Gun control advocates have gone to great lengths to rebrand themselves as mere proponents of “commonsense gun safety measures.” Often, this involves suggesting that every gun owner be required to undergo vetting and training that approach standards of sworn law enforcement officers, while being strictly limited in the firearms, ammunition, and accoutrements they’re allowed to own. Meanwhile, Second Amendment advocates who know all too well their real agenda have increasingly adopted the more accurate term “firearm prohibitionists.”
Fortunately, the Second Amendment side does not have to strain to justify its nomenclature. Firearm prohibition advocates inevitably do that for us.
Take Kris Brown, president of the legacy gun control group currently known as Brady.
In the wake of recent highly publicized defensive gun uses (DGUs) by federal immigration officials conducting enforcement actions, Brown issued a declaration that perhaps said more than she intended about her antipathy for all guns in all hands.
Posting on X Jan. 8, Brown wrote: “We don't know the details behind the shootings of 2 people by a Border Patrol agent in Portland. But I know one thing for certain: whether in the hands of federal officers or everyday Americans, guns do not make us safer.” Perhaps hedging her bets to appeal more broadly to the increasingly heavily armed left, Brown then invoked the common enemy of all progressives in good standing: “Yet Trump is reshaping our country based on this lie.”
As well as being impulsive with her words, Brown is no student of history, even the history of her own advocacy organization. Brady is named after James Brady, press secretary of President Ronald Reagan. Both he and his boss were injured by gunfire during an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981.
The perpetrator, who was armed with a handgun, was quickly subdued by … armed argents of the Secret Service, whose resolute actions saved the lives of Brady and Reagan and almost certainly prevented further bloodshed (a Secret Service agent and D.C. police officer were also wounded in the efforts to shield President Reagan and subdue the perpetrator). Iconic pictures from the scene show agents wielding guns, one of which – an Uzi submachine gun – is on display at the U.S. Secret Service Museum.
It might come as a surprise to James Brady, who passed in 2014, that the head of the organization that bears his name is now suggesting that armed federal agents do not contribute to public safety. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that anybody would be willing to undertake the difficult and dangerous job of protecting the U.S. president and his senior staff without the benefit of being, not just armed, but with the best, highest-performing firearms currently available.
The list of federal agents who have used firearms in the protection of the public during times of crisis and danger is too long to do justice to in this article. Suffice it to say that innumerable innocent lives have been saved by the practice of arming federal officers.
So accepted is the use of firearms by law enforcement officers in the U.S. that it is rare for anyone on any side of the firearm regulation debate to seriously question its basic validity or wisdom. Indeed, the usual posture of prohibitionists like Brown is to curry favor with law enforcement by exempting them from their gun ban proposals, invoking officer safety as a reason to ban guns, and portraying armed officers as the true guardians of public safety.
All this, however, assumes that Brown was using the term “we” to refer to law-abiding Americans generally.
There is, however, a radicalized leftwing fringe that seems increasingly more aligned with lawbreakers than law enforcers. This is especially true now that President Donald Trump is ultimately in charge of the nation’s federal law enforcement apparatus. President Trump has come to symbolize everything the left loathes and opposes, and his insistent backing of vigorous law enforcement and border security – even as it coincides with historic drops in violent crime – has drawn reflexive opposition as well.
Indeed, all three people harmed in the recent DGUs have been accused of either intentionally interfering with the enforcement of immigration law or of actually being in violation of that law. They were also said to have resisted the law’s enforcement by weaponizing their vehicles against federal immigration enforcement officers.
Of course, any time an agent of the government uses deadly force against a member of the public, that action is rightly scrutinized. Brown is correct that all the details of these incidents are not yet known; they are still being investigated, as they should be. Without concerns about the potential for runaway government, we wouldn’t have the Second Amendment, itself.
But to state with a “certainty” that they prove or illustrate that guns in any hands are antithetical to public safety is to give away the game that firearm prohibitionists are really playing. That game is ultimately to promote the idea that no safeguards can allow Americans to coexist with guns and to leverage every firearm involved injury and fatality, no matter what the circumstances, in the effort to ban guns as widely as possible.
A similar narrative was promoted by firearm prohibition organization Giffords, who labeled the asserted DGU in Minneapolis by an immigration agent who was in the path of a resisting subject’s accelerating vehicle a form of “gun violence” that “must” be rejected.
To the firearm prohibitionist, rejecting “gun violence” means rejecting all guns and their users, whoever’s side they are on and for whatever reason they have guns.
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