The great Thomas Sowell, on Gun-Control Ignorance – How many times do the same arguments need to be refuted?:
The key fallacy of so-called gun-control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun-control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun-control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Places and times with the strongest gun-control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.
The rate of gun ownership is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand-gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
Why the gun is civilization.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
…People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
We know how to stop mass shootings:
If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.
Bill Whittle’s essay, Freedom, which, I’m happy to brag, was birthed as a comment on my blog over 10 years ago but despite that (haha) is brilliant:
Assume for a moment you could vaporize every gun on the planet. Would crime go away? Or would ruthless, physically strong gangs of young men be essentially able to roam free and predate at will?
The history of civilization shows time and time again how decent, sophisticated city dwellers amass wealth through cooperation and the division of labor — only to be victimized by ruthless gangs of raping, looting cutthroats who couldn’t make a fruit basket, sweeping down on them, murdering them and carting away the loot, to return a few years later, forever, ad infinitum. Vikings, Mongols, desperadoes of every stripe — they are a cancer on humanity, but there they are and there they have always been.
If civilization is worth having — and it is — then it has to be defended, because the restraining virtues of justice, compassion and respect for laws are products of that civilizing force and completely unknown to those who would do it harm.
Therefore, since I believe in this civilization, in its laws, science, art and medicine, I believe we must be prepared to defend it against what I feel no embarrassment for calling the Forces of Darkness. Those forces could be raiders on horseback, jackbooted Nazi murderers, ecstatic human bombs, or some kid blowing away a shopkeeper.
For the gun-ban argument to be convincing, you’d have to show me a time before shopkeepers were blown away, hacked away, pelted away or whatever the case may be. You would have to show me a time in history before the invention of the firearm, when crime and raiding and looting did not exist, when murders and rapes did not exist. We may lose 11,000 people to handguns a year. How many would we lose without any handguns, if murderers and rapists roamed free of fear, ignoring reprisal from citizens or police? I don’t know. You don’t know either. Maybe it’s a lot fewer people, and maybe, in a world where strength and ruthlessness trump all, it would be a far higher one.
You may argue that only the police should be allowed to carry guns. Consider this carefully. Do we really want to create an unelected subculture that views itself as so elite and virtuous as to be the only ones worthy of such power, trust and authority? Have we not clearly seen the type of people drawn to such exclusive positions of authority, and the attitudes and arrogance it promotes?
Furthermore, I can’t see any moral distinction between a policeman and a law-abiding citizen. Policemen are drawn from the ranks of law-abiding citizens. They are not bred in hydroponics tanks. They are expected to show restraint and use their weapon as a last resort. Millions upon millions of citizens, a crowd more vast than entire armies of police, do exactly this every day.
If all of these horrors had sprung up as a result of the invention of the handgun I’d be right there beside those calling for their destruction.
But clearly, this is not the case. In our cowboy past we used to say that “God created Man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” This is simple enough to understand. It means that a villager, let’s say a schoolteacher, can defeat a human predator who may have spent his entire life practicing the art of war. Firearms are what tipped the balance toward civilization by eliminating a lifetime spent studying swordplay or spear play or pointed-stick play. The bad guys have always used weapons and they always will. The simple truth about guns is that they are damn effective and even easier to operate. They level the playing field to the point where a woman has a chance against a gang of thugs or a police officer can control a brawl.
I don’t see how vaporizing all the guns in the world would remove crime or violence — history shows these have always been with us and show no signs of responding favorably to well-reasoned arguments or harsh language…
Please, people. Know facts. There are graphs and everything if words are too complicated:
Clearly, the U.S. had a higher homicide rate than Australia long before Australia enacted such strict gun control. But more crucially, the U.S. and Australia saw a similar reduction in homicides during the 1990s, while Australia was curtailing gun rights and the U.S. was expanding them.
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Why not overturn the 1st Amendment instead of the 2nd? Don’t you care about The Children?
Mass Shootings Require Curtailing Rights:
The time for action is now. The recent spate of mass shootings must finally spur us to do what must be done. We need press control. That’s right, the media is out of control and they are enabling and certainly promoting the sick bastards who are slaughtering innocents. The Founders could not have envisioned a 24/7 news cycle with blaring soundtracks, garish headlines, and a relentless, almost pornographic sensationalism. There is no doubt the sad souls who plot these horrors can picture their faces beaming from screens around the world. They gain a notoriety they could never achieve otherwise and the ghouls who give them a stage must bear their responsibility.
Back in the day, you had to take quill to parchment, or if you were doing mass media you could run off a couple of hundred pamphlets. The high capacity, assault weapons of cable news and the internet were as unimagined in colonal times as nuclear weapons. The Bill of Rights is not suicide pact and an unabridged press does not mean very channel should be as well-armed as the New York Times. Semi-automatic handguns have been around since the 1890s but school shootings are a much more recent development. What has changed since then? Instant fame, or more properly infamy, that’s what and it is time to put some common sense controls on the folks who give these losers a chance to live forever.
Even super-liberal Roger Ebert had a moment of clarity several years ago on this issue:
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them.
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Jeff Goldstein, An open call to gun-control advocates and gun supporters:
It’s time to stop being afraid of the press and the left and the academics who wish to mold us and stand up for principle by forcing facts into the debate.
And it’s time for gun control advocates to make their case rationally and logically, because once their arguments are stripped of a knee-jerk emotionalist appeal, they cease to make any kind of coherent sense. Suggesting to me that they are merely opportunistic and have no connection whatsoever to wanting to keep people safe. Rather, they want removed what they don’t understand simply because they don’t wish to understand what it is they want removed.
As it’s a natural right of mine they’re hoping to take away, the onus needs to be placed on them to make the case — and then take the issue to the states for a constitutional amendment battle.
Finally, one of the longest but best pieces I’ve read in the last few days, worth every moment for any gun-control advocate who wishes to act on facts not feelings, here’s the wonderful Larry Correia’s Opinion on Gun Control:
Australia had a mass shooting and instituted a massive gun ban and confiscation (a program which would not work here, which I’ll get to, but let’s run with it anyway.). As was pointed out to me on Facebook, they haven’t had any mass shootings since. However, they fail to realize that they didn’t really have any mass shootings before either. You need to keep in mind that mass shooting are horrific headline grabbing statistical anomalies. You are far more likely to get your head caved in by a local thug while he’s trying to steal your wallet, and that probably won’t even make the evening news.
And violent crime is up in Australia. A cursory Google search will show articles about the increase in violent crime and theft, but then other articles pooh-pooing these stats as being insignificant and totally not related to the guns.
So then we’ve got England, where they reacted swiftly after a mass shooting, banned and confiscated guns, and their violent crime has since skyrocketed. Their stats are far worse than Australia, and they are now one of the more dangerous countries to live in the EU. Once again, cursory Google search will show articles with the stats, and other articles saying that those rises like totally have nothing to do with regular folks no longer being able to defend themselves… Sensing a trend yet?
And then we’ve got South Africa, which instituted some really hard core gun bans and some extremely strict controls, and their crime is now so high that it is basically either no longer tracked or simply not countable. But obviously, the totally unbiased news says that has absolutely nothing to do with people no longer being able to legally defend themselves.
Then you’ve got countries like Norway, with extremely strict gun control. Their gun control laws are simply incomprehensible to half of Americans. Not only that, they are an ethnically and socially homogenous, tiny population, well off country, without our gang violence or drug problems. Their gun control laws are draconian by our standards. They make Chicago look like Boise. Surely that level of gun control will stop school shootings! Except of course for 2011 when a maniac killed 77 and injured 242 people, a body count which is absurdly high compared to anything which has happened in America.
…You may think that the 2nd Amendment is archaic, outdated, and totally pointless. However, approximately half of the country disagrees with you, and of them, a pretty large portion is fully willing to shoot somebody in defense of it.
We’ve already seen that your partial bans are stupid and don’t do anything, so unless you are merely a hypocrite more interested in style rather than results, the only way to achieve your goal is to come and take the guns away. So let’s talk about confiscation.
They say that there are 80 million gun owners in America. I personally think that number is low for a few reasons. The majority of gun owners I know, when contacted for a phone survey and asked if they own guns, will become suspicious and simply lie. Those of us who don’t want to end like England or Australia will say that we lost all of our guns in a freak canoe accident.
Guns do not really wear out. I have perfectly functioning guns from WWI, and I’ve got friends who have still useable firearms from the 1800s. Plus we’ve been building more of them this entire time. There are more guns than there are people in America, and some of us have enough to arm our entire neighborhood.
But for the sake of math, let’s say that there are only 80 million gun owners, and let’s say that the government decides to round up all those pesky guns once and for all. Let’s be generous and say that 90% of the gun owners don’t really believe in the 2nd Amendment, and their guns are just for duck hunting. Which is what politicians keep telling us, but is actually rather hilarious when you think about how the most commonly sold guns in America are the same detachable magazine semiautomatic rifles I talked about earlier.
So ten percent refuse to turn their guns in. That is 8 million instantaneous felons. Let’s say that 90% of them are not wanting to comply out of sheer stubbornness. Let’s be super generous and say that 90% of them would still just roll over and turn their guns when pressed or legally threatened. That leaves 800,000 Americans who are not turning their guns in, no matter what. To put that in perspective there are only about 700,000 police officers in the whole country.
Let’s say that these hypothetical 10% of 10% are willing to actually fight to keep their guns. Even if my hypothetical estimate of 800,000 gun nuts willing to fight for their guns is correct, it is still 97% higher than the number of insurgents we faced at any one time in Iraq, a country about the size of Texas.
However, I do honestly believe that it would be much bigger than 10%. Once the confiscations turned violent, then it would push many otherwise peaceful people over the edge. I saw somebody on Twitter post about how the 2nd Amendment is stupid because my stupid assault rifles are useless against drones… That person has obviously never worked with the people who build the drones, fly the drones, and service the drones. I have. Where to you think the majority of the US military falls on the political spectrum exactly? There’s a reason Mitt Romney won the military vote by over 40 points, and it wasn’t because of his hair.
And as for those 700,000 cops, how many of them would side with the gun owners? All the gun nuts, that’s for sure. As much as some people like to complain about the gun culture, many of the people you hire to protect you, and darn near all of them who can shoot well, belong to that gun culture. And as I hear people complain about the gun industry, like it is some nebulous, faceless, all powerful corporate thing which hungers for war and anarchy, I just have to laugh, because the gun industry probably has the highest percentage of former cops and former military of any industry in the country. My being a civilian was odd in the circles I worked in. The men and women you pay to protect you have honor and integrity, and they will fight for what they believe in.
So the real question the anti-gun, ban and confiscate, crowd should be asking themselves is this, how many of your fellow Americans are you willing to have killed in order to bring about your utopian vision of the future?
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Okay, enough links and quotes. It’s just that I’ve reached my limit with certain acquaintances in real life and on Facebook who are still asking some of the stupidest fucking questions I have ever heard, such as, “Why can’t we ban guns?” and “Why don’t we ban guns?” and “Are you seriously saying you will not give up your guns even while The Children die?”
Nevermind that I did “give up” my guns when I moved to Europe four years ago and have remained unarmed and unable to defend myself with anything other than my spindly arms attached to my 5’2″ skeleton, and yet somehow, mysteriously, England and Italy have not turned out to be crime-free utopias. Whatever. I don’t want to talk about Europe, and all my guns will be waiting for me when I finally get back to America because my dad has them. And he’s going to buy more for me in the next few weeks.
What I’m actually, sincerely most interested in at this point in this whole “discussion” is exactly why we all feel compelled to have a National Conversation all of a sudden because of these specific 20 children. I’m just trying to figure out the protocol – we are to ignore the more than 20,000 other children who die every day? Is that how it is? We are not going to have National Conversations, including talk of amending the Constitution itself, because of the several children who are murdered by their own parents every single passing day? Why not outlaw parents? They kill more innocent little kids than school shooters, by orders of magnitude. Why not outlaw, or even just put more “common-sense restrictions” on, car ownership or alcohol consumption? Have we all forgotten, or are we just not that interested in, the never-ending bloodbath of children from road accidents and beatings and drownings and skateboard/bike/playground accidents and I could go on and on and on. Don’t even get me started on the unfathomable universe of constant pain and suffering in children’s cancer wards or burn units that never seems to move President Obama to give speeches and shed tears on camera, or to attend funerals, and which certainly doesn’t move any of my Facebook friends to post pictures of candles and offer up their “thoughts and prayers” for the families.
I want to say “I don’t get it”, but I do get it: this kind of story is great for TV ratings, so it’s given 24/7 coverage. The hundreds of kids getting chemo this afternoon and who are probably going to die agonizing deaths in the next few months aren’t “exciting” and don’t get ratings or Presidential pressers or Tweets from celebrities. The media tells us to be upset about these particular 20 children, therefore we are, because we are well-trained and it feels great to go along with the crowd.
I don’t know about you but I find the whole thing incredibly revolting. The murder of those sweet little innocent kids was absolutely awful. Of course it was. But no more awful – and no more deserving of a National Conversation and new federal legislation – than the thousands of other heartbreaking child deaths on the same day and every day before that and every day since then, on into the future as far as our horrified eyes can see.