Salon Writer Says Our Guns Will Kill Us

Salon Writer Says Our Guns Will Kill Us

Salon Writer Says Our Guns Will Kill Us

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?

Salon

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. 

Written by

Kim is a pint-sized patriot who packs some big contradictions. She is a Baby Boomer who never became a hippie, an active Republican who first registered as a Democrat (okay, it was to help a sorority sister's father in his run for sheriff), and a devout Lutheran who practices yoga. Growing up in small-town Indiana, now living in the Kansas City metro, Kim is a conservative Midwestern gal whose heart is also in the Seattle area, where her eldest daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live. Kim is a working speech pathologist who left school system employment behind to subcontract to an agency, and has never looked back. She describes her conservatism as falling in the mold of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles. Don't know what they are? Google them!

14 Comments
  • Slow Joe Crow says:

    Any mention of Lucian K Truscott IV should include his general discharge from the Army under less than honorable circumstances for refusing an order to deploy to a combat zone. Salon probably left that out of his bio since it destroys his “I was in the military” argument from authority and shows him to be a physical and moral coward, since he both shirked war and used his family connection to avoid a court martial and military prison.

  • Scott says:

    Good post Kim, though as to the statement “The fact is — no one knows how they’ll react to a crazy person with a gun.” I would suggest that is not the case for those who have faced shooters / combat before.
    As to the clown Truscott, were his grandfather (of WWII fame alive today, I have no doubt he’d dick-punch, and then disown this used maxi-pad of a human being

  • GWB says:

    pompous progressive windbag
    Getting better, Kim. But you need to aim just a little lower and go for the full alliteration: “pompous progressive pussbag”. Something like that. Marta sets a high/low bar. 😉

    he graduated from West Point
    Well, so did an avowed communist who desired to destroy the Constitution, so their standards aren’t what they used to be.

    there would still be 67 million guns left over
    So… you’re saying there currently aren’t enough for two for every man, woman and child? We gotta up our game, people!

    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.
    Wow, that sounds a lot like someone with combat envy. “I would have been a big bad-ass and saved everyone!” Pfft.

    rather than providing data
    That makes it sound like Truscott did provide data. Here’s some of his “data”:
    despite FBI statistics that show conclusively that violent crime, and especially crimes involving firearms, is higher per capita in areas of the country with more guns
    And that’s utter bullshyt.
    Another, speaking of “good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun”:
    It’s the argument they have for all the so-called “open carry” laws that have been passed.
    No, the Constitution is the argument people make for open-carry laws.
    The “19 mass shootings in 2019” is also questionable, at best, since they count at least one falling out among a criminal gang, an armed robbery, and at least three domestic incidents. (None of those are normally counted as ‘mass shootings’ because they aren’t in public places with innocent victims unrelated to another crime.)
    (Oh, and the ABC article he uses for the basis of the number 19 captions a picture of a police officer standing watch outside the El Paso WalMart as “A police officer stands at attention during a mass shooting…”. *facepalm* )

    Oh, and here’s something from Truscott’s article, too. From a guy who evidently advocates that cops should have a monopoly on firearms:
    In Dayton, it took them 66 shots to bring down the killer. They fired 40 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition, 16 rounds of .233 millimeter ammunition, and one shotgun round. The killer took only 40 rounds to kill seven and wound 17 with his AR-15 style weapon.
    So, it took 56 rounds to take down one guy. Yet, almost all “good guy with a gun” stories have the good guy not even needing to reload. Evidently, Truscott (like most progs) wants the worst shooters to be the ones that are armed. There’s a sterling idea, exactly what I’ve come to expect of America’s elite.

    He also keeps conflating “open carry” with “good guy with a gun”. They don’t equate.
    Then he throws this doozy out there:
    yet in neither place was there a civilian “good guy with a gun” to stop the carnage
    Well, yeah, because you’re not allowed to carry and consume alcohol (the area in Dayton was full of restaurants and bars) in Ohio, and the mall (on whose property the WalMart resided) was a gun-free zone.
    And, of course, that’s also why we “gun nuts” want MORE guns in the hands of good citizens. *eyeroll*

    this study was not published
    Gee, I wonder why……………….

    And even if someone fires back at a shooter, the results won’t be pretty.
    Actually, I don’t know of any civilian who has shot innocent bystanders, much less to the extent that police officers tend to.

    “Yeah, but an off-duty cop shot the guy! He knew how to handle a gun!”
    O. M. G. Go find my numerous comments on VG about how crappy cops are at shooting bad guys! (And his own statement, above.) Diallo, the rogue cop in CA, lots of NYC and LA bits, the ones who shot the lady hostage, the ones who poured hundreds of rounds into cars – and didn’t kill those inside. The list is YUGE of cops in general being VERY. BAD, SHOOTERS.

    This guy is a decent writer, in that he writes English decently, and manages to construct his story so you reach the conclusion he desires you to reach. But that AIN’T journalism.

    (Sorry for the voluminous spewing, but this kind of abject prevarication in the service of removing the rights of free citizens just chaps my ass.)

    • GWB says:

      So, it took 56 rounds to take down one guy.
      Woops. 57.

      And he basically says that civilians can’t do better. Despite demonstrating regularly that they can.
      (He actually makes the argument by stating the bad guy WAS a better shot. Then says civilians can’t do better. WTF? Do you even read yourself, bro?)

  • Scott says:

    “16 rounds of .233 millimeter ammunition” .. i didn’t read that part… does this clown even proofread his crap, or is he actually that stupid? If you convert that to inches, it would be 0.008779528, or roughly twice the diameter of a human hair… What kind of a window liking moron leftist ( I know, I repeat myself) doesn’t even ensure that what they’re saying has some bearing on reality. the ammunition it .223 CALIBER not MM, that would be .223 inches, a YUUUGE difference.. one more reason to discount everything this scum of the earth vomits out of his pie hole.

  • Codex says:

    there would still be 67 million guns left over

    So… you’re saying there currently aren’t enough for two for every man, woman and child? We gotta up our game, people!

    “One is none” and “If you haven’t got a backup you haven’t got a plan.”

    My husband’s idea is that any private location that decides to be any form of [law-abiding] Gun Free, must have a public record of who finalized the decision (including any government officials), as well as being financially responsible for the safety of those who enter it. If despite any and all precautions, injury or death results from an attack on the premises, they are financially liable for all medical, funeral, and care costs. The gun-free decision maker is immediately liable for criminal negligence.

    Anyone know a lawyer who can write this up as an initiative?

  • GWB says:

    And NOT from Truscott….
    John Lott has a video that John Stossel tweets. In it, at the 50 second mark, a clip from Ransom has the one character say “In my experience, the problem with carrying a gun is that, eventually, it will go off.”

    Yes, these people are THAT stupid.
    (The video is full of other idiotic pronouncements about firearms from Hollywood writers. Watch the whole thing, even Lott is a terrible speaker.)

  • Formerly known as Skeptic says:

    I have also seen claims that when there are “Good guys with guns” around, attacks are often stopped with less than four casualties, thus causing that incident to NOT show up on the mass casualty statistics. This is generally backed up with a couple examples, but I cannot vouch for the overall impact of this effect on the stats. Sounds reasonable to me though.

  • Jim says:

    “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!’ ”
    Maybe. While not a cop myself, I know a fair number of them and have worked with them on a charity pistol match. Cops generally seem to fall into two groups, the gun guys, and some of those are VERY good, and the guys who only fire their weapons when they have to qualify. I wish more fell into the first group, but they seem to be a minority.

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