National Rifle Association instructor Mike McQuown understands why gun control is a topic of conversation, especially since President Joe Biden has issued an executive order that tightens some gun controls, including that on ghost guns.
McQuown, a resident of Brockway, said things are only getting more difficult for legal gun owners.
“Nothing (Biden) said will stop a criminal from doing anything they intend to do,” he said. “A criminal doesn’t care if he has a pistol brake or a stock on an AR pistol? If you are going to kill people, do you really care if you are going to violate an ATF rule?”
“The problem is that the companies that make those crossed the line,” he said. “When the build-a-gun started, you brought the parts from different places. Now, they put them together in a box. You can buy the entire gun, in a kit, and in 25 minutes build a gun and be ready to go and do things.”
McQuown, who also is an Army veteran, said he enjoys building guns, “but if you are a bad guy and you can’t buy a gun anywhere else you can literally buy one off the Internet.”
He doesn’t think the building of guns should be done away with, but said there needs to be some level of regulation.
“There should be a background check,” McQuown said. “If you are not a criminal, why should you care about a background check?
However, McQuown called President Joe Biden’s proposal to place a ban on high-capacity magazines a “joke.”
“I can take a modern sporting rifle, the AR-15, and I can put a 30-round magazine in that gun,” McQuown said. “We can take three 10-round magazines, and with very minimal training it would take exactly the same time to shoot the same targets.
“I am a trained instructor and I can change a magazine in a second. The average person can do it in a second and a half. So, the (proposed) ban is a joke.”
He said the sweeping gun-control agenda addresses a “nonexistent problem.”
“The reality of it is that there are 383 million gun owners in this country,” McQuown said. “On average, they all own 2.3 guns per person, so you are talking about almost 700 million guns.
“Last year, the ATF said there were 14.5 million new gun owners, and each one of them bought two guns.”
He said taking away assault rifles “has been tried before in this country. The American people are the world’s largest standing army. Gun owners in this country outnumber all of the police, and active and military reserve combined.”
McQuown said guns have always been a part of American culture.
“When I graduated in 1991, every school from October to December had trucks in the parking lot with guns hanging in the window,” he said. “We never had problems.
“The problem we have now is not a gun problem, but a parenting problem. It is people saying it’s not my fault or someone owes me something.”
“I have been an NRA concealed carry instructor for 20 years. I have taught gun safety to people ranging from 6 years old to 75 years old. The people are every size, shape, age, color; men, women, it doesn’t matter,” McQuown said.
“People take these classes because they are worried about their own security.”
He believes the root of today’s gun violence is not the result of having too many guns available.
“The shootings you see today are a culture problem. You didn’t see these mass shootings when I was a kid,” McQuown said.
“The news media glorified things like the Columbine shooting. You always see headlines about what these people did, but not what happens to them.”
He believes the Second Amendment should not be altered.
“The Second Amendment is the only single sentence amendment to the United States Constitution. It says a lot,” McQuown said.
“It was very specifically worded. It was very important to the Founding Fathers.”