In another weak and pathetic attempt to blame the firearms industry, Dickinson starts his argument by again speculating on the industry's marketing strategy. When I said it was weak and pathetic, I meant exactly that. You see, Dickinson, along with the rabidly hoplophobic left, all think that firearm manufacturers and industry leaders are the root cause of mass murders with firearms and that they must be held to account because they sell "massacre-ready weapons" to the public.

The modern firearms industry’s mission couldn’t be clearer: profiting off the sales of weapons that can turn lone shooters into mass killers, or armed discontents into a homeland security threat. 

Evil people will beget evil actions, and they will use whatever tool they can to necessitate said actions. Whether they use a gun, bomb, vehicle, knife, or a combination of them, they will use what they can to commit their evil deeds. This has been proven time and time again. After terrorists failed to bring down the World Trade Towers in 1993 with a truck bomb, eight years later, they decided to crash planes into the towers to knock them down. The terrorists used box cutters and knives to gain control of the planes, no guns or bombs. Yes, I will readily admit that guns make it easier to commit mass murder, but any gun, with the exception of a single-action or muzzle-loaded firearm, can accomplish this. 

But going back to Dickinson's weak argument that the gun companies are responsible, this argument suggests that there is malicious intent by manufacturers and gun dealers to arm the public so they can commit mass murder. This is not only flatly ridiculous but completely without merit or substance. But let us go down that rabbit hole, shall we? As it stands, in 2021, firearms were used in 48,830 deaths in the United States. 

Let's break down the firearm deaths first. These numbers and percentages are very important, as they alone discredit Dickinson's assertion that gun companies are solely responsible for gun deaths or mass murders.

In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).

But there is also a number that Dickinson and the left continuously ignore and even suppress: the number of times a gun is used in self-defense or to stop a crime. According to a CDC-commissioned study, Americans use firearms in self-defense anywhere between 60,000 to 2.5 million times every year. But Dickinson and his hoplophobic friends refused to tell you this because they don't believe in it. 

"[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again," Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to the CDC in one of the emails. "It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value — even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions."

When it comes to automobiles and deaths caused by or with a motor vehicle, 42,939 deaths in the United States are caused by motor vehicles annually. Now the number of how many people were killed via an intentional use of a vehicle to do so is not reported. However, there have been plenty of incidents where people use their vehicles in road-rage-style attacks on others, as we saw in November of 2021 when Darrell Brooks used his vehicle to ram 68 people in a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and wounding 62 more. 

With almost 43,000 deaths annually, we don't hear anyone talking about how the car manufacturers are responsible unless there is a defect in their vehicle. You don't see activists going after Ford after the Wisconsin murderer used a Ford Escape SUV, do you? There isn't a law that protects automobile manufacturers from lawsuits when their vehicles are used in a crime, even though almost 43,000 people are killed with them. Why is that? Because unless they intentionally designed a car to fail, they made their products in good faith. This means that if some crazy person uses a Ford Explorer, for example, to plow into a crowd and kill as many people as they can, Ford can't be sued because they didn't cause the incident. 

That same concept should apply to firearms manufacturers, but the crazy hoplophobes on the left don't think like that. 

If Ruger makes a gun, they market it for everyone. Not all guns are for the same purpose, either. Some shotguns and rifles are strictly for hunting, so they're marketed for hunters. Some are made with the competition shooter in mind, so they're designed with features to aid in that endeavor and marketed as such. And some are made for defensive uses, and again, they are marketed for it. 

What the left continues to ignore is that we are living in very odd times. Crime is rampant all across the country, and we are seeing a government that continues to show us that it cannot be trusted to act in our best interest or protect us at all times, or at all even. With the border in disarray, and terrorists attempting to exploit it, the attacks on Israel by Hamas, why can't gun makers market their guns for that? 

In the advisory, which is marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," the agency says that people in the U.S. who are sympathetic to Hamas and are attempting to join the group in the area of the war may attempt to leave through the southern border. In addition to this, they further warn that foreign fighters associated or sympathetic with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad will most likely attempt to conceal their travel or transit to the United States by coming through the open southern borders. 

All that and more is the very reason why we have a Second Amendment. We don't have it to further hunting season or sporting events. Any argument to the contrary is made without any knowledge or understanding. As I wrote about before regarding  "weapons of war," we do have not just the need but the right to have these weapons and more. 

Let me set something straight right now; weapons of war are the exact thing the Founders were talking about when the Second Amendment was drafted. As I have attested to in previous articles, I look to our past and research what the Founders who built our cherished Republic wanted and their reasons for drafting such an important amendment to our Constitution. In his 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, Thomas Jefferson stated:

 What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.

Furthermore, Jefferson included a passage from Cesare Beccaria in his essay on crimes and punishments in his "Legal Commonplace Book." It reads:

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.

The leftists and hoplophobic writers at Rolling Stone, like Tim Dickinson, are all just gaslighting us and the gun companies in an attempt to to make us look like the bad guys and the "terrorists" they all say we are. Ultimately, they will fail because we use facts in our arguments — and the facts do not care about your feelings.