Deconstructing the Anti-Gun Cult

Before she blocked me last week on Twitter, I frequently read the posts of Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, as well as tweets from former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Everytown for Gun Safety, which is her organization's chief financial backer. Combined, the two gun control groups are front and center in the U.S.'s anti-gun cult, with 4 million members, which is about the same number of members as the National Rifle Association. It's alarming how frequently Watts manipulates data to craft a narrative that America is held hostage to pervasive gun violence and how often she and her organization regurgitate the usual debunked Democrat and DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex) myths, lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories.

Anti-gun propaganda As President Trump visited Mississippi, Watts posted the following: "Mississippi has the second highest rate of gun deaths in the nation – nearly 18 deaths per 100,000 residents." Anti-gun propaganda is powerful, and Watts's skills are finely honed. Her LinkedIn profile shows that she held director and vice president positions with global reach at a prominent public relations firm, Monsanto, and General Electric Healthcare. I'm not certain where she got her information from, since my research showed that Mississippi has the fourth highest rate. That's not my concern; my concern is how she always withholds the specifics. Based on the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures, Mississippi had a total of 587 firearm deaths in 2016. Two hundred sixty-eight were suicides, and 282 were homicides. This is clever anti-gun methodology; two out of three of the annual total of 37,353 gun deaths, nationwide, are from suicide, totaling 22,938. Per the CDC, firearm suicide rates are 7.1 per 100,000; suffocation and poisoning rates, combined, are 5.7 per 100,000. Imagine a world in which there are no guns at all. If those who are suicidal couldn't access firearms, the law of probability, in my opinion, proves beyond a reasonable doubt that some – perhaps the majority – would suffocate or poison themselves. Suicide rates have been rising the last two decades across the country, and this is unquestionably a public health crisis. A gun, however, is still an inanimate object in a suicidal American's hands, just as nooses and poisons are. Increasing suicide rates are wholly irrelevant to legal and responsible gun ownership. There is a mechanism already in place in our National Instant Criminal Background Check System for mentally ill potential buyers of firearms. Is this background check system "perfect"? Of course not, just as no alleged "solution" pitched by Watts and Bloomberg is "perfect." Here are more CDC suicide data. Forty-five thousand total annual suicides: No known mental health conditions: Other 8%

Poisoning 10%

Suffocation 27%

Firearm 55% Known: Other 8%

Poisoning 20%

Suffocation 31%

Firearm 41% We know that 2 million purchases were denied, since 1993, due to background checks, although data are unclear as to how many adjudicated mentally ill Americans attempted to buy a firearm to commit suicide. Fact is, being barred from purchasing a gun due to mental illness did not decrease suicide; it actually increased rates in other methods. Lumping suicides into total gun death data is exploiting the dead. America Doesn't Have a Gun Violence Epidemic – Democrat Cities Do Another effective play out of the Everytown playbook is the use of eye-catching color graphs that show America's alleged gun apocalypse: Accidental gun deaths have decreased over the last decade, fortunately: 824 total accidental gun deaths in 1999; 489 in 2015 – the most recent CDC data. The other approximately 15,000 annual gun deaths are homicides. Would you like to guess what cities have (and have had, for years) the highest rates of gun homicides? The Trace, a nonprofit established in 2015 with seed money from Bloomberg, does some fine data-mining. Here are two graphics, one from 2010-2015 and one from 2016-2017: I'm not sure The Trace, which is clearly Democrat-leaning, realizes the irony in its activism. In the 2010-2015 graph, every city, except Tulsa has been run by Democrat mayors and super-majority city councils or boards of aldermen ranging from 15,000 consecutive days (St. Louis) to 53,000 consecutive days (New Orleans). Most of the same Democrat cities are present in the 2016-2017 graph; several of their homicide rates increased. I have written extensively about crime and gun violence epidemics; you can read more here. How about non-fatal shootings? Notice the overlap of several cities; all are Democrat-run, except Jacksonville. When gun crime data in Democrat cities and suicide data are removed from national figures, gun crime rates are astoundingly low, considering the approximately 350 million legally owned firearms, and nearly 2 trillion pieces of legally owned ammunition. Do Watts and Bloomberg know even a scintilla of this information? I suspect they do, just as they know that "assault weapon" has no actual mechanical or technical meaning, irrespective of how much their DMIC and politician sycophants parrot the lie. I can't really fault them for being so out of touch with what's happening in long-time Democrat ghettos and inner cities. Bloomberg's net worth is $46 billion, making him the 11th wealthiest person on planet Earth, and Watts's home, according to property records, is worth more than $1.2 million, with a nearly $1 million mortgage open on it. It's not coincidental that affluent, privileged white Democrats are some of the most ardent anti-gun Americans. As a PS, the NRA wields far less influence than it proclaims. Yes, the people at the NRA have some influence, and yes, they are politically active. But what the NRA has spent in the last two decades on all political activity is a pittance compared to what other organizations in unrelated industries spent in 2016 alone. Around 20 percent of the NRA's total spending has occurred just in the last three years, although anti-gun groups spent $37 million on this year's state and federal midterms, compared to the NRA's $20 million. Aspiring gun-confiscators always say the NRA has blood on its hands, but I've always thought those with fantasies of confiscation have more. If the cult wants to be taken seriously by the "gun nuts," tell the truth – the whole truth. Rich Logis is host of The Rich Logis Show at TheRichLogisShow.com and author of the upcoming book 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat. He can be found on Twitter at @RichLogis.