There is no shortage of gun control talking points in the American gun rights debate, and if you spend enough time on this issue, you start to see the same ones repeated again and again. I thought it would be helpful and make some sense, then, to have some of the most common ones presented and rebutted in a single article that can be updated in the future as others pop up.
This list will be more idiosyncratic than comprehensive, as I’m talking about the arguments that I see a lot, and how I personally respond to them. For a much more thorough overview, a great resource is Gun Facts.
Argument: The Second Amendment was only meant to protect a collective right to serve in a militia, not an individual right to have guns and other weapons.
Numerous founding-era sources confirm the individual right, such as Tench Coxe, a friend of James Madison and himself a delegate to the constitutional convention:
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
“Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution,” under the pseudonym “A Pennsylvanian” in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789, p. 2 col. 1. As quoted in the Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789, A friend of James Madison, writing in support of the Madison’s first draft of the Bill of Rights.
Other quotes, while not as explicit, only work in the context of an individual right. Such as Federalist No. 46 by James Madison:
It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
What did Madison mean by the “advantage of being armed,” which Americans had but the people of almost every other nation did not? It can’t be the right to serve in a government militia or army, as people of other countries obviously had that “right” too. He clearly presupposes that individuals in the United States have the right to be armed, which was later codified into the Second Amendment.
Similarly, Alexander Hamilton added, should a large army ever be raised, “that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens.”
Many more commentators later confirmed the same in the 19th century, which is covered in another recent article.
In short, the Second Amendment was indeed in part about a citizen militia to guard against foreign invasion or federal tyranny. But it also guards an individual right, which makes the militia purpose possible in the first place.
Argument: Even if it’s an individual right, the Second Amendment applies only to those weapons most commonly used for self-defense like handguns, not military-style firearms.
The first thing to point out with this one is that it’s extremely jarring given the prior insistence that the Second Amendment exists only to protect a “militia right.” If a citizen militia is the main purpose, then obviously small arms useful for warfare would be protected most of all. In 1791 that would be a musket and a sword. In 1875 it would be a Colt revolver and a Winchester lever-action rifle. Today, it’s an AR-15 and a GLOCK.
Numerous sources confirm that the Second Amendment is about both personal self-defense as well as a more “societal” self-defense from foreign invasion and domestic tyranny. I did a whole law review article on this topic, which can be found here.
To save time, here are a few select quotes:
William Patterson, who held many positions of power in the founding era resulting in him being one of the first Associate Justices of the Supreme Court from 1793 until his death in 1806, wrote a militia is…
…the people themselves prepared to act as soldiers for the purpose of resisting oppression and securing their rights. . . . Tyrants dread freemen, when freeman not only have arms in their hands, but know how to use them.
In 1855, Furman Sheppard, who would later serve as District Attorney of Philadelphia. shared the same sentiments…
If citizens are allowed to keep and bear arms, it will be likely to operate as a check upon their rulers, and restrain them from acts of tyranny and usurpation.
Thomas M. Cooley, who served on the Michigan Supreme Court for two decades, wrote the Second Amendment…
…was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary powers of rulers, and as necessary and efficient means of regaining rights when temporarily overturned by usurpation.
In case there was any doubt, Cooley added the meaning of the Second Amendment…
…undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose.
Ironically, the federal government previously not only acknowledged this anti-tyranny purpose, but argued to the Supreme Court that it was the sole purpose of the Second Amendment…
“[I]t would seem that the early English law did not guarantee an unrestricted right to bear arms. Such recognition as existed of a right in the people to keep and bear arms appears to have resulted from oppression by rulers who disarmed their political opponents and who organized large standing armies which were obnoxious and burdensome to the people. This right, however, it is clear, gave sanction only to the arming of the people as a body to defend their rights against tyrannical and unprincipled rulers. It did not permit the keeping of arms for purposes of private defense.”
— Brief for United States in United States v. Miller, O.T. 1938, No. 696, pp. 11–12 (citations omitted).
Argument: The Second Amendment was mostly adopted so state militias could put down slave revolts, and it’s a deeply racist provision.
This argument has seen a bit of a resurgence in popularity due to a recent book pushing that argument once again.
I’m sure southern slave states intended to use armed citizens serving in militias to put down slave revolts, but otherwise, the argument is pure nonsense. The Second Amendment was adopted by all of the states at the time, not just the southern ones. This includes Pennsylvania and Vermont, which had the strongest state constitution versions of right to bear arms provisions…
Pennsylvania: The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned. Art. 1, § 21 (enacted 1790, art. IX, § 21). Prior version in 1776: That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination, to, and governed by, the civil power. Declaration of Rights, cl. XIII.
Vermont: That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State — and as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power. Ch. I, art. 16 (enacted 1777, ch. I, art. 15).
Thus, both of these colonies/states with muscular right to bear arms state constitution provisions ratified the Second Amendment, and both of them abolished slavery before the revolutionary war was even over. In fact, Vermont in 1777 was the first colony to ban slavery outright. Pennsylvania in 1780 introduced a more gradual ban on slavery, making it law that anyone born before the passage of the law could be kept a slave.
Besides these two examples, Massachusetts and New Hampshire banned slavery in 1783, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. So in total, five of the original thirteen colonies, plus Vermont, had banned slavery before they ratified the Bill of Rights and its Second Amendment. (Note: Vermont declared independence separately from the original 13 colonies, although the Continental Congress refused to recognize it. Vermont was finally admitted to the union as the 14th state in 1790, after 14 years as an independent republic.)
The idea that the Second Amendment was just about slave control lazily ignores that it was adopted by states that had abolished slavery either immediately or more gradually before the constitution was even ratified. And some of those states had unmistakably individual rights components in their own state constitutions.
The “Second Amendment is racist” argument also ignores that some of the strongest early proponents of an expansive right to bear arms were abolitionists and later civil rights advocates. Pages 109 through 111 of my law review article cover this briefly.
Argument: States with looser gun laws have more gun deaths.
There are really a couple arguments in this one.
1. First, it’s necessary to define what we mean by “gun deaths.” Usually, gun control activists count suicides (as well as accidents, but those are a tiny part of the total). That’s because suicides make up over half of all gun-related deaths, and it’s true that they are a problem. But this is primarily a problem of correlation: Middle-aged white men are by far the most prone to suicide and they also tend to have the most guns. So, they tend to use those guns for suicide. But there are competing theories too. For example, altitude appears to be strongly correlated with suicide, which is why even gun control states like Colorado have higher suicide rates.
In 2020 the US experienced 45,222 gun-related deaths. Of those, 24,292 were suicides compared to 19,384 gun-related homicides. That means suicides comprised 53.7% of gun-related deaths in 2020, with homicides accounting for 42.9%. The remainder of about 3.4% is a mix of accidental deaths (535), law enforcement shootings (611), and gun-related deaths of undetermined causes (400).
For more on the topic of suicide and gun policy, check out my article here.
2. Second, when it comes to gun-related homicides, there isn’t a correlation. Seven of our top ten lowest homicide rate states have constitutional carry, as I discussed here. The pro-gun states that have high numbers of homicides are almost exclusively in the south and had the same high rates of homicide well before they loosened their gun laws.
In a Twitter thread some time ago, I charted out States to compare their gun control “grade” compared to their homicide rate. No correlation.
On a nationwide scale, the significant increase in gun ownership didn’t correlate with more gun homicides.
Even within states with ostensibly high homicide rates, there’s a tremendous urban/rural divide, with the cities having far higher homicide despite being controlled by the more antigun Democratic party. For example, in 2021 Jackson County (Kansas City), St. Louis County, and St. Louis city accounted for about 32.5% of the total population of Missouri. But they had an astonishing 73% of the state’s homicides.
Argument: Even if guns don’t mean more homicides, there are more accidents when gun ownership is higher.
Despite gun sales accelerating, unintentional gun deaths are actually way down in recent years, especially since the highs of the 1970s. This is mostly the result of better gun safety education.
Even just since 1999, the rate has fallen from 0.3 per 100,000 deaths in 1999, to 0.2 in 2020, per the CDC. And in raw numbers, there were 824 unintentional gun deaths in 1999, and 535 in 2020. Of course we want that number to be zero, but it’s simply not a statistically large problem at all.
Yet even with only 500 or so unintentional gun-related deaths per year, that’s still enough so it feels like you hear a sad news story at least once a week about some negligent parent leaving a gun out and a toddler being killed as a result. That, however, is simply a function of our large population.
In a nation of 330 million people, rare events feel more common than they actually are. For example, if we had Switzerland’s population but the same rate of unintentional gun deaths of 0.2 per 100,000, we’d have about 15 a year instead of around 500, and they would feel far less frequent even though the rate was unchanged.
Argument: Mass shootings have gotten worse (and related arguments)
…a multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms—not including the offender(s)—within one event, and at least some of the murders occurred in a public location or locations in close geographical proximity (e.g., a workplace, school, restaurant, or other public settings), and the murders are not attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).
To be sure, this definition still isn’t perfect. I’d argue it leaves out some unsuccessful mass shootings. For example, a while back someone tried to commit mass murder on a New York subway. He shot ten people, but miraculously none of them died and he was captured. So Violence Project wouldn’t count that as a mass shooting because there were no fatalities. Personally, I would include that, as it was sheer luck that led to no deaths in that incident.
Still, the Violence Project’s tracker is pretty good, and certainly much better than Gun Violence Archive at including only true mass shootings. They find that mass shooting deaths are up in recent years compared to prior decades:
So are there more mass shooting victims in recent years? Yes, and we should try and end this scourge. But at the same time, the numbers are comparatively tiny.
Mass shootings are horrific and make the news, but even in our worst year ever — 2017 — a total of 108 people died in them. To compare, 1,721 people died that year due to cuts or stabbing, per the CDC. You are thus around 17 times more likely to die from being stabbed to death than you are to die in a public mass shooting in the worst year ever for mass shootings. In fact, the toll from all American mass shooting deaths combined, according to the Violence Project, is at 1,391 deaths through 2023. That’s less than one typical year of stabbing deaths.
Mass shootings are a problem and they also are demoralizing. No one wants to see innocent people, sometimes even children, be gunned down by lunatics. But like all problems, it should be kept in proper context.
Mass shootings are more common than ever before, but remain an astronomically rare way to be killed (which I know is cold comfort to the people who have lost people in such shootings). From 1999 to 2002, you had about a .03 per 100,000 chance of dying in a mass shooting. That’s a little less than roughly one in three million. From 2019 to 2022, those odds increased to about .05 per 100,000, or around one in two million.
Argument: The 1994 ‘assault weapons’ ban expired in 2004 and mass shootings went up.
The simple counter to this point is that Columbine happened during the ban and, more importantly, mass shootings were also pretty low before the ban started in 1994.
A federal report on the Clinton ban concluded it had no discernible effect.
Moreover, the “assault weapons” ban didnt actually stop sales of common rifles. The AR-15, for instance, actually increased in sales every year the ban was in place:
That’s because the ban was primarily a features-based ban. While it outlawed some guns by name, manufacturers could make close facsimiles and as long as they included no banned features, the gun was legal for sale.
Even after the 1994 ban ended, most mass shootings, even just counting ones with four or more people killed, do not involve “assault weapons.”
Argument: There aren’t many actual defensive gun uses.
This is an oft-debated point and survey estimates of defensive gun use range anywhere between 100,000 a year and 2.5 million a year. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle. (Remember that most defensive gun uses do not involve a shot being fired, mere brandishing that dissuades a would-be assailant is enough.)
Critics like to bash one famous 1990s survey by Gary Kleck which found around 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. One factor that is usually ignored in these criticisms is that crime was much higher in the early 1990s when the survey was conducted. Moreover, even if Kleck was off on the high end, a number of surveys likewise put the result in the millions, or at least over 500,000:
The low end of the survey range (roughly 100,000 per year) comes from the National Crime Victimization Survey done by the federal government. The problem with that figure is that NCVS first asks those surveyed to self-identify as a victim before asking how they defended themselves, if at all. The trouble with that is many people who had a defensive gun use incident may not consider themselves a victim at all.
RAND, a well-respected research organization which isn’t particularly friendly to guns, explains it as follows . . .
As noted earlier, however, there are also good reasons to suspect that the NCVS underestimates the true number of DGUs. The NCVS provides an opportunity for respondents to describe DGUs only in the context of certain types of crimes. DGUs resulting from crimes not covered by the NCVS will likely be undercounted. DGUs may occur in the context of suspected crimes that respondents on the NCVS might not judge to qualify as events in which they were a victim of a crime, in which case those DGUs would be undercounted. At the time research on DGUs was being conducted, the NCVS did not explicitly ask crime victims whether they used a firearm to defend themselves. Thus, some DGUs might go uncounted if respondents choose not to volunteer their use of a gun when asked whether they attempted to resist the perpetrator (Kleck, 1999). Finally, NCVS respondents victimized while engaging in illegal activity may not volunteer these experiences, meaning any associated DGUs would not be counted (McDowall and Wiersema, 1994).
The jury is thus still out on this one, but defensive gun use is probably significantly more frequent than the 100,000 per year baseline of the NCVS.
Argument: Concealed carry permitting increases crime.
This is total nonsense. We’ve effectively annihilated this argument in litigation on behalf of CRPA, and in various amicus briefs for other cases. The data overwhelmingly show that Americans with CCW permits are extraordinarily law-abiding. You can read one such brief here for a more complete look at our arguments (start on page 16), but as just one example, let’s look at the State of Florida.
As of August 2024, Florida had issued 6,144,365 concealed weapon permits since October 1, 1987. Of those, 2,449,492 are still active today. In that 37-year period, only 20,621 permits have been revoked without being reinstated, or roughly three-tenths of one percent of the total issued.
Florida statistics are notable because it is the state where the modern right-to-carry movement gathered steam. The state’s enactment of “shall-issue” permitting was met with predictions of wild-west style violence and warnings of “blood in the streets,” but none of that happened.
At least one prominent opponent of the law admitted his error. Representative Ronald A. Silver stated in 1990 that “[t]here are lots of people, including myself, who thought things would be a lot worse as far as that particular situation [carry reform] is concerned. I’m happy to say they’re not.” Clayton E. Cramer & David B. Kopel, “Shall Issue”: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws, 62 Tenn. L. Rev. 679, 692-93 (1995).
Similar data exists for many other states, and data to the contrary is nonexistent. As a result, several courts have recognized the lack of evidence supporting efforts to tie criminality to those lawfully carrying for self-defense.
“[D]espite ample opportunity for an evidentiary hearing, the State has failed to offer any evidence that law-abiding responsible citizens who carry firearms in public for self-defense are responsible for an increase in gun violence.” Koons v. Platkin, 673 F. Supp. 3d 515, 577 (D.N.J. 2023). “Simply put, CCW permitholders are not the gun wielders legislators should fear.” May v. Bonta, No. 23-cv-01696, 2023 WL 8946212, at *19 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 20, 2023). “[T]he vast majority of conceal carry permit holders are law abiding.” Wolford v. Lopez, 686 F. Supp. 3d 1034, 1076 (D. Haw. 2023).
At least one research organization that typically argues for more gun control, RAND, has recognized the same. “[E]vidence generally shows that, as a group, license holders are particularly law abiding and rarely are convicted for violent crimes.” Rosanna Smart, et al., The Science of Gun Policy: A Critical Synthesis of Research Evidence on the Effect of Gun Policies in the United States, at 427 (4th ed. 2024), available online here. (last accessed Sept. 27, 2024).
Only one antigun organization has attempted to argue the opposite. Concealed Carry Killers, created by the anti-gun Violence Policy Center, purports to show that people with CCW permits commit murders frequently, hence the sensational title. But according to the website itself, of the 2,512 total people purportedly killed by “concealed carry killers” from May 2007 to January 2024, 1,505 were suicide victims. Further, those who “committed suicide as part of a murder-suicide” is its own small category differentiated from other suicides. Thus, the 1,505 in the category of “suicide” harmed no one but themselves.
The Violence Policy Center’s Concealed Carry Killers site exploits the deaths of those who died by suicide to inflate its count in service of its anti-gun goals. Worse yet, it disparages their memory by calling them “killers,” no different than criminals who intentionally harm others. They aren’t the same, and their deaths do not support the notion that concealed carry permit holders present a grave risk to the public at large.
Additionally, the data do not say where these deaths took place. Presumably, the overwhelming majority of those who died by suicide died in their own homes. This makes much of the data entirely irrelevant to concerns about carrying firearms in public places.
In any case, what’s most remarkable is that the Concealed Carry Killers data actually supports the argument that Americans with CCW permits are overwhelmingly law-abiding. After removing the 1,505 suicide victims from the data, 1,007 total people who were killed by “concealed carry killers” remain. Only 544 of these are killings with resulting convictions. The rest are some mix of unintentional shootings, murder-suicides, claimed self-defense shootings, and cases still under investigation. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all 1,007 involved cold-blooded killers.
From May 2007 to January 2024, 1,007 killings over 16 years is an average of about 63 per year. To put that figure in its proper context, one must compare it to the number of Americans who lawfully carry firearms. According to data from the University of Washington, “in 2019 approximately 16 million adult handgun owners had carried a loaded handgun on their person in the past month.” According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, the figure has risen to 22 million as of 2022.
Going with the lower 2019 figure for the sake of argument, if about 16 million Americans legally carry, and 63 killings result per year, that’s an annual homicide rate of around 0.39 per 100,000 people. According to the CDC, the overall national homicide rate was 7.8 per 100,000 people in 2021. In other words, even according to the Concealed Carry Killers data, Americans who legally carry firearms are about 20 times less likely to commit homicide than the general population. That hardly supports claims that such persons are somehow uniquely dangerous that Americans must be disarmed in most places.
Argument: Europe is stricter on guns and proves gun control works to lower homicides.
First off, European gun laws vary greatly. In some countries, such as Austria and the Czech Republic, citizens have pretty decent access to modern semiautomatic firearms. Others, like the UK, limit ownership greatly, and even if you have a gun, it’s probably a double-barrel shotgun at most.
But even treating all of Europe as a monolith, what this argument leaves out is that European countries have always had lower homicide rates than the United States, even before they passed strict gun laws. Australia is similar.
You can also make the comparison to individual states. For example, New Hampshire has very pro-gun laws and a European-style homicide rate. Similar observations apply to Maine, Idaho, Utah, etc. The obvious rebuttal to this is the argument that New Hampshire is sparsely populated, so of course it’s less violent. There is some merit to that point, but it’s an overstated one. To be sure, New Hampshire is not New York City, but it has 1.4 million people in a relatively small slice of real estate. So while it isn’t New York, it’s not Wyoming either.
More specifically, New Hampshire has a population density of 58 people per square kilometer. (For reference, Wyoming is at 2, New York State is at 159). Using population density, we can find a comparable European country. Ireland has 73 people per square kilometer. While that’s not identical, it’s in the same ballpark and gives us a good comparison point given the totally opposite gun laws. Ireland had an overall homicide rate of 1.49 per 100,000 in 2020.
New Hampshire was at 1.02 per 100,000, beating out the Emerald Isle with its strict gun laws.
To be fair, Ireland has a city of 1.1 million people, while New Hampshire’s largest city is around 100,000 people. I don’t claim the comparison is totally equal, but the population densities are very similar and New Hampshire at least proves that high homicide is not a fait accompli to embracing gun rights.
In short, gun laws are just not the primary determinative factor of homicide rates. That’s why New Hampshire and Louisiana can have near-identical gun laws, but the former has the homicide rate of a wealthy western European nation while the latter has the homicide rate of a narco-state. It works with the gun control states, too (compare Massachusetts with Maryland – similarly strict gun control laws, widely divergent homicide rates).
Lightning round
Here are a few shorter arguments that crop up frequently…
- Guns are the leading killer of children!
I did a long tweet on this topic, which Truth About Guns adapted into an article here.
- Universal background checks would reduce violent crime!
I think that the only gun control laws with some argument for being successful are background check laws, and NICS can point to many denied sales over the decades that it’s been in place. At least some of those denials probably would have led to violent crimes if the criminals who tried to buy firearms had been successful.
That said, the evidence is certainly subject to dispute. A UC Davis study performed by academics who are by no means gun industry advocates looked at California’s UBC law and found no notable benefits.
- We must ban untraceable ghost guns!
The ghost gun moral panic is just a rerun of the old “Saturday Night Special” moral panic. I don’t doubt that homemade firearms have seen an increase in criminal use, because there are more of them out there now than ever before. But that doesn’t mean they are necessarily increasing crime. I think criminals who would have used stolen guns or other black market arms are just shifting to using “ghost guns.” Homicide is currently falling rapidly from its pandemic-era highs, despite ghost guns being more prevalent.
The ATF says that of over 620,000 trace requests submitted to them in fiscal 2022, only around 19,000 were “ghost guns.”
- Constitutional carry is dangerous!
More and more states have adopted constitutional (permitless) carry without a corresponding rise in crime, including Florida recently. Miami just had its lowest homicide year since the 1940s, which is incredible.
In general, every time a state plans to adopt constitutional carry, predictions of “blood in the street” are made, but never come to fruition. Now, 29 states are constitutional carry states.
Of our top ten lowest homicide states, six have constitutional carry. It’s true that some of the most violent states are also constitutional carry states, primarily southern states. But those states were just as violent before those recent enactments too.
You can read some of my related posts on this well-worn topic here, here, and here.
- We must repeal the PLCAA!
I did a long post about PLCAA in response to Jason Kander, former Missouri Secretary of State, calling for its elimination.
- Gun buybacks work!
They simply don’t and my theory why they don’t is that the people who are willing to turn in unwanted guns are generally not criminals anyway. Perhaps there are some edge cases where an unneeded gun gets stolen and used in a crime, but it’s an outlier.
Regardless of my theories though, even some leftwing/anti-gun media admits they do not work (see here, here, and here).
That said, stopping buybacks isn’t much of a priority for me. If governments want to waste taxpayer money to buy guns from people who are willing hand them in, whatever. The biggest downside is that it’s a shame when the occasional valuable antique is turned in and destroyed.
Conclusion
I hope you found this helpful. I may add to it over time.
To support more work like this in addition to our litigation efforts, please become a member and/or donate to CRPA.
Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.
This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.
“and if you spend enough time on this issue, you start to see the same ones repeated again and again. ”
That’s a big part of how they build their narrative, by repetition. In fact, if you look at some of their studies closely you begin to see the same sets of data being used for different purposes to reach different conclusions that are bogus because the data set was for something else and they are juts repeating the use of it to give results that are not true but looks good to people who don’t know any better ’cause researcher said’. Repetition is a big thing with anti-gun, and its contributing to their downfall because you can only repeat something so many times before others start taking a closer look at it and go “but this doesn’t make sense.”. Like that ‘guns are the number one killer of children” lie they repeated that over and over for years until one day someone took a look at the underlying data and found out the data includes adults.
“ghost guns” are not just homemade firearms. Any gun for which the ATF can not trace in less then 6 hours, for any reason, goes in their ‘ghost gun’ category even if it has a serial number on it and was commercially manufactured. Any serial number for a commercially manufactured gun that comes to ATF to be traced that they can not trace back to an active in business FFL goes in the ‘ghost gun’ category for them. Any commercially made gun where the serial number has been defaced or obliterated and is not readable goes in the ‘ghost gun’ category for them.
“you start to see the same ones repeated again and again. ”
Preachers have been using repetition for many a year to get make a point, i.e., they tell you what they are going to preach, then they preach it and that is followed by telling you what they just preached.