Ricochet: A Book Review-ish

Teeth Gnashing & Name Calling Disguised as Productive Discussion

About four weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I received a message here on Substack that was sent to my 2A Cops related account. It was from the Deputy Director of Publicity of Atria Books, which is part of Simon and Schuster Publishing. She asked if I had any interest in previewing a book written by a NY Times writer named Mike McIntire and the book was about “common sense gun control.”

Before responding, I double checked the “About” page here on this website to make sure it had not been hacked. Nope, it clearly states the following:

2A Cops is a news, opinion and gear review website run by cops, both retired and active duty, who support the rights of private citizens to own guns, even what some people see as scary guns such as "assault weapons."

Cops have the unique perspective of seeing what difference a gun in the hand of an intended victim can make. That is why we strongly support the 2nd amendment.

Seeing as I feel it is important to know your enemy, I said I would appreciate the opportunity to preview the book. She had a copy sent to me free of charge telling me that it was “a timely and important book.”

While I waited for the book to arrive, I did some research about the author. I read some of his articles that I found online and I got exactly what I expected to get knowing he was a writer for the NY Times. Needless to say, he is not a gun rights advocate.

To Read, Or Not To Read

The book arrived and I sat down planning to read the whole book. Suspecting I might differ with the author on some points, I kept a pen and highlighter nearby.

Still, I had some hope that McIntire might approach this book from an objective, level headed perspective. After all, if one is attempting to engage the reader, or hoping to influence the reader’s opinions, it would make sense to try and appeal to a broader audience.

My hope was quickly dashed. By page two, McIntire was already deriding gun owners by suggesting they “fetishize” firearms.

Ironically, this claim of gun owners fetishizing guns immediately followed him talking about a strange, emotional reaction he had as a child the first time his father took him shooting with a .22 caliber rifle. In that very same paragraph, he talks about shooting bottles out on public land.

Perfect. He was taught at a young age to be an irresponsible gun owner that screws up public land by shooting/breaking glass bottles… Fantastic!

A few paragraphs later, he talks about a time when he was a teenager and his parents were away from home, he dug out his dad’s hunting rifle chambered in .30-06. He opened a window and fired a round off into “the woods” behind their home. He clearly knew he should not have done it because he talks about disposing of the spent shell and putting the gun back.

I too grew up in a house with guns. My father took me shooting at a young age. I have had my own rifle since the age of 12, and I kept it in my room. I never had a remotely similar reaction to shooting a gun like the one he describes, and I absolutely never was as irresponsible as him, cranking off a round from inside my home into God only knows what.

Seriously guy? I can already see the problem part of the equation here, and it isn’t the guns…

By page three, he is blaming gun retailers for “gun violence” while spewing nonsensical, easily disproven garbage about how easy it is to buy a gun, saying they have been “making firearms nearly as easy to acquire as an iPhone.”

Just to disprove his insanely stupid claim, click here and you can have an iPhone delivered to your house within hours.

For anyone who has never bought a gun and is uneducated on the process, buying a gun is nothing like buying a phone.

To legally buy a gun from a retailer, you must provide valid ID, have proof of residency, fill out a federal form 4473, have a background check run through the FBI and you have to pass that background check. All of that is the minimum process in the freest of states. In states like CA, there are abundant other hurdles that also must be met.

Only a liar or someone who has never purchased a gun would attempt to compare the two processes.

As he continues his derision of gun retailers and owners, using his recklessness as evidence, he throws out the practically mandatory disclaimer, telling the reader that he is a gun owner. That way the reader who knows nothing about guns will know he knows what he is talking about.

Put On Your Waders…

At this point, he really goes off the deep end.

“What I have never understood, however, is our particular cognitive dissonance toward these things. We idolize guns and the power they confer, while at the same time blithely tuning out the carnage wrought: forty thousand dead each year, at least one mass shooting a day, and gunshots the leading cause of death among children.”

First of all, who the F is we? I am a bigtime gun guy. I own a bunch of guns, I work in a gun store, I write about guns, I make gun videos, I run this very blog about guns. I do not remotely “idolize guns,” no more than I idolize other things I enjoy, such as cars and motorcycles.

This fetishizing and idolizing of guns is something that exists solely in the minds of anti-gun people. Those very same people are the ones who call gun owners “ammo sexuals” and constantly bring penis size into conversations about guns. They attribute some sort of overly emotional, sexual attraction to firearms that does not exist in any place other than their minds.

Beyond that, I need to address this “carnage” that he so casually threw out there. I know why he thinks he is correct. Those are the talking points that people who push for gun control constantly recite. It has become their montra.

The problem is, all of those claims are untrue, or at a minimum, lack serious context. I am going to address each claim separately.

40,000 Gun Deaths Per Year

In terms of firearm related deaths, that number is accurate. The US averages 44-48k “gun deaths” annually. However, what he is not telling you is that 60% of those “gun deaths” are suicides. One cannot lump suicides and homicides together because not only is the reason for the death completely different, possible remedies are also entirely different.

If guns magically ceased to exist, people wanting to kill themselves would still be able to kill themselves. If you need proof of that, one need only look at Japan. Gun ownership is completely forbidden in Japan, yet Japan has a much higher suicide rate than the US. The suicide rate in the US is 15.28 per 100k while Japan eclipses us at 21.46 per 100k.

As for the remaining 40% of the gun deaths being homicides, the vast majority of those are gang crime related. In the United States, 1% of the population is responsible for 63% of violent crime. The problem is not the general public misusing guns, but rather a very tiny number of known people.

Additionally, only 1.3% of violent criminals who used a gun in crime purchased their gun legally, from a gun retailer. And of those guns, the overwhelming majority were handguns for one simple reason, they are easier to conceal than a rifle.

If the intent is to make the country safer, passing more gun control laws is not going to make any sort of statistically significant change. It can’t when you look at the actual facts surrounding those “forty thousands gun deaths.”

One Mass Shooting Per Day

Just like the 40k gun deaths, this statement relies on half truths and flawed statistical analysis. While he does not say what his source for that statistic is, I suspect he is using the “Mass Shooting Tracker” that so many “journalists” rely on. The problem with that website is that they have created their own definition of what constitutes a mass shooting.

The Mass Shooting Tracker includes any and every incident where four or more people are shot, no matter the circumstances, no matter if the suspect is one of the four people. They include domestic violence incidents, gang shootings, home invasion robberies, etc.

They do that on purpose. When the average person hears “mass shooting” they picture the same thing: an incident in a public place like a mall or a school where the suspect or suspects start shooting random people. If you can make people think that “mass shootings” are occurring every single day, they are going to be much more prone to support gun bans.

Ironically, the type of “mass shooting” event that people picture is exactly what the FBI used to define a mass shooting as. However, they have since removed that definition from their website.

If you want to look at the frequency of actual “mass shootings,” the type we all picture, the Rockefeller Institute of Government is a much more respectable source. They also have tracked mass shootings all the way back to 1966 so you get a much better perspective.

Rockefeller lists a total of 515 mass shootings since 1966. These are the incidents that everyone pictures when they hear the term “mass shooting.” Recent years have had a much higher rate, which started to increase in the 1980’s. That said, they document six incidents this year, as opposed to the 297 claimed by the Mass Shooting Tracker website.

Gunshots The Leading Cause Of Death Among Children

This claim takes the cake in terms of lies because that is what it is, a lie. Flat out bald faced lie. But gun control advocates repeat it ad nauseum.

The word “child” is used specifically because it conjures images of people who fit the highlighted part of the definition below, namely pre-teens.

If they instead used the phrase “minor” we would all picture something entirely different. That is an important distinction.

Additionally, this claim is based on causes of death reported by the CDC. The CDC has age groups based on what I am not exactly sure, but none of them meet the definition of a “child,” or even a “minor” at that.

Below is a chart from the CDC for 2024 (the most recent completed year) showing the leading causes of death for each age group. I highlighted all firearm related categories. While we already discussed the difference between suicide and homicide, they are clearly grouping them all together to get their “leading cause of death” numbers.

In no age group that constitutes a child, are firearm homicides the leading cause of death. Motor vehicle accidents are in fact the number one cause of death for everyone under the age of 25.

If you lump firearm homicides, firearm suicides and accidental deaths with a firearm all together, for the age group of 10-14 (only half of that group is a “child”) you finally surpass car accidents.

But as we discussed previously, suicides are going to happen with or without guns. Look no further than that same exact age group and you will see that suicide by suffocation is the second leading cause of death, surpassing all gun related deaths.

Moving up from there, the next age group contains more ages that are legally an adult than those that are minors, and none of them is a “child.”

At this point, we need to address the elephant in the room. Look at all those firearm homicides! That is all criminal gang activity, and none of those guns were legally acquired because minors cannot legally own a gun. I’ve written about this issue in the past right here on this blog.

Blaming guns for deaths resulting from voluntary criminal behavior is ridiculous.

Historical Illiteracy

McIntire decides to point out some historical information about gun restrictions, but the problem is his version of history never existed.

“Historically, Americans were more clear-eyed about guns as deadly tools and had little trouble balancing the right to own them against sensible restrictions.”

I’m not really sure what part of American history he thinks he is referring to, but he is clueless.

Prior to the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934, you could buy any gun you wanted from the local store with no paperwork, no identification, no age restrictions, and that included full-auto machine guns. You could even have them sent directly to your house via the US Postal Service. So clearly he is not talking about that part of our history.

Prior to the Gun Control Act of 1968, you could buy any gun you wanted from any country of origin, aside from machine guns, without any background checks, no ID required, no age restrictions, and you could still have them sent directly to your home via the post office. You could still buy brand new machine guns if you wanted one, but you had to pay an extra tax. So he clearly is not talking about that part of our American history.

Up until 1986, anyone who wanted one could legally purchase a brand new machine gun from their dealer so long as they paid the NFA tax. This included full-auto AR-15s, Uzi submachine guns, MP5 submachine guns, hell even M60 belt fed light machine guns could be purchased by the average person. So he was clearly not talking about this part of history.

Prior to 1994, you could walk into any store that sold firearms and show them your identification, hand them cash and walk out the door with your new gun. While you could no longer have guns shipped directly to your home, buying a new gun from a dealer was still a simple task.

It was not until 1994 that background checks and assault weapons bans (1989 in CA) became a thing.

So does his version of history only include the last 30 years?

Yes, throughout our history, some small jurisdictions had passed their own weapons laws, usually prohibiting the carrying of guns either open or concealed (varied by area). Ironically, many of those early gun control laws were racist and only addressed gun ownership by minorities.

However, for all but the most recent years, Americans could purchase whatever gun they wanted with little to no government restrictions.

Call It Commonsense And They Can’t Argue

After proving his historical illiteracy, he moves on to, or more correctly back to insulting gun owners who are unwilling to compromise on their 2nd Amendment rights.

“At its core is a stubborn minority of Americans who refuse to accept commonsense limits, even as advancements in lethal firearms technology make a grotesquerie of their insistence on ever-greater freedoms.”

First, nothing about guns today is any more lethal than guns made in 1960. The AR-15 existed in 1960, and could be ordered via the mail to your home. Machine pistols existed at that same time and were totally legal to purchase. I’m not sure what advancements he thinks have been made, but other than a bunch of cosmetic changes, nothing today is significantly different from guns that were available more than 60 years ago.

But let’s get to the meat of that statement, the use of the term “commonsense.” This term is used to paint anyone who disagrees with the suggestion as an extremist.

How could you possibly not agree with that? It is commonsense!

The problem is there is nothing commonsense about their calls for more gun control. The people who come up with the suggestions know nothing about guns, nothing about the history of gun laws, nothing about who is committing the majority of the gun crimes that they also know nothing about.

What is the antonym of commonsense? Because that is what they are pushing, only calling it the opposite.

Summary

I freely admit I did not read the entire book. In fact, I barely made it through the first chapter. I did not need to read any further.

In that opening chapter, the author demonstrated his lack of any factual knowledge on the subject matter, his lack of historical knowledge, and his disdain for those who support gun rights. Rather than having an introduction inviting people from differing view points, he chose to denigrate and insult everyone with whom he disagrees.

If you are a proponent of gun control, Mike McIntire has a book for you that will reinforce everything you want to hear.

If you are a knowledgeable gun owner who is tired of the death of a thousand cuts that our 2nd Amendment Rights have been taking the last 90 years, you won’t find anything worthwhile in this book.