CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, January 6, 2020

Gun control: Democracy dies in censorship

When West Freeway Church of Christ deacon, Jack Wilson, put down a would-be mass killer with his handgun, the left-leaning mainstream media (MSM) were incredulous. What? How could this be that some church goers worship while armed? The MSM opined: Armed self-defense or the armed defense of others must be the exception and not the rule.

Thus, the question arises: Just how often do law-abiding gun owners engage in armed self-defense or in the defense of others? The Dan Bongino Report at www.bongino.com provides a summary of several studies focused on that very question.

The studies, which are largely unknown to the general public, reveal the use of firearms by law-abiding citizen for self-defense happens with stunning frequency. But this lack of public awareness is not entirely due to MSM censorship. Fear of potential legal consequences causes an unknown number of gun owners who have had to defend themselves with firearms to remain silent.

Nevertheless, the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, which relies solely on self-reported firearms incidents, says firearms are used for self-defense over 100,000 times each year. A 1994 survey conducted by the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), found homeowners use firearms for self-defense over 500,000 times per year. A more recent 2013 study by the CDC estimates that defensive uses of firearms by victims occurs within a low range of 500,000 to a high range of three million times per year.

An interesting perspective on self-defense gun use is found in a 2007 study done by David Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen in which they found: “Firearms are used over half a million times a year against home invasion burglars; usually the burglar flees as soon as he finds out that the victim is armed, and no shot is ever fired,” and “Annually, three to six times as many victims successfully defend themselves with handguns as criminals misuse handguns (thus handguns do up to six times more good than harm).”

Bet you never saw that on CNN or MSNBC or on the big-three broadcast TV networks. And you would probably never hear that reported on National Public Radio (NPR).

Each monthly issue of the National Rifle Association’s flagship publication, The American Rifleman, carries a full page of human-interest stories about homeowners or business owners who have used firearms to protect their families, themselves, and/or their premises from would-be home invaders or robbers. The outcomes range from the attacker(s) being scared away by warning shots to the attacker(s) being killed or wounded.

Human-interest stories used to be a staple of good reporting; however, that does not seem to be the case when it comes to the beneficial uses of firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens. And whatever happened to "irony" as a staple of good journalism? The law-abiding Jack Wilson was in legal possession of the handgun that killed the evil-doer. Ironically, Thomas Kinnunen’s long criminal record should have prevented Kinnunen from possessing the firearm he used to kill two innocent worshipers.

One method of propaganda is censorship. Apparently, the gun-control propagandists are using censorship by the MSM as a way to prevent the general public from knowing that taking firearms away from law-abiding citizens does more harm than good.

©2020. William Hamilton.

William Hamilton is a laureate of the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Nebraska Aviation Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame. Dr. Hamilton’s Formula for Failure in Vietnam: The Folly of Limited Warfare was published on November 20, 2019. To order, call toll free: (800) 253-2187 Or, go to Amazon.com.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com