Why are some liberals laughing because a tiny fraction of concerned citizens injured themselves after attending gun shows to educate themselves on self-defense and firearm safety? Rallies held to honor the first annual Gun Appreciation Day resulted in five people being injured in three incidents.
In Raleigh, at the Dixie Gun and Knife Show, three people were hurt when a rifle discharged by accident.
At a state fairground in Indianapolis, a man shot himself in the hand, and in a Cleveland suburb a man accidentally shot his friend.
In response to the incidents, liberal Tweeters posted such non sequiturs as: "5 shot at 3 separate gun shows on #GunAppreciationDay.
No wonder the NRA doesn't want the gov't keeping statistics!" Actually, how about having the government keep statistics on the hundreds of thousands of crimes thwarted each year by armed citizens brandishing handguns to ward off attackers, instead of just compiling numbers on the crimes committed using guns? "Did you guys hear that nobody was shot at everywhere they didn't have guns? #GunAppreciationDay!" That "everywhere" excludes, of course, "gun-free zones" where law-abiding citizens conscientiously refrain from carrying firearms, but amoral criminals do not.
And nobody was shot in millions of places where law-abiding citizens had guns for protection.
"7 people shot at #gunappreciationday gun shows.
So much for [the] theory that more guns stop the shooting.
" That last was from Bill Maher, who apparently didn't get the memo that guns stop shootings when used in self-defense, not when accidentally discharged after people gather to learn how to handle them to minimize such incidents in the future.
So five people injured at gun shows-all there voluntarily, all with non-critical injuries, in two cases shot by either the person holding the gun or a friend-out of dozens of events comprising tens of thousands of people.
I'd say that's a pretty good record.
How many people are injured at professional sporting events-either players, or maintenance staff moving heavy equipment or scaling high stadium walls, or rowdy fans? How many people are killed in automobile accidents every day? How many scuffles occur per 10,000 attendees at the average gangster rap concert or hip hop club? Why aren't liberals laughing about those? How about your typical Occupy Wall Street camp? The first month of the Occupy Wall Street movement in fall 2011 spawned shooting deaths in Oakland and Burlington; drug overdoses in Portland and Vancouver; additional deaths in Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Bloomington, and Oklahoma City; rapes and sexual assaults in multiple cities; violence against police in Berkeley and elsewhere; tuberculosis in Atlanta; and a charming new respiratory disease dubbed Zuccotti Lung.
As Jim Hoft calculated, your odds of surviving a tour in Iraq were greater than your odds of surviving an Occupy Wall Street camp.
If estimates of 50,000 or more attendees at Gun Appreciation Day rallies are accurate, then with five accidents, your risk of just being injured at a gun rally on Saturday were about as great as being mauled at a kitten nursery.
Did the left find it so funny when twentysomething women were being raped in Occupy pup tents or young protestors were overdosing or being murdered or catching frostbite or tuberculosis? Where are the media stories about eco-warriors marching into nature to live with wild animals and getting eaten, or living in trees and falling to their deaths? Are the dozens of environmentalist fatalities each year a wholesale indictment of environmentalism? How about the naïve activists who trek to the Middle East to lobby for Palestinians and end up getting themselves killed, or expose themselves to capture by the Taliban and end up getting Navy SEALS murdered? Are these incidents a reflection of the dangers of dovish foreign policy? People attended Gun Appreciation Day rallies because they don't trust gun control advocates who say they just want to enact a few harmless regulations, and then they'll stop.
Everyday Americans want to fortify themselves against a world in which the national crime rate approaches that of heavily gun-restricted locales like Chicago and Detroit.
The left drove scared Americans to gun events with their rhetoric, then cackled when a few people trying to learn to defend themselves suffered bloody injuries.
That should show you just how concerned they are about gun violence.
Why don't gun control advocates simply admit that they don't understand gun culture, then return to whatever pursuits they find more satisfying? Gun show attendees in Raleigh and Indianapolis and Cleveland are not about to get in the faces of Manhattan and San Francisco yuppies demanding that they buy guns, the way community organizers and union stooges rowdily and chaotically protest for the rest of us to capitulate to and subsidize their expensive demands.
Most Americans just want to be left alone, to take the risks they find appropriate and live the kinds of lives they find suitable for their families.
As one sensible Tweeter noted, "Funny how yesterday for #gunappreciationday there were no violent riots, only people exercising their right to assemble peacefully.
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