The Salon writer with the pretentious name “Lucian K. Truscott IV” is on his high horse again telling you that you don’t need that gun. He also claims that “Guns will not save the day — they will kill us.” And we have waaay too many of them.

In case you’ve never heard of this pompous progressive windbag, allow me to fill you in. Lucian K. Truscott IV serves as the gun expert for leftwing Salon, since he graduated from West Point. After all, that’s the first thing you read in his bio, so that really gives him some cred. Now you may wonder how somehow with so little regard for the Second Amendment got into that venerable military academy. It’s because he’s descended from Truscott’s who served as Army officers in wartime, so Lucian IV must’ve gotten a legacy appointment. Frankly, I think his appointment should’ve gone to someone who actually loves the Constitution, but I digress.

Anyway, he begins by reminding us that there are more guns than citizens in the United States. In fact, he says. . .

“If every single person in the United States possessed a gun, including babies, elderly people and the infirm — even including those hospitalized and on their deathbeds — there would still be 67 million guns left over.  Sixty-seven million.”

In other words, you don’t need that many guns. Progressive elitists like Salon will tell you what you can own, got that, peasant?

Credit: giphy.com.

Truscott tries to smash the notion that “a good guy with a gun” will stop the baddies. He calls it the “NRA’s favorite myth,” and then wrings his hands over the fact that 31 states allow people to open carry without a license. In addition, all states allow some form of conceal carry.

OMG, will someone make it stop!

But, says Truscott, no good-guy-with-a-gun stopped any of the “19 mass shootings” this year. He also points out that cops stopped the shooters in Dayton and Odessa, TX, not civilians.

Truscott even threw some shade at Glen Oakley, a hero of the El Paso WalMart shooting. Oakley, an active duty Army specialist, ran towards the WalMart and and gunshots.

But then he ran away, says Mr. Salon:

“An armed U.S. soldier with a concealed carry license in El Paso drew his weapon before deciding to shuttle fleeing children safely out of the shopping mall.”

Never mind that employees had already brought down the metal security doors. Oakley then grabbed kids in a play area, who, by the way, were not fleeing at the time, but frozen with fear. Moreover, Oakley later told a reporter that he wished he could’ve done more.

Truscott has a lot of fellow travelers who also maintain that meh, your good guy with a gun won’t do squat during a shooting. In 2016, Harvard Political Review also pushed that canard, although their article devolved into trashing the NRA rather than providing data. Two years later, a writer for Psychology Today thought we could go the full Marianne Williamson route and use love:

“It can be refuted by a counterexample in which a bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good woman with a Bible, a Christian book, and the virtues of faith, hope, and love.”

That would work really well for a meth-head who was out “hunting humans,” a là the Dayton shooter.

But wait! In 2017, Stanford analyzed 37 years of data and successfully debunked the “good guy with a gun” theory. It’s science, people!

Liberal writers from Vice, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and Snopes cheered. And there was great rejoicing in the Land of Media Progs, even though this study was not published.

But hold on — Crime Prevention Research Center took apart the Stanford study, calling it “flawed and misleading.” Moreover the CPRC noted a published paper that refuted the Stanford results. This report called the Stanford report “fragile and most likely incorrect.”

The fact is — no one knows how they’ll react to a crazy person with a gun. Plus every incident is unique. And even if someone fires back at a shooter, the results won’t be pretty.

But there are many times when the good guy with the gun stopped the baddie.

That happened near my home in Kansas City when a gunman entered a local Costco, waving his pistol. An off-duty cop took him out, and no one died — except for the gunman. You can watch the events on surveillance camera from this news report.

Now Truscott and his fellow Salon travelers would argue, “Yeah, but an off-duty cop shot the guy! He knew how to handle a gun!”

And no one else does?

Now if Truscott and his fellow gun-haters had their way, would that cop have been able to carry his weapon into the store, anyway? After all, he was off-duty. But the rest of us should be able to protect ourselves, too. Why should an off-duty police officer have any more rights than the rest of us?

Besides, as progressives like to bloviate, If it saves just one life, right?

Featured image: Clinger Holsters/flicker/cropped/CC BY-ND 2.0.