Every time some gun-related tragedy occurs, we get to hear from innumerable people who know nothing about guns other than everything is the NRA’s fault. And everything they think they know about the NRA is wrong. In other words, they think they know one thing but the one thing they know is wrong. The thing they think they know is that the NRA pays off (Republican) politicians to vote against gun control bills. I asked ChatGPT “How much does the NRA donate annually to politicians?” And I got this answer: The National Rifle Association (NRA) is a powerful lobbying organization that has donated millions of dollars to political candidates and causes over the years. However, the organization is not required to disclose its exact political contributions, and the amount it donates can vary widely from year to year and election cycle to election cycle. According to the Center for Responsive… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: NRA
5 Reasons We’re Not Helped by More Gun Laws
The most common statistical sleight of hand when it comes to showing charts of gun murder rates per capita by country, with the United States always in the lead, is that these charts, somewhere in the fine print, and sometimes not at all, note that they’re only charting so-called “developed” countries, meaning that the U.S. is being compared to countries like Japan and France, but that Latin American countries and African countries, among others, are left out. So — 50+ people shot to death in a Nigerian church? Doesn’t count because Nigeria is not a “developed” country. And so on. (The other thing you have to pay attention to is whether a chart is showing gun murders or gun deaths. The U.S. has a very high suicide rate compared to most other countries — more than 60 percent of our gun deaths are suicides — so rolling the suicides in… Read more →
Who is to Blame for Buffalo?
From Kevin D. Williamson: Before the blood was even dry in Buffalo, Democrats were asking the most important question: “How can we well-heeled white progressives most effectively use the murders of all these black people to our personal and political advantage?” The murderer in Buffalo didn’t kill anybody you’ve ever heard of, and so the first thing to do if you want to exploit the deaths of all these people — and that is what Democrats intend to do — is to connect the crime to some famous name or prominent institution. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any actual connection: Just assert it, and that’s good enough for the newspapers and the cable-news cretins and the impotent rage-monkeys on Twitter. The usual suspects: social-media platforms, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Fox News, the National Rifle Association, etc. The shooter was actually well known in advance as a… Read more →
Fact Checking the Fact Checkers
PolitiFact has a article headlined “Donald Trump’s NRA speech, fact-checked”. Here’s a sample: “African-American unemployment has reached another all-time, in history, record low … And the same thing with Hispanic American unemployment, which is also at the lowest level in history — unemployment, lowest level in history. And women’s unemployment — women, many women — is at the lowest level in almost 20 years. Think of that.” The “fact check” starts out like this: As far as the numbers go, Trump is correct. It then goes on for another five paragraphs to say that Barack Obama deserves “at least as much” credit as Trump for low unemployment. That’s a fact check?! Trump didn’t even say anything about who deserves the credit, although the listener is invited to make a favorable inference. Had he added “. . . and I deserve all the credit,” it would be fair in that case… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Hillary Clinton
My fellow Americans — Hillary Clinton is still rattling off all the “reasons” she lost the 2016 presidential election: misogyny, the FBI, sexism, the NRA, Russia . . . To my knowledge, she has never correctly identified the actual culprits: the patriotic men and women of this country. Read more →
Was Nikolas Cruz Bullied?
In 2018, being accused of bullying is not on a par with being accused of murder, but it’s close. Emma Gonzalez, one of the Parkland shooting survivors, said this about Nikolas Cruz at the anti-gun march in Washington, D.C.: Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him? You don’t know this kid. OK? We did! I can’t see anything unusual about that. The popular kids sneer at the geeks, the nerds and the weirdos. Because they deserve it. You don’t know this kid. We did. But when the kid in this case goes off the rails, which “was no surprise to anyone who knew him,” some self-reflection seems to be in order before blaming the usual suspects. I don’t understand the strategy of gun control proponents. Every tragedy… Read more →
See You in Hell: Rifles Have an Undeservedly Bad Reputation
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the Lake of Fire! I was perusing the FBI data on murder weapons in the U.S. For 2016, what do you think was the most frequently employed murder weapon? Survey SAYS — handguns! The weapon of choice in 7,105 murders. I blame the NRA! Ha ha, just messing with you there. The NRA has nothing to do with the existence of evil in the world. That’s my department. That handgun number is actually a little low, because the FBI also reports more than 3,000 gun murders where the type of firearm is not specified — and it’s almost always a handgun. Running a distant second behind guns: knives, used to end the life of 1,604 Americans in 2016. Now here’s a surprising one: 656 people killed by “personal weapons,” which essentially means beating someone… Read more →