The Media’s Gun Control Expert is a Cuckoo Bird

Members of the establishment press love to quote Vanderbilt University psychiatry professor Jonathan Metzl, especially to reinforce their preferred gun control narrative.

They love this scholarly Metzl egghead so much they overlook him saying a lot of things that are, to put it mildly…crackers. 

Metzl, during a recent C-SPAN appearance, said that before COVID-19 people needed guns to hunt but not defend themselves. He also said that during and after COVID-19 the gun lobby manipulated Americans to believe they need a gun for self-defense.

Metzl, in his book Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, argued that politicians refuse to pass more gun control laws due to white privilege and white supremacy. 

This was a narrative that Metzl carried to C-SPAN. He said laws in the distant past permitted the Ku Klux Klan to disarm black Americans. 

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“Before even the founding of this country, there was a racial political component to who got to carry a gun in public in pre-colonial America, basically white landowners and white people could carry muskets in public,” Metzl said.

“That was to keep Native Americans and African Americans from revolting.”

OK, so let’s get this straight. 

Metzl despises guns and believes few people really use them for self-defense. But he admits that powerful people historically use firearms to oppress people with no guns at all or, at best, inferior firepower. Does he not realize that a tyrannical government could do the same thing to its citizens, once those citizens are deprived of their firearms?

In 2016, the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute published a report. That document questioned whether people have a right to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. If so, does the Second Amendment reinforce that right? 

Cato said yes and quoted former Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president.

“Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced,” Humphrey said.

“But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against a tyranny, which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

Cato also cited an incident that occurred in Jonesboro, La. in the summer of 1965, when 20 black U.S. Army veterans founded an armed community defense patrol, “Deacons for Defense and Justice.” 

“Inspired by visible public presence of boldly armed men, black attitudes in Jonesboro began to change. Black housekeepers stopped accepting racial taunts, and quit if the taunts continued,” according to Cato. 

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“‘Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro Unusual Town,’ was the headline of a New York Times article on Jonesboro, on February 21, 1965. The Deacons’ model spread to other Klan heartlands and was able to overturn Klan power with scarcely a shot fired.”

In 2020 the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation listed 11 instances of responsible gun owners saving lives.

Metzl spouts a lot of research, but he doesn’t add necessary context to his gun control narrative. 

Perhaps the establishment press should stop citing Metzl as their go-to gun expert?

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