A Nov. 26 Harvard Political Review article, “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Why the Tobacco Lobby Doesn’t Provide a Blueprint to Defeat the Gun Lobby,” seems to promise a logical argument ... until it begins to repeat false gun talking points, such as:
“Guns cause gun deaths. The more guns, the more gun deaths. Period.”
“In the wake of the Columbine massacre—at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association, NRA president Charlton Heston [said] … ‘I’ll give up my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands.’”
“Prior to the late twentieth century, the Second Amendment was never interpreted as conferring an individual right to bear arms …”
Note to Harvard students: Violent crime has declined while gun sales set new records; Charlton Heston did not say that at the NRA Annual Meetings in Denver; and the belief that the Second Amendment only protects a collective right is a recent claim, soundly refuted in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision.