Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
I don’t understand the world anymore.
And no, it’s not entirely because unhinged cops are shooting people for no reason, or because unhinged people are shooting cops for no reason – violence is violence and has been going on for as long as there have been humans.
What baffles me is how members of our society have managed to train their brains to see illusion rather than reality. Modern Americans have evolved a strange filter that intercepts the raw data taken in by their five senses and fundamentally alters that data before it reaches the rational part of the brain. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the things I’ve been reading on the interwebs over the past few days. Data comes in, gets twisted to comport with a preconceived reality, and then processed. Then, the person sits down to write an article about it; and this is the headline they come up with:
“The NRA is to blame for police shooting of Philando Castile by encouraging citizens to arm themselves”
Philando Castile was the innocent motorist who was murdered Wednesday evening while sitting behind the wheel of his car by Falcon Heights police officer Jeronimo Yanez, who then bravely covered Castile’s girlfriend and 4-year-old daughter with his gun while Castile bled out from four gunshot wounds administered by Yanez at near-contact distance.
Given the objective reality of how events unfolded, it’s readily apparent who is to blame for the murder of Philando Castile: his murderer, Jeronimo Yanez.
But, when merely firing a .22-caliber, centerfire sporting rifle gives a person “temporary Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” tackling the ugliness of objective reality is obviously too big a task for such frail flower to manage. So, once again Gersh Kuntzman eschews reality for his own fantastical narrative.
“I don’t immediately blame the cops and I certainly don’t blame the victims. I blame the gun nuts. Gun lovers and their mouthpieces at the National Rifle Association have done more to damage police-community relations than poor cop training, racism, crime and fear could ever do,” Kuntzman wrote to open his imbecilic rant.
Really? Last I checked all the NRA has ever done is seek to educate people on how to use firearms, educate kids on how to be safe around them via the Eddie Eagle Gun Safety Program, and defend the inherent right to own arms against government intrusion. Along the way, they supported Project Exile, which imposes stricter penalties on those who use a gun in the commission of a crime. But, again, reality matters not one whit to Kuntzman.
“And it’s all due to the NRA’s twisted, sick perversion of the Second Amendment from a cherished right to keep and bear arms as part of a well-regulated national defense into a call to ‘stand your ground’ in all circumstances,” Kuntzman continued.
As a former NRA-certified instructor who taught concealed carry courses, I can assure you that the NRA in no way, supports the idea that one should “stand their ground” in “all circumstances.” And what, pray tell, does that assertion have to do with anything anyway? Who was said to be “standing their ground” in Baton Rouge or in Falcon Heights? The cops? The NRA doesn’t handle training cops; departments have their own internal processes for that.
“The NRA famously depicts armed citizens as heroes and lobbies against any restrictions on an American’s right to defend himself,” Kuntzman wrote.
Or, herself, but never mind. And yes, at least 67,000 times each year according to the anti-gun Violence Policy Center, armed citizens do defend themselves and others against violent crime with a firearm. There is something a bit heroic to standing up to a threat, I don’t think the NRA is wrong there.
“’Tell every politician you will STAND and FIGHT to protect your fundamental right to hunt, shoot and own a gun for personal protection,’ one of the group’s petitions reads. But this relentless call for ‘personal protection’ has not led to a safer country, but a more dangerous place awash in guns,” Kuntzman continued.
I’m not sure why he’s referring to a campaign where the NRA encouraged members to contact their representatives in congress about new proposed restrictions here. I guess he’s trying to make the NRA seem nefarious, but then, someone has to counter Bloomberg’s billions. And, actually the last twenty years has seen a decrease in overall violent crime while individual firearm ownership continued to grow and the number of people with concealed carry permits ballooned from a few thousand to more than 12 million. Again, Kuntzman has little use for reality.
“Last year, 990 people were fatally shot by cops in this country, according to the Washington Post. So far this year, 509 have been killed,” Kuntzman continued to flesh out his red herring.
Again, the NRA has nothing to do with cops deciding to shoot people over minor traffic offenses. There’s not even a tangential relationship to be made here. Oh, wait…
“The victims in two recent shootings — Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile near Minneapolis — carried weapons. If Sterling and Castile were lawfully armed, then they were the ‘good guys’ with guns the NRA is always talking about.”
What the actual hell is he even trying to say here? The “Good guy with a gun” thing is a reference to NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre correctly pointing out that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; like what happened in a South Carolina night club last month. Nothing about that entire concept has anything to do with good people being murdered by police officers.
“But in the recent police shooting of Dylan Noble in Fresno or of Dillon Taylor in Utah two years ago, the victim was unarmed. And that’s the problem: In a country where law-abiding citizens are encouraged to protect themselves with guns, police increasingly assume every person they stop is indeed armed.”
Increasingly? Cops have been trained to assume a threat for ages. Is he trying to suggest that disarming everyone would make us all safer? Wouldn’t that assertion be contradicted by the two incidents he cited in the immediately preceding sentence? Seriously, why the hell does this clown even have a job?
“The NRA has been beating the ‘self-defense’ message into our consciousness for decades now — and the result is that the plurality of American gun owners, 48%, now say they own their weapons to defend themselves, up from 26% in 1999, when hunting was the main motivation for gun ownership.”
Odd he provided no source for his likely made-up statistic, or any evidence that the NRA is somehow behind a change in people’s attitude. Clearly, Mr. Kuntzman attributes near-magical powers to the NRA, but that still falls short of an actual explanation.
From there, Kuntzman goes on to excoriate gun-owners and cites a few examples of the replies he got to his work after the Orlando shooting; cherry-picking some poorly-worded responses from pro-self-preservation folks. This was done so as to fashion a peg upon which he could hang his next asinine argument.
“The irony, of course, is that there’s no way for cops to distinguish who are the ‘good guys’ with guns, who are the ‘bad guys’ with guns, and who are the rest of us who don’t want to be in any crossfire,” Kuntzman wrote.
Uh, Alanis, that’s not irony; nor it what you’ve written an actual argument. Nobody wants to be in “any crossfire,” just like no one wants to be caught outside in a pop-up thunderstorm. Problem is both things often take place without any warning or say-so by those involved. It’s called “life.” Get a helmet.
“There’s no evidence that Sterling or Castile, or many of the other legal gun owners shot and killed by police were ‘bad’ guys. Sterling had a record of felonies, yet purchased his gun on Monday — Independence Day. Details remain unclear about how he did that. And, Castile’s girlfriend, Lavish Reynolds, said her boyfriend was the ultimate law-abiding citizen.
‘He works for St. Paul public schools,’ she said. ‘He’s never been in jail, anything. He’s not a gang member,’” Kuntzman wrote, still utterly failing to draw any sort of logical line between Castile’s murder and the NRA.
“So why did he feel he needed a gun? Perhaps he simply heeded the message of the nation’s most powerful lobbying group: law-abiding citizens should be armed. But the results are almost always tragic: Any time a cop answers a 911 call, he now has to assume everyone in his immediate view — the ‘good’ guy, the ‘bad’ guy and even the innocent bystanders — has a gun. So the incident inevitably escalates. And, suddenly, the NRA’s ‘good guy with a gun’ is the one who ends up dead.” Kuntzman concluded in a bewildering abuse of logic and fact.
First, the NRA didn’t invent the idea of carrying a handgun for self-defense. They didn’t just out of the blue lobby state legislatures to relax draconian and ineffective restrictions on concealed carry. People started demanding their rights, and the NRA did what it does, it defended and supported the inherent human right of the individual to be armed.
Worse than the abuses of logic are the out and out lies Kuntzman tells here with alarming casualness. The results of people being armed are not “almost always tragic.” By any objective measure of reality, it is actually almost never “tragic.” Each and every day more than 12 million Americans go about their business with a concealed handgun under their clothes – and nothing happens. Each and every year, again, according to the anti-gun Violence Policy Center’s own numbers, at least 67,000 Americans use a gun for self-defense – against 9,000 – 13,000 homicides committed with guns.
The situations don’t “inevitably escalate.” I’ve been pulled over enough times with a my legal gun in the car to know that most of the time the cops couldn’t care less that I am armed, they’re more interested in the immediate reason they decided to pull me over to begin with. And, once again, the “good guy with a gun” argument has nothing to do with guys being shot to death by cops during traffic stops.
It’s easy for anyone with a three-digit IQ and a whit of common sense to blow giant holes in the drivel Kuntzman writes, so, that done I’d like to finish the job by pointing out the actual root of the problem.
“Gun lovers and their mouthpieces at the National Rifle Association have done more to damage police-community relations than poor cop training, racism, crime and fear could ever do,” reads the third sentence of Kuntzman’s piece.
The idiocy of that sentiment is staggering in and of itself, no doubt. There are many factors contributing to the problems going on between police officers and regular people, and the NRA isn’t the biggest; hell, it’s not a factor at all. The single biggest factor, the most proximal root cause of the antipathy between cops and the communities they “serve” is the 45-year-long boondoggle known as “The War on Drugs.”
No other set of laws is more responsible for bringing cops into contact with civilians than the drug war. Making matters worse, government policy has done nothing in the last 45 years but further incentivize police initiating contact with people suspected of drug activity, the biggest incentive being asset forfeiture. If a cop arrests someone in a nice car for drugs, they typically seize the vehicle and force the owner to prove they didn’t acquire it via drug money, even if they’re not being charged with distributing drugs, merely possessing them. In fact, last year marked a milestone in asset forfeiture: the total value of property seized from citizens by police was greater than the total value of property reported to the police as stolen by citizens. Add to that the occasional reports that surface of cops being arrested for selling drugs, and it becomes quite apparent that the nexus of the problem, the drain hole around which all this other stuff swirls, is the war on drugs. It, more than anything else has eroded the public’s trust in the concept of law enforcement generally and of police officers individually.
End the drug war and there will be far less reason for police to interact with citizens. They won’t be constantly out there looking to score the department’s new MRAP or espresso maker on the back of someone driving a Caddy with a joint in their pocket. It’s only logical to conclude that dramatically decreasing the number of incidents where police and citizens come into contact would dramatically decrease the number of citizens being shot by police. Of course, it would also require the state to give up a lot of its cherished power, so, I’m not holding my breath. The drug war will go on, the cops will continue to rob and murder us and idiots with names that sound like something out of a Monty Python sketch will continue to completely fail to understand what the hell is going on.
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