Apples & Trigger Locks

Confederate Yankee and Instapundit point out a fun Reuters article about gun collectors. It includes this graph:

The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.

The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors.

Now Gun Control advocates *love* to mix Apples and Oranges. In other words, mixing the criminals in with the legitimate gun owners, so that they can tar & feather the entire issue with the crimes of the former to obscure the lack of crimes by the latter.

I am willing to assume that the phrase "owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers" is due more to the reporter's ignorance than to any deliberate attempt to mix those apples and oranges. In that spirit, I would like to point out to said reporter that 99% of the time criminals and drug dealers are not "gun owners", they are "gun possessors". There is a difference.

Legitimate gun owners and collectors actually legally purchase their weapons, and are in an entirely different category than those who come by their weapons through illegal commerce or theft, and possess them for the express reason to assist in the commission of other crimes.

In the future, please do not lump them together.

It is kind of like mixing together Governors who go home to their families, and Governors who hire prostitutes.....

Apples and Oranges.