As Always, Left-Leaning Media Gets Its Gun Coverage Wrong

I remember being a kid and my father taking me shooting. I remember every single time he took me, as a matter of fact. We didn’t generally go to the same place all that often, bounding around between a friend’s farmland or other patches of dirt with enough of an embankment to make it safe, though we did use a traditional range a time or two.

However, my education about firearms started much earlier, with Dad telling me the rules for safely handling a firearm at an early age.

He even required me to follow them with my toy guns.

Yet according to Mother Jones, the millions of gun owners who learned as I did don’t count as having received real training. It’s typical moronic propaganda from the uninformed anti-gun Left, and the good folks over at The Federalist Papers rip Mother Jones’ arguments apart because, well, it’s easy:

Misleading information about gun owners and gun ownership seems to be a standard operating procedure for some on the Left. Mother Jones is just the latest to hop aboard the irresponsible reporting train.

The left-wing outlet ran a truly over-sensational story about firearms training in the United States. In their story, the headline reads, “Only 3 In 5 Gun Owners Have Received Firearms Training.” However, as Jenn Jacques of Bearing Arms points out, the first sentences in the story actually manages to ironically disprove the point:

Forty percent of America’s gun owners have not received any formal firearms training.

There’s one word in that sentence that completely changes the meaning of the claim. Can you guess what it is?

It’s the operative word formal. While it may be true that some American gun owners have not received extensive formal training on their guns, like in a classroom setting with highly certified instructors, that does not mean that they are completely untrained and illiterate in firearms safety and operations.

Many people do informal kinds of training, like parents with their children or one family member with another family member. A parent in a given household may have had many hours of formal training in a classroom and live-fire environment, and then passed that information on to others in their family.

Precisely.

While I have received formal firearm training due to having served in the military, I didn’t actually learn anything during the Navy’s basic pistol shooting course. Because I had already learned all of it from my father — a Vietnam veteran and police officer.

He learned how to handle a firearm from his father, a Freewill Baptist minister.

The Left likes to attack gun owners as “untrained,” but we’re actually obsessed with proper firearm handling. Had Mother Jones’ writer bothered to spend any time among lawful gun owners, he wouldn’t have written the article, because he would have quickly learned that we don’t tolerate untrained owners remaining that way. The first advice anyone gets when they’re thinking of buying a gun is to get some training. Many of us offer to teach folks informally for no money, because we want the safe handling of firearms to continue as the norm rather than the exception. Ignorance of safe gun handling practices isn’t accepted as an excuse, either.

Leftists try to paint gun owners as dangerous people who threaten everyone’s safety with their weapons, and believe only government can protect us. But we shooters tend to do that all on our own without any help from Big Government, because we understand no government can promise our safety.