Gun Prohibition Advocates Demonize
Lawful Industry, Ignore Actual Criminals

By NRA-ILA. July 17, 2023

Here we go again. Four years after then-Vice President Joe Biden said, “Our enemy is the gun manufacturers,” 'gun control' advocates are still trying to convince Americans that violent crime results from law-abiding businesses providing a constitutionally-protected product under exacting government scrutiny. Amidst the gun prohibition lobby’s never-ending – and usually illegal – campaign of harassing lawsuits, Everytown has now upped the ante with its new “research” effort, “Inside the Gun Shop.” The point is not to shed understanding on America’s regulated firearm industry, however, but to impugn and dox the businesses that make the Second Amendment possible.

Everytown uses the report to insinuate that the real problem behind firearm-related violence in America is that greedy, profit-motivated businesses manufacture and sell guns without scruples or effective oversight. The demonization of guns and businesses is no doubt a double sop to the organization’s left-leaning audience, which is often as eager to blame Capitalism as guns for the nation’s woes. It’s also ironic, given that Everytown is funded almost entirely by billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg, who made his fortune by providing technology and information services to Wall Street, the better to enable its supposedly rapacious financial exploitation. As CNN once wrote, “Wall Street as we know it today wouldn’t exist without [Bloomberg’s] innovations.”

Bloomberg would undoubtedly agree that economic theory and common experience establish that making something more expensive reduces demand for it. Thus, an ongoing strategy of the anti-gun movement is to advocate for piling as many regulations and requirements on top of the firearm industry as possible to drive up the prices of the industry’s products. .....