By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Reporting Project
The United States Supreme Court is about to determine whether all Americans have a right to own a real AR regardless of their address thanks to two cases brought by the Second Amendment Foundation and its partners, which challenge “assault weapon” bans in Cook County, Illinois and Connecticut.
As you can imagine, the gun-banners and their paid activists are apoplectic with rage, hate and discontent.
As a result, those who make their living by opposing the Second Amendment and other civil rights are pushing their paid media hard, forcing them to publish false diatribes on a near daily basis. They’re churning out trash like there’s no tomorrow, and when their main anti-civil-rights authors need a break, they turn to their B, C or even D teams.
One member of the anti-gun D-team published a story Thursday that’s about as comical as it is completely untrue: Robert Spitzer, who describes himself as a professor emeritus of the Political Science Department at the State University of New York in Cortland, which was founded in 1868 as the “Courtland Normal School.”
This is not the first time the good professor has thrust both hands deep into the anti-gun money pot. Seven of his 14 books have been anti-gun and/or anti-Second Amendment, including his most recent works: The Gun Dilemma and Gun Law History.
He has appeared frequently on the anti-gun media to denounce guns, gun owners and civil rights, including: The Today Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightly News, PBS’s News Hour, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
Spitzer’s recent story was hilariously titled: “Why the assault weapon debate is a culture debate.” It pretty much goes downhill from there.
I should point out that he posted his own story on Bluesky Social—a form of X/Twitter for anti-gunners. So far, only one of his 111 followers has liked his work.
He begins his story with self-accolade.
“As a gun policy scholar, I believe this flurry of legal activity brings to a head the multi-decade dispute over restricting assault weapons that extends far beyond legal arguments. The source of the conflict ranges from elements of gun culture identity to the technical characteristics of these weapons. Much of this controversy remains misunderstood, including conflicting claims about the weapons’ origins and definition,” Spitzer wrote.
But what he asks the reader(s) next makes further reading of his story extremely difficult.
“Where the court ultimately stands will have to do with its answers to these tough questions. Is an assault weapon a weapon of war or a sporting rifle? Is it a machine gun or simply a tricked-out hunting rifle? Does it really pose a risk to the public compared to other guns?” he actually wrote.
I didn’t need to open my safe and examine my ARs. None of them are weapons of war or full-auto, and none of them are “tricked-out hunting rifles.”
They’re ARs after all, and they certainly do not pose any risk to the public whatsoever.
Spitzer then takes his reader(s) through a history of the AR, which is about as false and, at times, as hilarious as you could ever imagine.
- He claims AR sales are made as a “political statement.”
- He claims ARs are the weapon of choice for mass murderers.
- He claims AR rounds “travel farther and cause more harm.”
- He claims ARs are increasingly used by gangs and extremist political groups, rather than by millions and millions of law-abiding gun owners.
Spitzer ends his wordiness with a nonsensical statement coupled with a surprise.
“Despite this extensive regulatory past, experts generally expect that the court will strike down assault weapons restrictions. If so, it will be hard-pressed to justify the result as consistent with America’s extensive history of weapons regulation,” he wrote.
The hyperlink takes the reader(s) to an advertisement for one of Spitzer’s textbooks, Gun Law History, for only $29.99.
That, friends, says about all you need to know about the good professor’s column. It’s woefully untrue and nothing more than another way for this “gun policy scholar” to peddle his textbooks.
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