5 myths about guns

[melm00se]

Myth No. 1
Gun owners are all conservative.

Imagine the “typical” gun owner. If you know the demographics, you’ll probably picture a White, conservative guy who lives in the South, the West or the Midwest. Gun owners, as a political bloc, are much more likely to vote Republican. Republicans often promote the partisan stereotype, as when Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) strapped a Glock to her hip as she challenged Democrats to let her bring a gun into the Capitol. Headlines that ask “Why Are Conservatives So Obsessed with Guns?” further reinforce this impression about gun owners’ political identities.

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Myth No. 2
Gun crime has been going up for years.


Since 2000, Americans have increasingly (and incorrectly) believed that crime, including gun crime, has gone up. By 2019, 59 percent of Americans believed that gun murder was higher than it was 25 years ago — even though the gun homicide rate had roughly halved over that period.

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Myth No. 3
The federal government won't fund gun research.

In 1996, amid backlash to two major federal gun laws — the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban — Congress passed the ****ey Amendment, named for its sponsor, Rep. Jay ****ey (R-Ark.). That measure stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” In the years since, headlines have described a federal funding “freeze” or “drought,” or claimed that “gun violence research has been shut down for 20 years.”

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Myth No. 4
The NRA is primarily a lobbying group.

But the NRA invests just as heavily in shaping gun culture through its magazine and digital media presence, annual meetings, firearms museum and firearms training courses, according to research by Noah Schwartz, a PhD candidate at Carleton University. These training opportunities range from non-firearm “Refuse to be a Victim” courses to more advanced courses on pistols, rifles and armed self-defense. The over a million people who go through the NRA’s courses every year learn much more than how to safely handle and shoot a firearm, as I explore in my book “Citizen-Protectors”: These courses also encourage people to see gun carrying as an act of moral responsibility and the NRA as a guarantor of the ability to do so.

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Myth No. 5
We are hopelessly divided over gun policy.

And yet there are points of consensus. The vast majority of Americans, for example, support a universal background check system — including 83 percent of gun owners and 72 percent of NRA members. As political scientist Kristin Goss has detailed, there has been bipartisan work to address the intersection of mental health and gun policy, especially at the state level.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-guns/2021/04/01/c7ddb51e-9243-11eb-9668-89be11273c09_story.html