The pundits say that gun owners are a smaller-than-ever minority, and that a majority of American homes are “gun-free.” (I hate that phrase, “gun-free.” No, guns are not vermin. Anything which sounds that helpless as “gun-free” can’t be A Good Thing.)
Let’s look at some recent statistics, though. The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports their recent survey of gun dealers that in 2012, about 25% of their sales were to first-time gun owners.
My friend and colleague Dave Workman – such a solid resource that I find myself linking to his stuff more often in this blog than any other source – observes that some 15,000 new concealed carry permits were processed last month in his home state of Washington alone. The list of permit holders increased by more than 60,000 there since May of 2012. http://www.examiner.com/article/cpl-figure-skyrockets-15k-a-single-month.
Brother Workman quotes another outstanding source of solid information, Howard Nemerov of PJ Media, who in turn cites a recent Gallup poll showing that 47% of American adults have firearms at home. http://www.examiner.com/article/waning-gun-culture-u-s-may-be-myth?cid=db_articles . Sounds like a pretty substantial “minority” to me.
Obviously, density of gun ownership is a regional thing. You’ll have fewer guns in Manhattan high-rises, and more in rural farmhouses and on Western ranches, where guns are working tools as well as self-defense implements.
And, let us not forget, a whole lot of folks don’t want to tell strangers that they have guns, whether or not the stranger has identified himself or herself as a pollster. The media has, for decades, stigmatized gun owners. Besides, who wants to announce having in their house one of the very few things besides prescription drugs that thieves can peddle in the underworld for more than their intrinsic value, instead of pennies on the dollar?
We aren’t an overwhelming national majority, but we sure aren’t the weak and fading shadow the Prohibitionists wish we were.
Dave Workman ( left), Mas (center) and Tom Gresham (right) show how anti-gun media reacts to statistics favoring gun owners.
Glenn Reynolds talks to Michael Barone about President Obama's failure to push gun control legislation through the Senate. Has Obama lost his persuasive abilities, or is he asking too much from congress and the American people? Could the real problem be that President Obama has never encountered true dissent in his political life? Find out.
Late last January, a Fox commentator noted that CNN had turned into a 24/7 “gun control” telethon. And now, on the evening of April 9, I sit here watching what CNN has called a two-day special devoted to exactly that topic.
It is focusing on background checks. No surprise: the gun prohibition movement nationwide has lasered in on the exact same thing. They’ve been doing it for a while, ever since they realized that both the “assault weapon ban” and the “high capacity magazine ban” are being increasingly recognized as illogical and meaningless…as, indeed, they were proven to be the last time they were enacted.
The “opening shot” of the “two-day blast” (puns intended) centered on Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly. Before she was shot by psycho Jared Loughner, Rep. Giffords was a conservative Democrat who staunchly supported gun owners’ civil rights. She owned a Glock 19 pistol exactly like the one Loughner used, and to their credit, her husband admitted that. He also admitted that he and his wife owned a slightly larger capacity version of the same gun, the Glock 17, which he fired obligingly at a backyard plinking range for the CNN cameras.
The Glock 19 pistol holds 15 rounds in its standard magazine, and the Glock 17 contains 17 rounds when its standard magazine is full. Each will take one more round in the firing chamber when fully loaded. Kelly made a big point of the fact that Loughner had used extended 33-round magazines in the weapon he used in the massacre.
Interesting, that, though Giffords and Kelly have now become icons in the “gun control” movement that wants to limit everyone to 10-round magazines (and New Yorkers to only 7), neither seems to have even symbolically given up their standard capacity magazines “evil high capacity assault magazine clips.”
“Sean AZ” commented in the last blog entry below this one that it looked to him as if the backstop Kelly was shooting at on CNN was unsafe. And in a previous entry here I commented on the disingenuous hypocrisy Kelly demonstrated recently in his purchase of a “high capacity assault rifle,” to wit the SIG version of an AR15. (The gun shop where he bought it refused to complete the transfer. When I am next in Tucson, I want to shake the hand of the gun shop owner who made that decision.)
So far in this particular stage of the “we gotta have universal background checks” CNN marathon, it appears that folks think we gun people want it to be legal for criminals to buy guns on the street, or have their girlfriends buy guns for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s already against the law, and has been for a very long time, and it’s us gun people who rage against the Obama/Holder Justice Department’s failure to prosecute more than a token number of criminals who do so. So far, even Anderson Cooper, the point man on this particular CNN blitz, doesn’t seem to be aware of the quicksand of creating felons out of a husband who leaves a gun at home with his wife, or parents who bequeaths a family heirloom gun to heirs, which lies in some of the currently suggested “background check” legislation passes. (Please see the blog entry below this one.)
To Cooper’s credit, while he’s obviously not “pro-gun,” he’s trying to show both sides like a professional journalist, in stark contrast to his fellow CNN denizen, Piers Morgan. Having been forced out of his journalism career in England by a hoax he perpetrated as a journalist, and a phone-tapping scandal, Morgan gets about half the ratings Anderson does. Anderson has already, honestly, brought out the fact that Loughner PASSED a background check when he bought the gun he later used that terrible day in Tucson.
My heart goes out to Gabby Giffords. It pains me to see what the brain damage inflicted on her by a monster has done. I can only wish she’d been carrying her own Glock 19 on that day, and seen the evil little monster in time to stop him.
In recent days, we’ve seen a senior proponent of the full capacity magazine ban reveal that she didn’t have a clue how either magazines or stripper clips worked, and neither apparently did her research assistants.
It was a moment of absolutely monumental cluelessness. It’s as if a denizen of Capitol Hill was pushing legislation to limit how much fuel you could have in your vehicle’s tank, and to limit your family car to low speed…and you discovered that the legislator had never driven an automobile and didn’t know a steering wheel from a spare tire. Not long before that gaffe, we saw Governor Cuomo push through the SAFE Act in New York State, not only limiting the public to seven cartridges in the magazine but crafting the legislation so sloppily that he and his minions didn’t realize they had written it to apply to police as well. This sort of thing reflects a level of ignorance on a par with the politician who, last year, made it clear he thought an island would tip over if too many people were located on one side of it,
or the candidate last year who declared that women’s bodies had some magic mechanism that kept them from getting pregnant if they were raped.
Such things should be taught in civics classes, as a warning to the electorate.
In the wake of it all, thankfully, more middle-of-the-road citizens are re-examining the whole “assault weapons/high capacity magazines” propaganda blitz, and seeing the mendacity and futility hidden therein. Yet pundits still tell us that the shining hope of the gun prohibitionists is “reasonable, common sense universal background checks.” Here, stalwart gun owners’ civil rights activist David Kopel explains all the bad stuff that hides in the proposed legislation: National Review.
Originally posted at American ThinkerPresident Barack Obama is firmly committed to pushing an anti-gun agenda. He's so steadfast in his conviction that he was willing to fly, on his $180K per hour magic carpet, the families of the children and school workers that perished in Newtown, Connecticut all the way to Washington DC. After breakfast, Sandy Hook family members participated in a mini anti-gun-violence, sympathy-fueled arm-twisting session where, in an effort to persuade reluctant senators to sway his way on the issue of gun control, the grieving were exploited.
The president's current argument is that sweeping legislation is needed because 32,000 people in America die each year from gun-related violence, many of whom are children. Yet, Obama's carelessness with the truth omits the fact that 32,000 people make up only 0.01% of the American population.
Pressing the Senate to pass a bill whose ultimate goal is to curtail gun ownership because children die from gunshot wounds would be like lobbying for a bill to outlaw household cleaning products because every year thousands of children die as a result of accidental poisoning.
The truth is that in comparison to other causes of death, guns are responsible for a relatively small percentage of fatalities. Even so, the president remains focused like a laser on passing unpopular legislation and using the prevention of death as an excuse to restrict constitutional freedom and limit the sale of firearms and firearm accessories. For good measure, Obama also insinuates that any American unwilling to acquiesce to his anti-gun viewpoint might be harboring nefarious intentions.
And so to accomplish his goal of watering down the power of the U.S. Constitution, Barack Obama thinks portraying himself as the compassionate champion of dead children is his best bet. Yet isn't it true that Obama couldn't even save the lives of four adults in Benghazi, let alone 20 little ones in Newtown? For Barack Obama to portray himself as some sort of thwarter of untimely death is ludicrous. Moreover, an avid abortion advocate talking in memoriam about the lost lives of children is another example of this president's use of disingenuousness to divert attention from failed policies whose ramifications affect the 99.99% of those whose lives will never be touched by gun violence.
If preventing death were really Obama's goal, then he'd address the much larger number of Americans who die for reasons other than lethal gunfire.
For instance, what about the 600,000 Americans who perish annually from heart disease, or the 575,000 who succumb to cancer? On behalf of all the American children whose lives are negatively impacted (if not snuffed out) by these diseases, why hasn't children's advocate/gun-control crusader Obama stressed the urgent need to fund cancer and heart disease research?
Thus far, even though there are approximately 120,000 deaths each year from all kinds of accidents, to date the families of the 32,000 dead car accident victims have not been invited to fly on Air Force One to Washington DC to address the US Senate about preventing fatal car crashes.
And then there are the 50,000 Americans a year who succumb to pneumonia and flu and the 30,000 who die annually from a little-known but highly preventable hospital-acquired bacterium called C-Diff, or Clostridium Difficile.
If Barack Obama believes that 0.01% of the population is too many to die from gun violence, then the same should hold true for seasonal flu and C-Difficile. But it's 10 weeks into his second term and so far Barack has yet to campaign on behalf of controlling the growing problem of deadly super bugs.
If the families of the Sandy Hook victims earned a ride on Air Force One and had an opportunity to plead their case before the Senate for stricter controls on gun ownership, why not also fly the grieving parents of 8-month-old Charlee Mackenzie Ratliff, who, while recovering from surgery to repair a hole in her heart, died in May of 2010 after acquiring a deadly case of C-Diff?
Charlee's mom and dad could come to Capitol Hill to address controlling the spread of bacterial infections that are killing the very young, those with weakened immune systems, and the elderly in hospitals and nursing homes across America. Why not invite the Ratliffs to raise awareness on how, in the coming years, limited Obamacare monies will inevitably lead to an increase in the threat of fatalities resulting from hospital-acquired infections?
Speaking wholly about curtailing Second Amendment rights, at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, Barack Obama delivered an ardent plea for Americans to pressure their local representatives to support stricter gun-control legislation. The president's words could have also been applied to the heartbreaking deaths of victims who've lost their lives from causes other than gun violence.
If you're an American who wants to do something to prevent more families from knowing the immeasurable anguish that these families know, now is the time to act. Now is the time to get engaged, to get involved, to push back on fear, frustration, and misinformation. Now is the time to make your voice heard from every state house to the corridors of Congress.
Based on those sentiments alone, the only conclusion one can glean from the president's selective concern is that either Obama only cares about the lives of specific children, or what we've surmised all along is being confirmed: the president is exploiting the gun-death issue with an explicit goal that has nothing to do with averting premature death. In other words, once again, Obama is blatantly lying by omission, which is just a fancy way of saying that in the overall scheme of advancing progressive policy, the president couldn't care less about who dies or how.
First published by Northwest Asian Weekly, Seattle, March 23, 2013Following the Sandy Hook shootings, gun control is back on the books, with Obama and like-minded people pushing for an “assault weapons” ban. They decry such weapons as high-capacity, high-powered arms designed to specifically kill people, implying the 2nd Amendment is for hunting.
Yes, weapons kill. That is their purpose. For good, they kill other animals for meat and kill criminals, enemies, terrorists, or tyrants and their soldiers. America was born and remains free through force of arms. Realize, too, pacifists live by the grace of warriors.
Think “assault weapons” (semiautomatic rifles) don’t have a defensive purpose for civilians? Think again. In April 1992, Korean business owners armed themselves with AR-15s and AK-47s in South Central Los Angeles when riots occurred following the acquittal of four white policemen in the Rodney King beating. Businesses were being burned to the ground and police were nowhere to be found. As Richard Rhee said, “Burn this down after 33 years? This is my market and I’m going to protect it.”
The 2nd Amendment is not about hunting. It was framed because the colonists had fought a war against tyranny. Tyrants confiscate weapons. General Gage, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in North America, had confiscated weapons from citizens in Boston and then later tried to confiscate arms and ammunition in Concord and Lexington in April 1775. That ignited the Revolutionary War. If hunting is implied at all, then the implication is to hunt tyrants and their minions.
Another specious claim by liberals is that the Founders would never have allowed semiautomatic rifles to be owned by private citizens. Well, consider this. King George’s redcoats are coming down the road intent on pillaging and killing colonists in an attempt at subjugation. Wow! Should the colonist go get his bow and arrow or should he get the most up-to-date weapon he can so as to repulse this attack and, hopefully, survive?
The founding generation spent blood and lives fighting tyranny. They wanted to ensure that the progeny of their genes would remain a free people and that their ideas would become a beacon of freedom to the world.
Hence, the Constitution was born, the greatest document ever conceived by man. The Founders were touched by God. The 2nd Amendment provides teeth for all the other rights in the Bill of Rights.
A recent New York law, pushed by Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), requires registration of assault weapons.
Cuomo favors gun confiscation. If that occurs, many liberals, like Cuomo, mistakenly expect American gun owners to relinquish their guns, as the citizens of the U.K. and Australia did. The liberals will be abetted by the news media, who will show Joe Gunowner turning in his weapons, making America a safer place.
Not so. Many American gun owners hold the 2nd Amendment near and dear to their hearts, a principle they will fight and die for. If gun confiscation becomes law, three things can happen. One, nothing changes because the law cannot be enforced. Two, if enforcement begins, civil strife will ensue, perhaps with martial law. (Think Prohibition—and alcohol wasn’t even guaranteed by the Bill of Rights — with its black market and widespread lawlessness.) America will now have become a more dangerous place, not only for gun owners, but also for the general population at large, as well as for law enforcement personnel, the National Guard, and the military—the latter three who will be tasked with enforcement. Though all of the latter three have sworn an oath to the Constitution, including the 2nd Amendment, there will always be myrmidons. Third, in the worst case scenario, civil war will erupt. Last time, 600,000 Americans died.
As Larry Correia wrote in his WordPress gun-rights blog, “How many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?”
We can work to reduce gun violence by imprisoning criminals, executing convicted murderers, institutionalizing violently unstable people, and arming teachers. We don’t need to make more gun laws, thus making the uber-majority of gun owners criminals.
Gun control advocates had best tread carefully. Many New York gun owners have blogged that they will not register their assault weapons under Cuomo’s new law. So, the ball is in Cuomo’s court.
America, overall, is a safe, peaceful place. The idealistic vision of registering, banning, and confiscating weapons to make America safer may, instead, slide us down a slippery slope toward civil strife and, perhaps, civil war.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun or a finger gun hits the panic button. Suspensions and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone, usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and lectured to within an inch of his life.
Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like real guns.
It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror, that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.
The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry. And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. In a country where law enforcement is heavily armed and gunmen are stopped by gunmen in uniforms, a strange Swedenization had set in. The problem was not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the killing. Schools across the country are banning not the gun, but the idea of the gun. It is a conceptual prohibition that is meant to push away the threat of gun violence by eliminating any mention of the G word. Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.
This isn’t a precautionary attitude, but a pacifist one. Gun horror is not a productive emotion, but learned helplessness disguised as moral superiority. Rather than teaching children to hate killers, schools are instead teaching them to hate guns. And reducing murders to instruments rather than morals, children are left with no sense of right and wrong, only an instinctive horror of violence.
Pacifists have always demonized armies rather than invaders. During WWI they obsessed over gas. During WW2, it was the bomber and the tank. During the Cold War they demonized nuclear weapons. In the War on Terror, they target the drone. By dealing with the object rather than the subject, they are able to avoid the question of moral responsibility. Rather than hold the Nazis, Communists or Islamists accountable for their actions, they extended a blanket condemnation over the weapons-wielders.
The American GI was just as bad as the SS man or the Kamikaze pilot or the Political Commissar. The only difference was in who had the bigger guns. And the one with the bigger guns, was also the most to blame.
That same attitude can be seen today when Israel is blamed for every battle with Islamic terrorists because it has the bigger guns. Rather than evaluating the nature of a conflict and the values of both sides, the pacifists score every war based on firepower.
While the left likes to indulge in stereotypes of gun-toting rednecks and bomb-brandishing generals, the only people who judge the worth of a man by his weapon are the pacifists, the gun-fearers and gun-hiders who mythologize weapons as black agents of evil.
To believe that there is no such thing as constructive violence is to reject free will. Without accepting the necessity of constructive violence, there is no good and evil, only armed men and unarmed men. Without constructive violence, two boys playing cops and robbers in the schoolyard are not acting out a childish morality play, they are becoming desensitized to murder, and without it a child with a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun is on the way to being a school shooter.
If there is no such thing as constructive violence, then the police officer is not the solution to crime, he is part of the cycle of violence. And if that cycle of violence does not begin with a man choosing to use a gun for good or evil, then it must begin with the gun. The man becomes the object and the gun becomes the subject. American ICBMs become just as bad as Russian ballistic missiles. An Israeli soldier killing a suicide bomber is just as bad as the terrorist. There are no good guys with guns. To have a gun is to be the bad guy.
For decades the gun-control lobby has brandished assault rifles at press conferences and spent more time describing their killing power than their manufacturers have. The rifle has been upgraded to the assault rifle and now, in the latest Orwellian vernacular used by the White House and the entire media pyramid beneath it, weapons of war.
The dreaded assault rifle or weapon of war or killing machine of mass death actually kills rather few Americans. The average shooter doesn’t bring an AR-15 to a Chicago gangland dispute. Despite the number of these weapons in private hands, most of the killing takes place with handguns in the same parts of the country where large amounts of illegal drugs are sold, women trafficked and stores robbed.
Shootings in America are not caused by guns, they are caused by crime. Guns really do not walk off store shelves and go on killing sprees. That’s what criminals are for. But the trouble with that discussion is that it takes us into moral territory. Talking about guns is easy, talking about souls is not. If guns don’t kill people, then we have to ask the difficult question of what does kill people.
It’s a bigger question than just Adam Lanza pulling the trigger in a classroom full of children. It is a big question that encompasses the Nazi gas chambers and the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking and September 11. It is a question as big as all of human history.
Pacifists once used to be able to address such questions, but they have become obsessed with the technology of violence, rather than the spiritual origin of violence. And the technology of violence is largely beside the point. Guns do not motivate people to kill. Nor do they represent that much of a quantum increase in death.
Some of history’s worst massacres happened long before firearms became useful for more than scaring off peasants. The heavily armed Americans of the 50s had lower per capita murder rates than medieval London. It isn’t the gun that makes the killer. It’s not the hand that kills, but the mind.
The gun-free society has little interest in individuals. Its technocratic philosopher-kings want big and comprehensive solutions. Their answer to gun violence is to feed a horror of guns. Their answer to obesity is to ban sodas. Their solutions invariably miss the point by treating people like objects and objects like people.
In the Middle Ages, rats were put on trial for eating crops. Today we put guns on trial for killing people. The left has tried to reduce people to economics, to class and then race, gender and sexual orientation. It has done its best to reduce people to the sum of their parts and then to tinker with those parts and it has failed badly. The best testimony of its profound spiritual failure is that the worst pockets of gun violence are in urban areas that have been under the influence of their sociologists, urban planners, psychologists, social justice activists, community organizers and political rope-pullers for generations. And what have those areas brought forth except malaise, despair, blight and murder?
Banning guns will do as much for those areas as banning drugs did. It is not the shadow of the gun that has fallen over Chicago, but an occlusion of the spirit. Social services have had generations to save the city and they have failed because the technocracy can reach the body, but it cannot reach the soul.
The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.
Unwishing the gun brings us back to the sword. Unwishing the sword brings us back to the spear. Unwishing the spear brings us back to the stone club. And what then? When every weapon that ever existed or will exist is undone, all that remains is the deadliest weapon of all. The mind of man.
The gun, the sword, the spear and the club took countless lives and saved countless lives. Civilization has always balanced on a future made possible by little boys playing cops and robbers and playing with little green army men. They can either grow up to be the protectors of the future or the frightened men who will stand aside and do nothing when they hear the screams begin to come because they have been told that all violence is evil.
“…burned into my memory is the Sunday evening when my father was beaten with a tire iron on the street in front of our home, and in front of us, his four little children. Those three young white men were never caught...when my father, with his surgically reconstructed eye socket and jaw, was released from the hospital and returned home, he did something he never once considered when we lived in the projects. He bought a gun….My sense of security did not come from the Pittsburgh police, or from the law. My sense of security came from my father, and his gun."
G. Marcus Cole Professor at Law, Stanford University "Taking Guns away from the law abiding many puts too much power in the hands of an ill-intentioned few."
Star Parker
A Florida state Senator proposed a bill Saturday that would require an individual to take anger management classes before being allowed to buy ammunition.
Democrat state Sen. Audrey Gibson tried to explain her ludicrous thinking that an individual should have to complete anger management classes every 10 years in order to buy ammunition.
“This is not about guns. This is about ammunition and not only for the safety of the general community, but also for the safety of law enforcement,” Gibson said, adding, “It’s about getting people to think, really, about how much ammunition they need.”
New York State Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin revealed other measures that were removed from the final bill that was eventually signed into law.
These 15 measures were pulled from the final bill: 1. Confiscation of "assault weapons"
2. Confiscation of ten round clips
3. Statewide database for ALL Guns
4. Continue to allow pistol permit holder's information to be replaced to the public
5. Label semiautomatic shotguns with more than 5 rounds or pistol grips as "assault weapons”
6. Limit the number of rounds in a magazine to 5 and confiscation and forfeiture of banned magazines
7. Limit possession to no more than two (2) magazines
8. Limit purchase of guns to one gun per person per month
9. Require re-licensing of all pistol permit owners
10. Require renewal of all pistol permits every five years
11. State issued pistol permits
12. Micro-stamping of all guns in New York State
13. Require licensing of all gun ammo dealers
14. Mandatory locking of guns at home
15. Fee for licensing, registering weapons
This past Friday [2-15-2013] my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, to bring attention to the importance of rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun.
Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia, and from the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently underway to limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense.
Why would an organization like CURE, whose mission focuses on the relevance of American values of faith and freedom to minorities, be so concerned about guns?
Because, as conservative black Americans, we know that the soul of America is kept alive with the free flow of the oxygen of freedom. And we know that when that flow is interrupted in any way, the group that suffers first and most are blacks.
New gun control initiatives coming from our President and from Democrats in congress to respond to a highly publicized tragedy by wanting to expand the power of government and limit the freedom of citizens comes as no surprise.
There is no problem facing America today that liberals do not believe should be solved by more government and less freedom. And liberals are consistent and predictable in their indifference to facts and experience that show whenever they do succeed in growing government and limiting freedom, they make matters worse, not better.
A substantial body of research already shows that gun controls empower criminals and weaken law-abiding citizens.
As John Lott, former chief economist of the US Sentencing Commission, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which three or more people have been killed since at least 1950 have occurred in a place where people are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”
Regarding black reality, blacks are the least armed, least protected and defended, and the most assaulted citizens in our country.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of whites and 16 percent of blacks say that they have a pistol or rifle at home.
And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period 1980 to 2008, “Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and eight times more likely to commit a homicide.”
Law abiding black citizens live under siege in crime ridden urban centers. Somehow they are supposed to buy the logic that giving more power to those in law enforcement already charged with maintaining order but don’t, while stripping down the freedoms of those that do obey the law, will make them better off?
In a Pew Research Center survey in 2009, 46 percent of whites compared to 24 percent of blacks said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the local police to enforce the law.
Can anyone whom God has blessed with a brain actually think that universal background checks will keep guns out of the hands of gang thugs? Or that these same checks, in which some past legal infraction might nullify a gun application, will not result in even fewer urban law abiding blacks obtaining a weapon for protection?
Perhaps even worse than another make-pretend big government “answer” that will not only not solve a problem, but will make it worse, gun control initiatives mask over the issues that really need attention.
A culture that devalues personal responsibility, that fosters government dependence, that trashes traditional understanding of sex, marriage, and family, and that bans these traditional values from our public schools and our public life.
Americans of all backgrounds must fight yet another misguided liberal attempt to undermine our personal freedom and sap the vitality of our nation.
In addressing a crowd at the 2013 Western Hunting and Conservation Expo in Salt Lake City, Utah, NRA CEO and EVP Wayne LaPierre says that universal background checks are at the heart of the Obama administration's anti-gun agenda. While that may sound reasonable, background checks are aimed at one thing — registering your guns. "When another tragic 'opportunity' presents itself," says LaPierre, "that registry will be used to confiscate your guns."
Gun Control is Genocide. Why? Because throughout history, citizen disarmament has always been a precursor of mass genocide carried out by government gone bad. The term for it is "democide."
In the last century, governments have murdered 262 million people -- far more than have died on the battlefield in all the wars combined. Government becomes extremely dangerous when it controls all the firepower while the citizenry controls none. This imbalance of power leads to genocide.
The Second Amendment is the one right that defends all other rights.
Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder."
His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the inflictions of people working for governments than have died in battle.
Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, was criticized for comments he made Monday in defense of a bill to prevent concealed weapon carry on college campuses. From a published video:
“There are some gender inequities on college campuses. This is true. And universities have been faced with that situation for a long time. That’s why we have call boxes. That’s why we have safe zones. That’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re going to be shooting at. And you don’t know, if you feel like you’re going to be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around, or if you feel like you’re in trouble and when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop, pop around at somebody.”
Malkin said she has seen similar passive defense recommendations on other colleges’ websites, such as Oregon State University, State University of New York and University of Wisconsin. But advising women to arm themselves is a self-defense tip Malkin said is missing.
“It’s this nanny-state paternalism that I think is extremely dangerous to women,” Malkin said. “The idea that women can’t be trusted to make their own self-defense choices, that was the message that Joe Salazar sent, and it’s the message that a lot of these anti-gun college administrators send.”
Malkin said she supports concealed carry on campuses and wants to make sure her own daughter is comfortable protecting herself with a gun.
“I support freedom of choice when it comes to self-defense methods,” she said. “Unlike a lot of these democratic men, I don’t think women should only have whistles, call boxes and ball-point pens to defend themselves against violent sexual predators.”
At the 37th Annual National Wild Turkey Federation Convention and Sport Show in Nashville, Tennessee, Cameron Gray talks to Jessie Duff, world champion shooter, and co-host of "Friends of NRA TV" on Outdoor Channel.
In the 1940’s and 50’s, famed Author George Orwell surmised that both the English language and civilized society were in decline.
After a press conference held last week by Emeryville, California Police Chief Ken James, it’s easy to see a decline in both language and critical thinking skills in our country. And as Orwell thought, indeed civilized society may very well be in jeopardy.
It happened on February 14th. Taking to the microphones and cameras in his suburban San Francisco community, Chief James stood at a podium with the requisite group of serious-looking, professionally dressed, pouty-faced people standing behind him (it appears that Emeryville Mayor Kurt Brinkman was one of them). In part, the Chief said “one issue that always boggles my mind is that the idea that a gun is a defensive weapon. That is a myth. A gun is not a defensive weapon.”
From there, Mr. James went on to say that “a gun is an offensive weapon used to intimidate and show power. Police officers don’t carry a gun as a defensive weapon to defend themselves or their other officers. They carry a gun to be able to do their job in a safe and effective manner and face any oppositions we may come upon. If it was a defensive measure, why did we lose 55 officers nationwide last year to gun violence? And unfortunately, in just the two months of this year so far, we have lost two officers to gun violence in the state of California alone.”
So, how shall we begin to analyze the logical fallacies here? Let’s start with this: a gun is an inanimate object. A gun doesn’t think; it doesn’t feel; it has no intentions or aspirations; and despite what the Emeryville Chief of Police says, a gun does not have “offensive” or “defensive” tendencies.
In this regard, guns and footballs share something in common. Neither a gun nor a football is “offensive” or “defensive” in its essence. Yet each of them can be utilized by a human being for either offensive or defensive purposes. In short, whether a gun or a football is used for offensive or defensive purposes depends on who possesses it.
Having established this, consider these words again: “a gun is an offensive weapon used to intimidate and show power. Police officers don’t carry a gun as a defensive weapon to defend themselves or their other officers. They carry a gun to be able to do their job in a safe and effective manner and face any oppositions we may come upon.”
Really, Mr. James? I won’t bother doing “grammar police” work here (“oppositions” is not a word, and placeing “we” and “they” as the subject of the same sentence is problematic as well).
But seriously, does Chief James believe his own definition of a gun? If a gun is nothing more than something used to “intimidate and show power,” then why would police officers carry them? And is it the role of police officers to “intimidate?” Is it ever the job of a cop to “show power?”
I would answer both these questions with an emphatic “yes.” At times police officers absolutely need to “show power” and to appear intimidating in the face of lawless threats, and I suspect that most cops, if they were honest, would agree.
Yet James probably would not want to publicly say “our job as police officers is to intimidate” – especially not in California’s very left-wing Bay Area – because he would steer himself in to yet another public relations debacle, appearing as though he’s making excuses for police officers displaying “excessive force.”
But if James’ assertions are true, and a gun is merely something used to “intimidate and show power,” and can never be used for defensive purposes, then police officers should abandon them immediately. Law enforcement officers should be about the business of defending property, themselves, and the citizens they serve. If a gun isn’t helpful for those types of efforts, as Chief James insists, then it’s time for his police force to hand them in.
And here’s another implication of Chief James’ illogical remarks: If a gun was really something to be used for defensive purposes, then cops would never get killed. Well, in a perfect world, maybe this would be true. But in the real and imperfect world in which we all live (and this would include Chief James), even the best defensive plans sometimes are insufficient to save a life.
I mean no disrespect here to law enforcement officers, or to Chief James. On the contrary, I respect the profession of law enforcement enough to point out the recklessness of this man’s words.
I also realize that we live in a time when logic, critical thinking, communication, and the ability to draw inferences and to consider the implications of one’s words are skills that are in short supply. Yet the demand for them has, perhaps, never been greater in our nation’s history.
A gun in the hands of a criminal is a dangerous thing. The power of law enforcement in the hands of people who can’t think or speak logically is, perhaps, even more so.
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog If you're the biblically minded sort, then the trouble began when a jealous Cain clubbed Abel to death, but if you're evolutionarily minded, then it's a 'chicken and egg' question. Violence had no beginning, except perhaps in the Big Bang, it was always here, coded into the DNA. If people are just grown-up animals, more articulate versions of the creatures who eat each other's young, and sometimes their own young, there is as much use in wondering about the nature of evil as there is in trying to understand why a killer whale kills.
But debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pinhead is largely useless. We are not a particularly violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends a great deal of time wondering what kind of man would murder children. They probably live next door to him. For that matter, if your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to any number of war criminals, all the way from Eastern Europe to Asia to Africa.
The issue isn't really guns. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia.
The obsession with guns, rather than machetes, stone clubs, crossbows or that impressive weapon of mass death, the longbow (just ask anyone on the French side of the Battle of Agincourt) is really the obsession with human agency. It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in a crowded place, but about the precariousness of social control that the killing sprees imply.
Mass death isn't the issue. After September 11, the same righteous folks calling for the immediate necessity of gun control were not talking about banning planes or Saudis, they were quoting statistics about how many more people die of car accidents each year than are killed by terrorists. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; three thousand deaths can always be minimized by comparing them to some even larger statistic.
The gun issue is the narrative. It's not about death or children; it's about control. It's about confusing object and subject. It's about guns that shoot people and people that are irrevocably tugged into pulling the trigger because society failed them, corporations programmed them and not enough kindly souls told them that they loved them.
Mostly it's about people who are sheltered from the realities of human nature trying to build a shelter big enough for everyone. A Gun Free Zone where everyone is a target and tries to live under the illusion that they aren't. A society where everyone is drawing unicorns on colored notepaper while waiting under their desks for the bomb to fall.
After every shooting there are more zero tolerance policies in schools that crack down on everything from eight-year olds making POW POW gestures with their fingers to honor students bringing Tylenol and pocket knives to school. And then another shooting happens and then another one and they wouldn't happen if we just had more zero tolerance policies for everyone and everything.
But evil just can't be controlled. Not with the sort of zero tolerance policies that confuse object with subject, which ban pocket knives and finger shootings to prevent real shootings. That brand of control isn't authority, it's authority in panic mode believing that if it imposes total zero tolerance control then there will be no more school shootings. And every time the dumb paradigm is blown to bits with another shotgun, then the rush is on to reinforce it with more total zero control tolerance.
Zero tolerance for the Second Amendment makes sense. If you ban all guns, except for those in the hands of the 708,000 police officers, the 1.5 million members of the armed forces, the countless numbers of security guards, including those who protect banks and armored cars, the bodyguards of celebrities who call for gun control, not to mention park rangers, ambulance drivers in the ghetto and any of the other people who need a gun to do their job, then you're sure to stop all shootings.
So long as none of those millions of people, or their tens of millions of kids, spouses, parents, grandchildren, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates and anyone else who has access to them and their living spaces, carries out one of those shootings.
But this isn't really about stopping shootings; it's about controlling when they happen. It's about making sure that everyone who has a gun is in some kind of chain of command. It's about the belief that the problem isn't evil, but agency, that if we make sure that everyone who has guns is following orders, then control will be asserted and the problem will stop. Or if it doesn't stop, then at least there will be someone higher up in the chain of command to blame. Either way authority is sanctified, control or the illusion of it, maintained.
We'll never know the full number of people who were killed by Fast and Furious. We'll never know how many were killed by Obama's regime change operation in Libya, with repercussions in Mali and Syria. But everyone involved in that was following orders. There was no individual agency, just agencies. No lone gunman who just decided to go up to a school and shoot kids. There were orders to run guns to Mexico and the cartel gunmen who killed people with those guns had orders to shoot. There was nothing random or unpredictable about it. Or as the Joker put it, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."
Gun control is the assertion that the problem is not the guns; it's the lack of a controlling authority for all those guns. It's the individual. A few million people with little sleep, taut nerves and PTSD are not a problem so long as there is someone to give them orders. A hundred million people with guns and no orders is a major problem. Historically though it's millions of people with guns who follow orders who have been more of a problem than millions of people with guns who do not.
Moral agency is individual. You can't outsource it to a government and you wouldn't want to. The bundle of impulses, the codes of character, the concepts of right and wrong, take place at the level of the individual. Organizations do not sanctify this process. They do not lift it above its fallacies, nor do they even do a very good job of keeping sociopaths and murderers from rising high enough to give orders. Organizations are the biggest guns of all, and some men and women who make Lanza look like a man of modestly murderous ambitions have had their fingers on their triggers and still do.
Gun control will not really control guns, but it will give the illusion of controlling people, and even when it fails those in authority will be able to say that they did everything that they could short of giving people the ability to defend themselves.
We live under the rule of organizers, community and otherwise, whose great faith is that the power to control men and their environment will allow them to shape their perfect state into being, and the violent acts of lone madmen are a reminder that such control is fleeting, that utopia has its tigers, and that attempting to control a problem often makes it worse by removing the natural human crowdsourced responses that would otherwise come into play.
The clamor for gun control is the cry of sheltered utopians believing that evil is a substance as finite as guns, and that getting rid of one will also get rid of the other. But evil isn't finite and guns are as finite as drugs or moonshine whiskey, which is to say that they are as finite as the human interest in having them is. And unlike whiskey or heroin, the only way to stop a man with a gun is with a gun.
People do kill people and the only way to stop people from killing people is by killing them first. To a utopian this is a moral paradox that invalidates everything, but to everyone else, it's just life in a world where evil is a reality, not just a word.
Anyone who really hankers after a world without guns would do well to try the 14th Century, the 1400 years ago or the 3400 years ago variety, which was not a nicer place for lack of guns, and the same firepower that makes it possible for one homicidal maniac to kill a dozen unarmed people, also makes it that much harder to recreate a world where one man in armor can terrify hundreds of peasants in boiled leather armed with sharp sticks.
The longbow was the first weapon to truly begin to level the playing field, putting serious firepower in the hands of a single man. In the Battle of Crecy, a few thousand English and Welsh peasants with longbows slew thousands of French knights and defeated an army of 30,000. Or as the French side described it, "It is a shame that so many French noblemen fell to men of no value." Crecy, incidentally, also saw one of the first uses of cannon.
Putting miniature cannons in the hands of every peasant made the American Revolution possible. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would have meant very little without an army of ordinary men armed with weapons that made them a match for the superior organization and numbers of a world power.
At the Battle of Bunker Hill, 2,400 American rebels faced down superior numbers and lost the hill, but inflicted over a 1,000 casualties, including 100 British commissioned officers killed or wounded, leading to General Clinton's observation, "A few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America."
This was done with muskets, the weapon that gun control advocates assure us was responsible for the Second Amendment because the Founders couldn't imagine all the "truly dangerous" weapons that we have today.
And yet would Thomas Jefferson, the abiding figurehead of the Democratic Party, who famously wrote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants", really have shuddered at the idea of peasants with assault rifles, or would he have grinned at the playing field being leveled some more?
The question is the old elemental one about government control and individual agency. And tragedies like the one that just happened take us back to the equally old question of whether individual liberty is a better defense against human evil than the entrenched organizations of government.
Do we want a society run by the flower of chivalry, who commit atrocities according to a plan for a better society, or by peasants with machine guns? The flower of chivalry can promise us a utopian world without evil, but the peasant with a machine gun promises us that we can protect ourselves from evil when it comes calling.
It isn't really guns that the gun controllers are afraid of, it's a country where individual agency is still superior to organized control, where things are unpredictable because the trains don't run on time and orders don't mean anything. But chivalry is dead. The longbow and the cannon killed it and no charge of the light brigade can bring it back. And we're better for it.
Evil may find heavy firepower appealing, but the firepower works both ways. A world where the peasants have assault rifles is a world where peasant no longer means a man without any rights. And while it may also mean the occasional brutal shooting spree, those sprees tend to happen in the outposts of utopia, the gun-free zones with zero tolerance for firearms. An occasional peasant may go on a killing spree, but a society where the peasants are all armed is also far more able to stop such a thing without waiting for the men-at-arms to be dispatched from the castle.
An armed society spends more time stopping evil than contemplating it. It is the disarmed society that is always contemplating it as a thing beyond its control. Helpless people must find something to think about while waiting for their lords to do something about the killing. Instead of doing something about it themselves, they blame the agency of the killer in being free to kill, rather than their own lack of agency for being unable to stop him.
The pundits say that gun owners are a smaller-than-ever minority, and that a majority of American homes are “gun-free.” (I hate that phrase, “gun-free.” No, guns are not vermin. Anything which sounds that helpless as “gun-free” can’t be A Good Thing.)
