People think the pandemic's lasting impact on America's gun debate will be the giant surge of new gun owners who will be newly protective of their 2A rights. I'm not so sure about this. I think if the pandemic has been a net positive for gun rights, it'll be via a different route

Sure, some subset of the people who are buying guns out of fear will want to keep them, but I think the vast majority will be glad to get rid of them when things normalize.

Most won't go from "I wish nobody had guns" => "Screw it, I'm getting one, too" => "Gun rights FTW!!"

Instead, they'll do something like "I wish nobody had guns" => "Screw it, I'm getting one, too" => "Ok glad all that's over... I wish nobody had guns."

Ultimately, I doubt fear of imminent, transient threat can produce durable support for an abstract right.

I think the real impact of these times on the gun debate will arise from the way that public health so utterly debauched itself by wading openly into politics and calling their politics "science." I'm talking about health experts' support for the protests, of course.

This support was fine when offered as politics -- i.e., "speaking in my capacity as a citizen, I think the protests are essential & worth any amount of health risk."

But that wasn't the pitch. The pro-protest takes were offered up as "science" -- as public health intervention.

Now the mask is off, though. We all saw the field's politics being dressed up & publicly paraded as "science". There was no real attempt to even give it a veneer of support via graphs & charts & numbers. Just a set of value judgements with no tables or stats.

Opponents of gun control have been accusing the field of exactly this for decades, now. We've been saying, "your politics are anti-gun, so you make up the 'science' to support your politics."

This charge will now stick. And you can be certain I will do my part to make it stick.

Ultimately, too many public heath experts thought they could do "science" by speaking ex cathedra. Those of us who demanded actual supporting data, or who offered data-based arguments around the risks of the protests, were smeared and slandered.