6 Things Gun Lovers and Haters Can Agree On

6 Gun Owners Aren't a Unified Group

You don't have to travel far on the Internet (or in the South) to find people defending the Second Amendment because it protects us from government tyranny. The basic idea is that, at some point in the perpetually imminent future, millions of Real Americans (TM) from across the nation will surge forth with their M16s and John Wayne commemorative six-shooters to take back this country from the twin demons of BIG BROTHER and YOUNG PEOPLE.

Faith in the ability of American gun owners to fight back against government tyranny is often expressed through image macros.

Thermopylae comes up a lot for two reasons: 1) Xerxes asked the Spartans to give up their weapons, and 2) Zack Snyder's 300 gives members of the "patriot" movement hard-ons that could burst a carbon-fiber condom. I've made a habit of correcting these macros whenever possible:

But there's a certain ring of logic to the premise: A vast army of patriotic gun owners might provide a check to the government. Forty-four million armed angry people (minimum) could threaten the military, even in this age of flying murderbots and boat-mounted lasers. Alas, this grand army of tyranny-hating middle-aged white dudes rests on one flimsy premise: the idea that "gun owners" are a unified block.

But gun owners are just about as divided as the general population. There's no silent, unified army lying in wait for Obama's mad campaign of moderate health-care reform to finally go one step too far. About 55 percent of Republicans own guns, as do 40 percent of Democrats. Oddly enough, this represents a high point in gun ownership among Democrats. Our soldiers tend to mirror the country: Half of them don't give a fuck about politics, and the other half split pretty evenly between the two parties.

Gun owners don't even agree on gun control: The NRA loudly opposes universal background checks, but the vast majority of actual people with guns sees no problems with making sure the dude buying a Glock doesn't have a restraining order or history of schizophrenia. Eighty-five percent of all households support universal background checks, including 74 percent of NRA households.

"OK," I hear you ask in the half-Swedish, half-deaf-Portuguese-woman voice I attribute to all my readers, "if most gun owners aren't hiding out in the woods shooting at cutouts of U.N. peacekeepers, why won't you let us ban assault weapons already? Those aren't useful for anything but war."

5 Assault Weapons Aren't the Devil

I own a semi-automatic version of the AK-47, and it's good for so many things that have zero relation to killing. It can cut down trees, disassemble old cars, and, in a pinch, help me hammer tent poles into the ground. It's like a Swiss Army Knife, but powered by explosions and Communism. You can even cook a goddamn omelet with one:

The legal definition of "assault weapon" is based primarily on things that could not ever possibly decrease gun crime. Most people assume that an "Assault Weapons Ban" must make the terrifying black rifles we're all most frightened of illegal. So this AR-15:

... would clearly be illegal in a world with the Assault Weapons Ban. You could assault the shit out of people with a weapon like that. But guess what? That gun is as legal as flamethrowers and thermite charges. In fact, it isn't legally an assault weapon at all. Meanwhile, this pile of ugly:

... IS an assault weapon. Not because it shoots more bullets, or bigger bullets, or even faster bullets. This bad boy has a collapsing stock and a pistol grip. More than one of these "evil" features turns your humble rifle into a murder-hungry assault rifle. Other terrifying features include "threaded barrels," "bayonet lugs," "foregrips," and a long list of features no one needs in order to commit extremely efficient murder.

Here's the reality: The top 10 guns used in violent crimes are nearly all revolvers or pistols. None of them are rifles, and only one is a shotgun. We tend to fear huge black rifles with giant army-style magazines, but those guns are used in a tiny minority of crimes. In fact, the average number of shots fired per weapon in a gunfight is between two and four. Gunfights are terrifying, and real bad guys are more likely to pop off a round or two at close range and then run like fuck, rather than reenact the shootout from Heat.

And if the anti-gun people can agree to stop banning shit like "foregrips" and "collapsing stocks," the pro-gun side should agree that ...

4 Self-Defense Is Less of a Factor Than Fun Is

Gun owners are defensive of their hobby, like many nerds are. If you're talking to someone who clearly thinks what you're doing is "weird," your brain kicks its Flimsy Justification Lobe into overdrive. Most gun owners claim they bought their weapons for self-defense. But if you were actually there at the gun show when Jimbo picked up his AK-47, you wouldn't have seen a hard-bitten desperado sizing up defense tools or a violent madman looking for a people-ender. You'd have seen a big kid forking over $700 because he wanted to do this:

Take a camera to Comic-Con and find somebody who just dropped $700 on a super-rare comic. Ask him why, and I guarantee his response will include the word "investment." People get embarrassed when they're called out for spending a shitload of money on toys. Of course, guns aren't comics, and no Spider-Man fan ever tried to justify his obsession via vigorous lobbying. The same isn't true for the NRA.

They never tire of citing that 2.5 million people each year use their guns to heroically fend off bad people via tiny controlled explosions. It's easily in the top three most commonly cited gun facts on bumper stickers:

There's a reason the NRA brings that "fact" up on a schedule more regular than a cranberry farmer's urinary tract. If it were true, the whole debate over gun control would be over. But here's where that number came from: A breathtakingly shitty criminologist did a phone poll of 5,000 people and asked how many of them had used a gun in self-defense. More than 1 percent claimed they had. This Michelangelo of conclusion-jumping extrapolated that to the national population (200 million at the time) and came up with 2.5 million.

These numbers came out in 1995, and they've been "coming out" on a yearly basis ever since. In reality, self-defense via firearm is incredibly uncommon, because very few Americans will ever need to defend themselves from a violent attacker. If you want to keep a gun at home as potential security for that unlikely day, fine. I certainly do. But don't pretend that gun is a guarantee of safety -- gun owners are actually at greater risk of homicide and suicide than the general population.

3 It's Important to Put Facts Before Fear-Mongering

This is a Barrett .50 caliber rifle. It can put a $5, 5.5-inch bullet through the engine block of an armored car from over a mile away, and it costs around $10,000. To hear the media tell it, this rich-person's toy is the scariest thing since box cutters met beards:

"Who needs a gun that is accurate to more than a mile, can down an airliner on takeoff or landing, and can penetrate steel plating? If you're the gun lobby and its friends in the firearms industry, the answer is simple: sportsmen! If you're law enforcement, the answer is equally simple: terrorists."

Holy shit, Huffington Post, thanks for that heads up. But is it actually possible for a 10-round rifle to shoot a moving commercial aircraft down? Hell no. The NYPD actually holds several Barrett .50 caliber rifles for use against hijacked aircraft ... on the ground. Flying aircraft are incredibly difficult to hit. In World War II, the .50 caliber machine guns used by the Air Force averaged 11,000-plus rounds per kill. Yes, shooting a taxiing plane would cause a terrific amount of chaos. But you know what other rifles are capable of piercing a commercial jet's armor? Most of them.

But hey! This weapon is accurate at more than a mile away. Of course, it's worth noting that the longest sniper kill in history was from 1.5 miles away. In fact, it took from the entire history of guns in war to 2008 before any sniper confirmed a kill from one mile out. The Barrett probably is the Rolls Royce of sniper rifles, but you'd need to be literally one of the finest marksmen in human history to hit a target more than a mile out. The Barrett's inventor put it best: Fifty governments buy this weapon. If it could shoot down a plane, one of them would have tried.

Guns can be frightening things, but they're much scarier when you don't know a damn thing about them. Life isn't like an RPG, where better weapons automatically make you scarier. Ten thousand dollars worth of snub-nosed .38 six shooters have more potential for havoc than one dude working himself into a hernia with a 30-pound rifle.

2 Gun Culture Isn't Limited to Old Rednecks

American exceptionalism is a key aspect of the gun control debate. Many firearm hobbyists see themselves as the only island of shooting culture in a sea of gun-grabbing Western nations. This is one of those weird areas where pro- and anti-gun people are already sorta in agreement. No matter whom you ask, we're an anomaly: either the lone country that lets people own murderguns ... or the one bastion of gun rights in a world gone mad. Either way, you don't see stores like this outside of America:

Actually, this picture is of a store in Hamburg, Germany. Gun owners there face a strict licensing system that nonetheless allows regular shooters to own the same deadly black rifles that Americans are considered crazy for selling. In fact, German demand for the AR-15 was so high, a company named Schmeisser started building their own version, "to Teutonic standards."

Germany actually places fourth on the world gun ownership charts. If shooting was the Billboard Top 100 list from 1969, they'd be the Rolling Stones. Like everything German, their gun laws are strict: High-caliber weapons are restricted from the young, and you have to prove you practice regularly to own any kind of firearm at all.

How about the pistol-packing hillbillies in this picture? They're Frenchmen, essentially hillbilly antimatter. Even in America, gun owners as a group don't (always) look like you'd expect. Women are the fastest-growing segment participating in shooting sports. And new gun buyers tend to be young, rather than ornery rascal-bound malcontents.

1 No One's Going to Take Your Guns

If I could go back in time and punch one person square in the dick, it'd be the dude who invented the term "false flag." It's definitely a thing that has happened in history, but our craziest armed people have hit upon the general concept as the explanation for every mass shooting in America.

In the wake of the tragic Newtown shooting, decent humans reacted with shock, horror, and crying so much our keyboards needed replacing. Meanwhile, the worst people in the country rushed to gun stores, buying up ammo and spare AR-15s in preparation for the inevitable wave of gun bannings. And, again, there's a fucked-up logic to it. If you think the government's about to ban something you like, it makes sense to stock up.

Here's the thing: For whatever reason, America doesn't work that way. Fifty-seven percent of us supported stricter gun control laws in the immediate wake of the Newtown shootings. But by the time March 2013 swung around, only 47 percent of Americans supported more gun control. If you spend time on the Huffington Post, it might seem like Democratic voters are at their anti-gunniest point in history. But from 1991 to 2011, Democrats became less likely to support gun control, with support dropping from 53 percent to 43 percent during that time.

So if all these shootings are "false flags" dreamt up by Obama to take our guns, they aren't working for shit. Oddly enough, gun control and gun violence are both at their lowest level in decades. In other words: The last time this few Americans were shooting each other, John F. Kennedy was president. It gets weirder. You know what else has been in free-fall for 50 years? The percentage of gun-owning Americans. So we have fewer gun owners, with the freedom to own whatever they want, and, crime-wise, we're living in Camelot 2.0. If we could just cut the number of gun owners in half and then arm them all with that rail rifle from Eraser, crime as we know it might come to an end.

Robert Evans heads up Cracked's personal experience team, as well as the workshop moderator team. If you'd like to give him money or you just have a whistle to blow, he can be reached here.

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