what happens on a publication’s opinion page is going to be opinion. While bias is everywhere these days, you can’t really get upset when bias shows up on the page explicitly meant for bias.

But the Fayetteville Observer’s opinion page included an attack on Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, explicitly for being pro-gun, and the writer, Jack Bernard, played a little fast and loose with the facts here.

The NRA and conservative politicians like Hudson that support them have always believed that the more guns we have, the safer we are. But does having more guns and looser regulation like the bill Hudson supports make us safer?  

More guns haven’t made America safer 

Because the gun lobby does not want it known, exact figures on guns ownership are difficult, but there are sources. Per the linked study, there are 513 million guns in the U.S., compared to the 86 million in the country in 1968. So, the number of guns in the US has increased dramatically over the years. Have gun deaths gone down? 

The USA grew from 200 million to 341 million between 1968 and 2023, 71%. In 2023, there were 46,728 gun-related deaths in America. There were 20,336 in 1968. That is an increase of 130%, nearly twice the rate of our population growth. 

Now, I’m not going to pretend there aren’t issues at work here in the United States since 1968, but let’s understand something here. First, let’s understand that “gun-related deaths” include suicides, accidents, and homicides. That last one includes both justifiable homicides and murders.

It’s curious how he cuts off at 2023, though, because we already know what the homicide rate was for 2025, and it was down nearly a third since 2023.

It’s one thing if the numbers aren’t there, but they are, and while it’s still higher than it was in 1968, per capita, he neglects to look at how the numbers have ebbed and flowed over time, often corresponding to various gun control measures in negative ways. The Gun Control Act of 1968, for example, was meant to control guns, obviously.

It also came before a massive spike in homicides that remained high during the 1970s and 80s, only starting to come down in the 1990s, just before the Assault Weapon Ban of 1994. When that law sunset, the homicide rate didn’t really start ticking back up appreciably until 2020. In 2023, it was still easing down from that spike and, as of last year, that’s all but been erased. Oh, and we’ve never gotten back to that high point from the post-GCA era.

Weird, don’t you think? Bernard picks 1968, a strange place to start without any mentioned reason, and then cuts off at 2023, right before two more massive drops in the murder rates.

And the 2025 drop followed the Bruen decision barring states from denying permits to people over subjective nonsense, thus putting more guns on the streets than ever before.

These are the “facts” that Bernard brought to the table, and either he didn’t do his homework, or he’s expecting the readers to be too stupid to look for themselves.

However, let’s also recognize just how often this kind of thing happens among the anti-gun crowd.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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