Quote of the day—Dan Gross

There are few Americans in history who are as directly responsible for saving as many lives as Jim.

Dan Gross
President of the Brady Campaign
From Gun control man’s legacy James Brady, former press secretary under Reagan, dies
[I am willing to concede there are almost certainly some lives saved by the Brady Act. But what Gross and others refuse to recognize is that those lives saved come at the cost of other lives lost.

The chilling effect of getting your name put on government list prevents some people in high risk situations from getting the self-defense tools they need. Why be afraid of being put on a government list? Most governments are hostile to gun owners and treat them with great suspicion and sometimes murder them without cause. If you were gay would you register as a gay with the government? Or would you willingly put you name on a list of Jews, Muslims, or couples in mixed race marriages? You might think it would be okay at a particular place and time but in the big picture things can change quite rapidly and lists which were “promised” to be held in strict confidence end up getting into the worst of hands.

There were people murdered during the waiting period, required during the first few years of the Brady Act, before they could possess the gun they so desperately needed. Did Gross include them in his calculations? Did Gross do any calculations at all? My guess is that his only metric was the number of sales blocked. This was regardless of how many of those sales blocked represented a death due to someone who was unable to get a gun to defend themselves with. He didn’t bother to research the question at all, let alone do the subtraction in the expression “Lives Saved” minus “Lives Lost”.

Even after a dozen years to collect and study data criminologist still can’t find conclusive evidence the Brady Act, on the whole, saved any lives.

No. Gross doesn’t really care about the truth. Gross is simply continuing the long history of a culture of deception within the Brady Campaign. They have to. It’s all they have.—Joe]

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10 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Dan Gross

  1. “There are few Americans in history who are as directly responsible for saving as many lives as Jim.”

    It wouldn’t be so bad if this were merely the flattery of a eulogy, but Mr. Gross misapprehension of the truth believes there is a metric somewhere.
    He should get in as much trouble over this as Trent Lott did over his flattery of an old man, Strom Thurmond on the occasion of Mr. Thurmond’s 100th birthday, but he won’t.

  2. Simple metric, simple math.

    [murder rate] * [number of blocked sales] == [people who died because of the Brady Bill]

    4.8/100,000 * 2 million == 96 people dead because of a NICS denial

    Hysterical headline you’ll never see: “Late Brady’s Namesake Law Killed 100 People!”

    Hey, if it saves just one life.

    For teh Childrenz!

    (Yes, I know it’s absurdly oversimplified and therefore invalid, but unlike Dan Gross, at least I have an actual metric.)

  3. Hmm. I thought he was referring to all the people, like me, who decided to get their first gun because of the Brady Bill. Since the Bradys, Clinton and Obama have been fantastic gun salesmen, you have to give them the credit for saving lives by encouraging so many people to get armed. And that has snow-balled in the form of all the states since Clinton was elected that have gone from “no issue” or “May Issue” to “Shall Issue”. I submit that that number of lives saved would vastly exceed Archer’s ~100 deaths figure.

    By that metric, Bush 43 would have been responsible for more deaths by failing to inspire to people to buy guns. We were doing gun shows duting that time between Clinton and B43, and after the 2000 election it was like flipping a switch. People relaxed, the gun shows became losing propositions for us practically overnight, and we quit doing them. It only picked up again after 9/11.

  4. That is, assuming we care more about statistics than liberty and basic principles.

  5. When it comes to saving lives, Norman Borlaug would beg to differ.

    Once again gun grabbers show their arrogance, ignorance, and myopia.

  6. “If you were gay would you register as a gay with the government?”

    Apparently we are about to find out. It looks like this will be voluntary (for now…)

      • No kidding. The money quote:

        “…We need to be able to track this population.”

        Also, why does it always seem to be New York that does these things?

  7. “Directlty responsible”? Unless he’s been going around pulling people from burning buildings, performing emergency tracheotomies, or dropping criminals with his CCW, Gross meant to say “indirectly”. This is almost as big a pet peeve of mine as the whole “literally/figuratively” thing.

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