A remarkable Gallup poll—finding 63 percent of the American public believe they are more secure with a firearm in their homes—has sharply changed the professed goal of the anti-Second Amendment movement.
Leading this assault on our liberty, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has finally admitted what has been their target all along: “guns in the home.” Gallup’s headline announcing its poll results was straightforward: “More Than Six in 10 Americans Say Guns Make Homes Safer.”
For the gun-banners, that finding was just too much. The Brady Campaign’s Dan Gross fired back: “We are deeply troubled by the results of this recent Gallup poll. This dangerous misperception leads to thousands of unnecessary deaths every year, including several children every day.”
So what exactly was he calling a “dangerous misperception?”
The plain truth. That a majority of Americans believe that a core purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect armed self-defense. Or as Wayne LaPierre has succinctly put it: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The Gallup survey, published in November 2014, found significantly increased support for armed defense of the home which “drastically climbed… nearly doubled since 2000” when the polling firm first posed the question: “Do you think having a gun in the house makes it a safer place to be or a more dangerous place to be?”
This Gallup research also gives a positive nod to Florida’s landmark enactment of model “Castle Doctrine” and “Stand Your Ground” statutes, saying, “In the decade since, Americans have become more likely to view guns as a means of self-protection.”
In attacking the Gallup results, the Brady Campaign’s Gross announced that, “It is Brady’s goal to start a new, honest national conversation about the dangers of guns in the home and what we all can do to mitigate those dangers.”
In essence, Gross promised a massive propaganda campaign to tell Americans just how stupid we are to actually believe that firearms in one’s home are a critical element of personal safety.
Gross is not talking about “mitigating the dangers” of bad guys with guns, but about disarming good guys with guns.
Every time these gun prohibitionists use the word “conversation,” you know what’s coming. In their lexicon, “conversation” always means a one-sided shout-down. Honest conversation? An honest conversation would mean that they recognize armed self-defense by good people as a basic human right. That will never happen. There has never been anything honest about any element of their agenda nor any such thing as give and take. Just take.
And now they are flat-out saying they want to take your guns and your neighbor’s guns.
The Brady Campaign’s heightened rhetoric about the evils of guns in the home was expanded in a Nov. 21, 2014 statement, this time blaming gun ownership—by all good people—for mass murder by deranged killers.
According to the Brady Campaign, “We cannot ignore this simple truth: Too many shootings occur because proper weight has not been given to the risks that come with gun ownership. A gun in the home increases the risk of an unintentional shooting, suicide and homicide.”
It’s a huge lie, but then so is the very notion of government preventing violence. Violence prevention? Those words have nothing to do with mass killers or violent criminals.
Why not just pass a law or issue an order to “prevent evil?”
It’s impossible, of course. You can battle evil. You can defeat evil with good. But no law, no order, no stroke of a pen, no gun control scheme can prevent evil.
Immediately following the November, 2014 Ferguson, Mo., riots, Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief, told the Associated Press, “I don’t think we can prevent folks who really are intent on destroying a community.”
But in Ferguson, America saw that a handful of individual citizens, some bearing AR-15s, were able to defend businesses from rampant lawlessness where government totally failed.
That’s at the heart of the Gallup findings. Americans know individuals can meet evil with good, on the spot. Individuals protecting themselves with arms can stop evil.
That right, embraced and practiced by those six in 10 Americans, exists only because the NRA has been an unwavering force to protect the Second Amendment. Without your steadfast work and your commitment over the years, the Gallup question about guns in homes would have been moot long ago.
With that message, each of us needs to recruit every gun owner we know to join the NRA at this pivotal moment for our liberty and our nation.
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