President Ronald Regan once said, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Democratic political strategist James Carville was a bit more pragmatic about it, saying, “The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage, and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats, all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd.”

Lay out the silage they do and nowhere more so than in the field of the Second Amendment.

George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and a regiment of like-minded new world order propaganda hacks feed disinformation to their army of apparatchik who, with no critical thinking skills at all, spread the word. Currently, the hot topic is concealed carry national reciprocity. Clearly, to them, the concept of anyone being able to carry a gun anywhere is anathema to the very core theme of progressive liberalism: John Q. Public should not be allowed to own a gun, until he/she reaches the stature of Rosie O’Donnell – to whom such rules do not apply.

What has torched me off most recently is a letter to the editor of Silicon Valley’s Mercury News titled “Just wait till ‘Good Guy’ with a gun kills innocent bystander.” This is typical liberalism – spread the gospel regardless of facts. In it, the writer expressed concern over what the author of a previous letter to the editor wrote, saying he “is more concerned with ‘bad guys’ packing heat than Joe Average with an out-of-state permit.” He then suggests, “It’s going to take some wannabe cowboy trying to be a hero and hitting an innocent bystander to demonstrate just how bad that can be. How many people have to die to defend the Supreme Court’s twisted version of our Second Amendment rights…?”

This is so wrong on so many levels and underscores the fact that anti-gun liberals truly have no clue. I tried to find a case where a concealed carry holder’s life was threatened, used his legally possessed firearm to defend himself or another, and accidentally shot an innocent bystander. I’m not suggesting it has never happened, but I sure couldn’t find an example of it.

Having said that, the far more important issue is the writer’s position that it is better to have an active shooter shooting innocents all around him than for someone with a firearm to try to stop his murderous shooting spree, because he might miss and hit someone else. So, to liberals, is it better for potentially dozens of people to die at the hands of some fanatic than allowing law-abiding citizens to carry a concealed firearm? Does anyone see the logic in that point of view? I sure don’t. If we fought wars with that attitude, we’d still have a British accent.

This raises the question of how safely concealed carry holders go about their daily business. When Illinois was the only state not to have concealed carry and the legislature was debating the issues of instituting it, a man told me he was very uncomfortable with the idea that he could be in a room with people carrying hidden firearms. I asked him if he traveled out of state very often, he said he did, and I informed him that he had already been in rooms with people carrying hidden firearms. It had never occurred to him.

Mainstream media anti-gun reporting notwithstanding, here’s what we know about concealed carry permit holders. A 2013 study looked into the effects of state-level concealed weapon laws on murder rates for the period 1980 to 2009. It found that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The chilling effect concealed carry has on violent crime is one thing, but the remaining question is how trustworthy are concealed carry permit holders.

A study done by John Lott in 2016 found that it is very rare for permit holders to violate the law. There are about 12.8 million permit holders in the U.S., and Lott found concealed permit holders committed an average of 113 firearm violations per year during the period from 2005 to 2007. That’s .0009 percent of concealed carry holders commit a crime with a firearm compared to law enforcement firearm-related crime statistics at .02 percent. Overall, concealed permit holders are remarkably safe and law abiding.

Finally, there is the myth perpetrated by the Left that concealed carry permit holders are delusional if they think they can intervene in an active shooter situation and stop the carnage. It took minimal effort to turn up ample situations where that exact scenario unfolded.

A 2015 Controversial Times article titled, “12 Times Mass Shootings Were Stopped by Good Guys With Guns”, underscores the positive effect associated with law-abiding concealed carry holders being armed everywhere they go. Had Mississippi’s Pearl High School allowed faculty to carry a concealed firearm, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick might have been able to save more lives. When Luke Woodham started shooting, Myrick ran to his car, retrieved his .45 caliber pistol and headed back into the school. He was too late to save two students lives and seven others from gunshot wounds, but he did prevent Woodham from going across the street to the middle school as he’d planned.

The fact is that more mayhem is prevented by a good guy with a gun than is reported simply because stopping it before someone gets killed is never going to make the news. The fact that concealed permit holders are less likely to use a firearm in the commission of a crime than even law enforcement officials will never make the news, either; and the fact that they have stopped mass murderers from racking up a higher body count won’t be in national headlines, let alone the additional fact that they have a positive influence on the overall crime rate across the country.

Anti-gun progressive liberals never let the facts get in the way of their mission to disarm John Q. Public. You would do well to remember that in the next election.