Does Anyone Know Anything About Guns?

One of the reasons I have always enjoyed writing about guns is that I don’t have to figure out a story line, or even come up with an idea. All I have to do is scan the daily media and wait for one of the major media outlets to put out a gun story because invariably the story is wrong.

And the reason the media gets it all wrong about guns is that if you’re hired by an outfit like the Washington Post, the chances are you come from a nice, college-educated, liberal background and people from that background don’t usually know anything about guns.

And guns may be a consumer item found in many homes, but a gun sitting on someone’s night table or in a closet off the living room isn’t just like a car sitting out in the driveway or a new set of golf clubs in the car’s trunk.

The gap, socially and otherwise, between people who own guns and people who don’t own guns is as wide as the Mississippi River when it rains for a couple of days and the river overflows its banks. Gun owners and non-gun owners in America may both speak the same language, but the words have entirely different meanings to gun-owning versus non-gun-owning folks.

An example of this mental and cultural dichotomy is an article which just appeared in the Washington Post about a new survey on gun ownership which was commissioned by NBC News. The…