Posts on X.com are meant to be short and blunt. The word count on Twitter, which, of course, is now X, was famously 140 characters from 2006-2017, but then it was doubled and other exceptions were made. Still, even at 280 characters, it forces a certain unnuanced brevity that has a way of being quite revealing.
This is a lead into a post from the gun-control group Giffords on November 17.
“If Congress passes a national concealed carry mandate, anyone you see could have a gun on them—and the police would be powerless to protect you … ,” claims the post.
First, it is interesting that they refer to this proposed legislation as a mandate, as if it would become mandatory to carry a gun. But then, that is likely a slip from a person who has not properly learned to use the English language—a recent college graduate from an American university, perhaps.
Next, the claim that the “police would be powerless to protect you” juts out, as it is clumsy fearmongering. It is also a lie stacked on a few more lies.
Allow me to explain: First, there is a lie here in the insinuation that this isn’t already the case (and that it has been since the Founding period and before); actually, all a national reciprocity bill would do is prevent local and state governments from preventing law-abiding citizens to carry their Second Amendment freedoms with them as they move about in areas that allow lawful concealed carry. Such a federal law would not enable someone to carry concealed in places that have local bans or other restrictions.
Beneath this first big lie is the lie that jurisdictions that currently get out of the way of the peoples’ freedom—in states with constitutional-carry laws, for example—are more dangerous. They are not; in fact, each state that has passed such a law did so over the objections of gun-control activists claiming there would be “Wild West shootouts” in the streets if the law passed, but then, after such laws were passed, no such thing happened. Indeed, voters in these states have not demanded to repeal constitutional carry after it was made law.
Then there is the lie that the police would be left “powerless.” Americans have always been armed. It is in our nation’s DNA. This is not a new development. To believe this lie, one would have to believe that lawfully armed citizens are, by their very nature, criminal.
Finally, under this lie is perhaps the biggest lie of all: that we can’t trust American citizens with their individual rights. That is the basis for this false claim. Giffords, and other gun-control groups and the politicians that align with them, don’t trust we the people with our individual liberty.
There are, of course, mountains of data and lots of real experience showing that we can trust individuals with their right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, we must do so, as not doing so would be a complete reversal of the American system of government, which uses a bill of rights to restrict government from infringing on our basic liberties.
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