American Gun Ownership: The Positive Impacts of Law-Abiding Citizens Owning Firearms

In this week's episode, Sam and Dave discuss the positive impacts of law-abiding citizens owning firearms. It’s no secret that mainstream press coverage of gun ownership in the United States tends to be in favor of gun control. Journalists focus on how many people are killed by guns, how many children get their hands on improperly stored firearms, and how many deranged individuals go on shooting sprees.

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This anti-gun news bias is widespread among urban elites who have very little personal experience with guns and yet have no problem opining about the subject for influential newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post. Despite this bias, gun ownership has significant positive impacts on American society that often go unreported.

There is actually a sort of semi-official policy regarding this: “if it bleeds, it leads.” This means, in short, that the more death and destruction, the higher up on the news the story goes. Nothing moves units quite like tales of gun violence, so the media complies by wallpapering coverage of tragic events like mass shootings, despite the fact that such events are rare and comprise a small number of the total deaths in America.

What’s more, the media almost never reports on context when it comes to mass shootings, such as the well-documented connection between prescription antidepressants and shootings. Even when SSRIs are involved, there is a serious problem with mental healthcare in the United States, which has one of the lowest rates of involuntary commitment in the world. In other words, it is incredibly difficult to get someone who is clearly a danger to themselves and others locked away even for a short observation period.

Of course, other, more tangential causes like the breakdown of civil society and the destruction of the family are never even considered.

Before proceeding further, it is finally worth pointing out that despite any talk of “weapons of war on our streets” by politicians and the media, it is primarily the police who hold such “weapons of war.” The possession of heavy weapons by local, state and federal law enforcement is not an abstract or philosophical question: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms alone offers a number of examples of the deadly consequences of a heavily armed police force.

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