Watching the last few days unfold has been just harrowing and, until Friday morning, I did not expect to write on gun violence yet again this week. But I just couldn't escape the dual images of a gun barrel menacingly pushing through a car window at a black man who was clearly dying before our very eyes and the horrifying chaos in the streets of Dallas as successive shots rang out.
The deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and the five Dallas police officers were all tragic in their own right, even if for different reasons. But it was the sniper ambush of law enforcement officials at an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest that totally unmasked the NRA's most disingenuous talking points as complete and utter falsehoods.
The first is that the presence of more guns in society serves as a deterrent for bad guys, or as the NRA puts it: "an armed society is a polite society." It's an argument they particularly like to roll out in support of open carry laws. The second is that the presence of more guns helps minimize the damage a bad guy can do.
Indeed, even the NRA seemed to know that the jig was up on its deception when it issued an uncharacteristic statement post Dallas expressing "deep anguish" over the killings, but stopping short of their usual mantra that "good guys" could have stopped the carnage if only more people were armed.
That was the lie NRA president Wayne LaPierre foisted upon the nation just one week after the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in December 2012 that left 26 people dead. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said, reiterating one of the NRA’s favorite myths.
By his standards Texas—the 18th most heavily armed state in the country—should be relatively safe. In LaPierre's eyes, it's probably even "safer" than that number suggests since the Lone Star State doesn't require people to register their guns and the ATF is only able to count the number of background checks sought (in other words, 18th is probably an undercount). Though hard numbers are difficult to find given the state’s lax laws, a 2013 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that nearly half the people polled said either they or someone in their household owned a gun—and that was probably an undercount too.
Less than half — 44 percent — said no one in their household owns a gun. As for the rest, 43 percent said they or a member of their family owns a gun, and 13 percent answered “prefer not to say.”
Most of those who do own guns own more than one. Only 19 percent said they and their families own one firearm, 44 percent said they own two to five, 20 percent said they own more than five guns, and the rest chose “prefer not to say.”
Of course, in Dallas, the good guys were both equipped with guns and trained to use them and the shooter still took a handful of lives and injured nine others. In fact, if Dallas proved anything it's that the presence of good guys with guns neither deterred the gunman from acting nor neutralized him before he could shoot more people once police realized they were being attacked.
Additionally, the presence of more weapons at the march only served to throw the police off the trail of the real sniper, as they circulated the picture of a protester who had been openly carrying a gun as a possible suspect. It turned out the man had nothing to do with the shootings, which leads us to a conclusion that totally contradicts what the NRA has been selling all along: The abundance of guns in America isn’t helping law enforcement officials one bit. Police officers can simply no longer tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys with guns. Once someone opens fire in a crowd, it's nearly impossible for officers to know which guns are a threat and which ones aren't.
So the NRA can say that it stands in solidarity with the fallen officers, but they're the group that's helped arm this nation to the teeth, putting law enforcement in far greater danger. They're the group that stands opposed to bans on the very type of weapon that killed five officers Thursday night and scores more in mass shootings across the country, including Orlando. And they're the group that has continually perpetuated the myth that more guns would somehow make Americans safer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
(ICYMI last week: So you think the NRA is invincible...)