Democratic Party politicians and urban news media reporters advance their anti-gun agenda by the phrases and emphasis they use to comment on tragedies in which criminals use firearms.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo, commenting on September 7, 2015 on the tragic shooting of his colleague at a parade in New York City, said: “I don’t know what it’s go­ing to take this na­tion to come to its senses with gun vi­o­lence.”  Why does he not say we have to stop people from violently attacking or murdering other people?

On August 26, 2015, Hillary Clinton, commenting on the murders in Virginia in which a reporter and cameraman were fatally shot on live television, said: "We have got to do something about gun violence in America."  Why does not she say we have to prevent mentally ill people from gaining access to lethal instruments and killing innocent people?

When a criminal uses a firearm to commit a crime in America, politicians, news media people, and others with disdain for the view that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees to Americans an individual right to own firearms call it gun violence.  The criminal is de-emphasized and is absolved substantially of responsibility, and the responsibility is placed on an inanimate piece of hardware – a gun – as the violent perpetrator of the crime.

Yet when a criminal uses any instrument or device other than a gun to commit a crime, we blame the criminal – we assign responsibility for the horrid act to the animated, deliberately acting individual who perpetrated the crime and not to the inanimate piece of hardware used as the tool to commit the crime.

When one person attacks another person with a knife, do we hear from anti-gun politicians and do we read in anti-gun news media about “knife violence”?  Or does the news story read "a knife-wielding attacker"?  The report focuses on the perpetrator and not on the instrument employed.

On June 20, 2015, Reuters reported "3 killed as car plows through crowd in Austria, driver goes on 'stabbing spree.'"  The article continues: “[a] man deliberately drove his van into a crowd and then reportedly went on to stab people.”  And finally, "[a] killer used his car as a weapon and deliberately ran people down on a rampage."

The author of the report assigned blame to a man who deliberately used his vehicle as a weapon and went on to stab people.  There is no description of “automobile violence” or of “knife violence.”  There is no twisting of responsibility from the human perpetrator to the piece of hardware he happened to use to commit his mayhem.  There is no absolution of responsibility for the criminal who knowingly and deliberately committed the crime.

When a terrorist uses a bomb to kill innocent people in an outdoor market, do we hear anti-gun politicians and anti-gun news media people decrying “explosives violence”?  No, we hear them blaming the terrorist – a consciously and deliberately acting individual human being – for the attack, and not an inanimate object. 

Why do anti-gun politicians and anti-gun media people treat all instruments and tools of attackers except for firearms in one category and characterize them in one way, and treat firearms alone in a separate category and characterize them a different way?  From where does this intellectual dishonesty emanate?

My answer simply is that the intellectual dishonesty is knowing and intentional.  Politicians and news media people who reject the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming that the Second Amendment guarantees to Americans an individual right to own firearms, and who do not want people to own firearms, deliberately focus on the inanimate piece of hardware as the villain, and not on the conscious, acting criminal, to further their anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment agenda.  Such people use tragedies as fortuitous opportunities to subtly advance their agenda to turn public opinion against law-abiding gun ownership in America.

Ron Resnick is an expert on the constitutional law of the Second Amendment.  See Ronald S. Resnick, "Private Arms as the Palladium of Liberty: The Meaning of the Second Amendment," U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 77 (1999).