Well, first let’s remove the politics and truthfully talk about gun laws, about gun violence. After the Newtown shooting President Obama commissioned the Center for Disease Control to research gun violence and offer solutions. And the study was completed this summer and it just might make you rethink your stance, your view, on the issue. It did for me.
Don Lemon
September 19, 2013
REALITY CHECK: Let’s Talk About Guns
[You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.*—Joe]
The notion of CDC “studying” this stuff translates to “we think gun ownership is a disease”. Nice folks.
“And armed with just our cellphones, our fists and our wits, are we setting ourselves up to be sitting ducks, defenseless in the face of a sane, or an insane person, armed to the teeth and bent on killing.” — that’s an excellent comment. But I am utterly baffled how to square that with the lines that follow it. Does anyone have any idea? (If he argued, as Neil Smith does, that NRA is actually a gun control organization, I could understand his closing remarks. But that is not his argument.)
” President Obama commissioned the Center for Disease Control to research gun violence and offer solutions.”
In other news he commissioned the national Automotive Maintenance and Repair Association to research heart disease and surgical solutions.
So most gun deaths are suicides … So what?
These talking heads seem to think that people intent on killing themselves won’t do it some other way (drug overdose, hanging, jumping off of a high place, etc.) if their gun was taken away? It doesn’t stop them in Japan where the suicide rate is much higher than here and privately owned guns are virtually nonexistent.
After suicides, the VAST majority of murders by guns are committed by black or Hispanic gang members in a small collection of democrat-run shithole cities like Chicago, DC, Detroit, Baltimore, Philly, Camden, just to name a few of the biggies, where onerous gun control has been the practice for decades.
If you removed the gangbanger murders from the top handful of US cities, our gun murder rate would plummet from near the top to near the bottom of the list of first world countries. (Blame the democrats and their failed policies, which as pointed out in the Obamacare thread above, always seem to have exactly the opposite effect their proponents claim to be the goal.)
There is also a phenomenon that is sort of analogous to “opportunity cost”, in that they never mention, let alone account for the fact that the number of lives saved and violent crimes thwarted by righteous defensive use of guns DWARFS the rather modest number of lives taken by criminal misuse of guns.
And, that doesn’t even account for the fact that a significant majority of those killed through the criminal misuse of guns are, themselves, criminals who criminally misuse guns.
I’m arguing that you should divide the number of lives saved and violent crimes prevented by righteous defense of guns by the number of INNOCENT, LAW-ABIDING VICTIMS killed by criminal misuse of guns to determine the societal benefit ratio. (I’m saying that scumbag gangbangers with extensive records who are killed by other scumbag gangbangers in gang warfare shouldn’t count towards reducing the societal benefit result because they don’t benefit society, and I think that’s generously neutral with respect to their disposition. I believe it would actually be reasonable to argue that the calculation be arranged so that scumbags killed (either by law-abiding citizens defending themselves OR by other scumbags in pursuit of their criminal behaviors) should actually increase the societal benefit result by their removal from society.
That should be “righteous defensive use of guns” above, not “righteous defense of guns”, just to clarify.
As Neil Schulman points out in his excellent book “Stopping Power”:
“In a study by Rich et al reported in the March 1990 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry, Canadians who wanted to commit suicide but found guns harder to come by due to recent gun control instead jumped off bridges. The unavailability of guns was statistically irrelevant. Further, in Japan it’s almost impossible for anyone to get hold of a gun, yet twice as many Japanese kill themselves than Americans.”
The rate of suicide depends on the number of people who get sufficiently messed up that they want to stop living. The sort of means available to them makes no significant difference.
Looking at the “gun death” statistics a level deeper shows that if we were to eliminate the “gun control” centers of the U.S. – Chicago, Washington D.C., New York City, all of California, etc.; coincidentally also all urban Democrat-controlled areas – as statistical outliers/anomalies, our “gun death” rate falls well below the international average (can’t find the source link … sorry).
Yep, the areas of the U.S. derogatorily referred to as “flyover country” have the “laxest” gun laws, but they have the lowest crime/murder rates. It’s almost like packing strangers into living spaces like sardines and making them share resources has a bigger effect on murder rates than the availability of legal guns. Who’d’a thunk it?
The way to put it: “…have the ‘laxest’ gun laws and THEREFORE have the lowest crime/murder rates”.
Dangerous territory there. We can show a correlation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a causative effect – even though we like to think it does.
I honestly don’t think the gun laws have as much direct affect over the murder rates as either side claims. I think that factors uniquely associated with urban areas – primarily the crowding, anonymity (because there are simply too many close neighbors for any normal person to get to know them all), relative poverty, joblessness en masse, etc., and secondarily social factors such as the growing number of single-parent households (unwed parents and fatherless children, affected by death/incarceration of young baby-daddies) – are more direct causes of high violent crime and murder rates. Combine all that with leftist policies that further both the breakdown of the urban family unit and the associated dependence on the State, and the “common-sense, reasonable gun restrictions” becomes almost a non-factor. It’s merely coincidental that “gun control” is another plank in the leftist platform.
Just my $0.02.
There’s a lot more to the story than correlation. Read “More guns, less crime” first, and then you’ll be able to offer valid critique.
One data point (from that book): in interviews, convicted robbers who preyed on Florida tourists some years ago were asked “why pick on tourists?” Answer: “because they are unlikely to be armed.”