letter to the editor

I watched eagerly for last week’s farragutpress expecting to see a response to the Aug. 22 front page article “Farragut voices key in Moms Demand Action Knox rally,” which, in its second paragraph, dignified the group as “a grassroots organization.”

While Moms Demand Action may have been “grassroots” when launched in 2012, it was quickly co-opted in 2014 when it merged with the rabidly prohibitionist, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg-founded and -funded Mayors Against Illegal Guns to form Everytown for Gun Safety.

Moms Demand Action is now basically an astro-turf front group for Bloomberg’s personal $57 million vendetta against American liberty. As such, their stock-in-trade appears to be the distortion of facts and the promotion of fear-motivated, knee-jerk curbs on the rights of law-abiding Americans in the wake of every outbreak of violence.

For example, the closing statement in the article comes straight from the Bloomberg playbook: “One hundred people die from gun violence in the United States every single day.” The fact (easily verifiable from the Department of Justice’s own Bureau of Crime Statistics) is that gun-related homicides in the U.S. are down over 50 percent from their peak in the 1970s, and this closely parallels the proliferation of “Right to Carry” legislation throughout the U.S. during the same period.

And their assertion includes a very large percentage of suicides and fails to mention that over 50 percent of murders occur in just 2 percent of U.S. counties, and even in those counties it is mainly in very small areas of about 10 blocks.

Even more ironically, these concentrated areas of high crime are mainly in areas with the tightest gun prohibitions and therefore the lowest per-capita gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.

The fact that this group focuses on gun prohibition legislation, which would not have prevented any of the media-sensationalized mass shootings of the last decade, exposes the truth that their backers are not actually concerned with reduction of crime.

Rather, they are simply determined to restrict the freedoms of all Americans. Claims of crime reduction are merely a distraction employed to advance their true agenda.

For their statement on page 3A of the article, “We support the 2nd Amendment and have many NRA members and gun owners in our group,” I would have liked to have seen a show of hands.

As a Patron Life member of America’s foremost gun safety training organization, the National Rifle Association, I can tell you that NRA members know who this group is, and the objectives of the two groups are mutually exclusive.



Robert N. (Bob) Markli

Farragut (former alderman)