I have been around guns as long as I can remember.  My dad took me shooting the first time when I was about six or seven, and I was hooked.  I went shooting often.  When I turned 18 I bought my first gun.  I’ve had CCW permits since I was 21, and carry as often as I can.  Many of my friends own guns.  The college I went to had a gun club that I was an active participant in.

I do not know anybody who has been shot or killed in an act of gun violence.  I have never shot or killed anybody else.

To read what the acolytes of Bloomberg publish at The Trace or post on Facebook, that should not be possible.

The Facebook post links to this article: One City, Two Americas: Portraits From NRA Weekend in Louisville.  The tagline for the article is “Striking images show how gun culture is celebrated, and mourned.”

If the Bloombergians didn’t have dishonesty, they wouldn’t have anything at all.

The article pictures NRA members and gun rights activists next to gun safety control activists.  The article juxtaposes the NRAAM against gun violence in Louisville.

“On Sunday, the city woke to news of Donald Trump’s call to arm school teachers, and of a double homicide on the West End, where much of the city’s gun violence is concentrated. Neither headline came as a surprise.

In 2015, Louisville recorded its deadliest year in over three decades. From January through April, more than 150 people have been shot inside city limits, a 40 percent increase over the same period last year.”

The profiles of the gun safety control activists included details of the shooting that spurred their activism.

Let’s be honest, shall we.  As much as the antis like to paint this as two sides to the same gun culture coin, it’s not.  On the left is American gun culture.  On the right is the product of thug culture.  I’m not suggesting that Antonio Tharpe or his uncle were thugs, but the gang who shot him over a dice game were.  Tragically, one does not need to be a thug to be the victim of thug culture.  One just has to be an innocent bystander when the shooting happens.

We know who is responsible for the increase in shootings in Louisville, across the city from where the NRAAM happened.  An increase in the number of gangs, fueled by drug dealing and poverty, is the cause of the problem.  This is the same issue that is causing crime spikes in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Let’s be clear, there is nothing in common between the law abiding, freedom loving, culture of gun ownership that the NRA and like minded individuals celebrate, and the drug dealing, murdering, culture of gang violence that is killing kids in the street.  To say the two are related if not the same is a bold face lie.  Defending the civil liberties of law abiding citizens is not equivalent to an obsession with drugs and violence.  If they were the same, having more than 78,000 NRA members, many of the carrying concealed, in teh same place at the same time, would have been a blood bath.  But it was not.  As far as I have been able to determine, no NRA member, 1911 aficionado has ever shot a Glock fanboy over his choice in pistol.  Thug culture, on the other hand, encourages a group of one gang affiliation to  shoot someone over the color of their shoes.

One of these things is not like the other.

Going through the Everytown Facebook comments on this, of course the SJ left HAD to figure out a way to make race part of this issue and try to make the NRA look racist in doing so.

So allow me to make things a little clearer for them.

This is gun culture.  Mr. Colion Noir, an attorney, posing with his lawful AR-15 at a range, maintaining safe gun handling procedure.

This is thug culture.  An anonymous gang member, posing with his illegally shortened shotgun, pointing it at the cameraman.

See the difference?

Of course not.  Why let facts get in the way of ideology.