The Problem with Blaming the Gun: A Conservative Defence of Firearm Rights, By John Steele and Chris Knight (Florida)
Jay Rogers' March 8, 2026, piece in American Thinker delivers a sharp, data-driven takedown of the Leftist impulse to scapegoat firearms — especially "assault weapons" — for America's violence problems. Titled "The Problem with Blaming the Gun," the article labels such rhetoric not merely disingenuous but outright dangerous, as it misdirects focus from real threats like terrorism, gang activity, and surging Left-wing political violence toward policies that disarm law-abiding citizens while leaving criminals untouched.
Rogers opens with the Austin bar shooting by a Senegalese jihadist sporting an Iranian flag amid escalating U.S.-Iran tensions —a clear act of wartime domestic terrorism. Yet, within the same news cycle, the political Left pivoted to demands for assault weapons bans. Rogers calls this "the single stupidest, most intellectually dishonest, most politically cowardly response possible to a wartime domestic terrorist attack." The real issue wasn't the gun; it was radicalisation and ideological extremism. Armed police ultimately resolved the incident, underscoring the value of "good guys with guns."
The core of Rogers' argument is statistical honesty over emotional scare-mongering. Drawing from 2023 FBI data, he notes that handguns accounted for 7,159 homicides, while rifles (the category encompassing so-called assault weapons) were linked to just 323 — under 3% of firearm murders. Knives and blunt objects/fists often kill more people annually than rifles do. An NIH study pegs assault-type rifles at 2-12% of crime guns (most under 7%), and analyses from the Crime Prevention Research Center show rifle involvement in murders hovered around 4-5% before, during, and after the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, proving such restrictions had negligible impact.
A 2016 DOJ survey of prison inmates drives home the point: only 2% of criminals obtained their guns legally from retail sources; 79% acquired them illegally. Gun control debates obsess over the tiny fraction involving lawful owners while ignoring the vast black-market reality that new laws won't touch.
Mass shootings receive similar scrutiny. The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) inflates figures by counting any incident with four or more shot — including gang drive-bys and drug-related violence — as a "mass shooting" (e.g., 58 in the first 63 days of one recent period). Rogers contrasts this with stricter definitions, like the Violence Prevention Project's (four or more killed in a public place, excluding gang/criminal nexus), which yielded only 17 such events in 2025 — the lowest since 2006 per AP/USA Today/Northeastern tracking. Even under GVA's broad count, mass shooting deaths represented just 2.8% of all shooting fatalities in Q3 2025. The numbers simply don't justify blanket restrictions on semi-automatic rifles used overwhelmingly for lawful purposes like hunting, sport, and self-defence.
Rogers, with 35 years in financial risk management, applies analytical rigour: threats must be categorized correctly — jihadist terrorism, gang/narcotics violence, and ideologically driven attacks require distinct responses. Conflating them all under "gun violence" leads to bad policy. He highlights a disturbing trend ignored by the Left: CSIS data shows Left-wing terrorist attacks and plots hitting a 30-year high in 2025 (averaging 4.0 per year from 2016-2024, up from 0.6 in 1994-2000). Examples include the 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare's CEO (celebrated in some Leftist circles), the 2025 killings of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and conservative figure Charlie Kirk, assaults on ICE facilities, arson at the Pennsylvania governor's residence, and Molotov/knife attacks on officials labelled "Nazis." Yet the media and politicians refuse equivalent scrutiny, pivoting instead to firearm restrictions — a "protection racket" that shields one side's extremism.
From a conservative standpoint, this pattern reveals the deeper issue: gun control isn't about safety; it's about control. The Second Amendment exists precisely because the Founders understood that an armed populace deters tyranny and enables self-defence. Over 100 million law-abiding gun owners in America aren't the problem — they're part of the solution. When seconds count, police are minutes away; a permitted, trained citizen can be the difference, as Austin demonstrated.
Blaming the gun distracts from root causes: porous borders enabling radicalization, soft-on-crime policies fuelling gang violence, and a cultural refusal to confront rising domestic threats from the Left. Rogers calls for honest distinctions in statistics (separating gang/narco incidents from public mass killings), monitoring post-naturalisation radicalization under FISA with safeguards, treating Left-wing violence with the same gravity as Right-wing, and passing national concealed-carry reciprocity (H.R. 38/S. 65) to empower citizens nationwide.
The takeaway is clear: firearms don't commit crimes — people do, often ideologically motivated or criminally inclined. Restrictions that burden the law-abiding while criminals evade them aren't solutions; they're theatre. True risk management demands addressing threats head-on, not disarming the innocent. As Rogers concludes, America must be "forged, not fragile." That resilience comes from honest analysis, robust self-defense rights, and the courage to name dangers without fear of political backlash. The gun isn't the villain — dishonest Leftist narratives are.
The same general argument applies to Australia and the rest of the West, too.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/03/the_problem_with_blaming_the_gun.html
