Not Everyone Touched By Mass Shootings Turns Anti-Gun

The media would have you believe that mass shootings turn people into gun control activists. They shine a spotlight on people like David Hogg, Fred Guttenberg, Manuel Oliver, and others, and would have you believe that this is the norm.

I honestly don’t know if it is, but part of that is because the media rarely shows the other side, that some people can lose loved ones to horrific tragedies and still recognize that the problem wasn’t insufficient gun control.

I’m one of those, as I’ve talked about before.

Our own Ryan Petty was touched by it in a far more substantial way than me.

At the NRA Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Cam was kind enough to let me use the Bearing Arms booth on Media Row for a chance to sit down and talk with Ryan about his experiences with retaining his pro-gun opinions in the wake of something so awful.

It’s worth noting that Ryan and I both recognize that we’re seeing something similar play out in the wake of FSU. People are screaming about gun control and how, at a minimum, the post-Parkland laws need to remain on the books, while ignoring that they completely and utterly failed.

This was a discussion I’ve wanted to have for quite some time, but this was the first chance I really had to make it happen, and Ryan is an awesome guy. Talking to him invoked some feelings in me, especially as I know how devastated I was when I lost my friend Kim–in a shooting Ryan remembers as he was living in Seattle at the time, strangely enough–and couldn’t help but wonder how I would feel if it had been one of my kids instead.

The truth of the matter is that what we need to protect our children, to really protect our children, isn’t what the media likes to peddle to the American people. There are better solutions, which we discuss.

The truth of the matter is that people like Ryan and Joel Pollack should be just as sought after by the media as Fred Guttenberg. They’re not, though, because they don’t toe the line and advance the preferred narrative.

Yet with all three of us, we’re just some of the many people who recognized that we lost people we cared about not to a lack of gun control laws but to a person with murderous intent. We recognize that gun control laws already on the books failed to protect our loved ones.

I think about the fact that the man who killed an amazing woman who I had been blessed to call my friend had been accused of domestic violence and wasn’t apparently charged or, at least, prosecuted in any way–something that would have prevented him from having a gun, by the way–as well as how he had a gun in a gun-free zone and I get upset when people ignore that.

It was good to talk to Ryan about his experiences. We could have talked for hours on this one, but my phone likely wasn’t going to be able to record all of it.

Please, give it a watch and like, subscribe, and all that jazz because that’s apparently something you’re supposed to do on YouTube.

Or not. I’m not your boss.