The folks over at Media Matters caught a clip on NRATV with remarks showing just how out-of-touch the NRA’s members are. In a July 28th episode, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesche—who is the actor in the recent infamously inflammatory NRA ad essentially calling for violence against liberals—made an enraging argument against creating penalties for gun owners who don’t properly lock up their guns. Here’s the transcript:
GRANT STINCHFIELD (HOST): All right, so the other that topic we talked about just a little bit earlier here, this new study out now, I need every to know, the American Center for Progress (sic) is a left-wing group. They issued a study that gun thefts are up in the southern United States. They may or may not be, doesn’t matter. The end result of the study is, they want to increase storage laws and give penalties to the victims for not storing their guns properly and they make no mention of going after the criminals.
DANA LOESCH (NRA NATIONAL SPOKESPERSON): That's like shaming a rape survivor. It’s the exact same logic. How about this, how about they make tougher penalties for individuals who steal? Steal firearms. How about they have harsher punishment for those individuals who break the law? These individuals that they are seeking to punish haven’t broken the law. They have been victimized, as you accurately noted. So why in the world would they pass legislation that seeks to further victimize the already victims of these criminal acts?
The report Stinchfield mentions is “Stolen Guns in America” by the Center for American Progress, which analyzes the threat to safety stolen that firearms create in communities. If these pro-gun folk are the so-called “good guys” with guns, why don’t they care when “bad guys” steal their guns to commit crimes? Probably because they really want to play down this problem, which is considerably more serious than they’d like you to believe.
Gun theft is not a minor problem in the United States. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during the four-year period from 2012 to 2015, nearly half a billion dollars worth of guns were stolen from individuals nationwide, amounting to an estimated 1.2 million guns.3Twenty-two thousand guns were stolen from gun stores during this same period.4 A gun is stolen in the U.S. every two minutes.5
An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times says we can create laws to address this problem that’d provide more government oversight and incentives for individual gun owners to take security measures with their guns.
Like most aspects of gun violence in the U.S., there is much more that could be done to address this problem. Amazingly, under current law, the ATF cannot require gun dealers to even lock their doors. Certainly most gun store owners — like any other business owner who wants to make a profit — have implemented security measures to protect against theft. However, gun theft numbers make clear that we cannot solely rely on the industry to police itself.
...There’s also more that policymakers could do to help prevent thefts from individual gun owners. Gun owners should be required — or at the very least incentivized — to lock up their guns when they are not in use. Not only would this measure help prevent theft, but it would also greatly reduce the risk of accidental shootings by curious children who find guns in their homes.
Loesch probably made the comparison because she doesn’t really care about rape victims. If she did, she’d know that victims are not at fault for their attacks—it’s the responsibility of the rapist. When it comes to gun storage, the gun owner is making a decision to not store their very dangerous equipment. No one is forcing them to keep their guns unsecured; in fact, no one is forcing them to have a gun at all. Survivors of assault are at risk no matter where they are—all it takes is a rapist in the same room who decides to attack.
The gun owners aren’t the victims here; it’s the people who live around individuals who whining about doing their part to keep their communities safer with responsible gun ownership.