Quote of the day—EricNM

The country is awash in 300 million guns. Until that number actually reduces, rather than grows as the NRA wishes, our nation’s gun death rate will always be the highest of any developed nation. The only way to accomplish that is with some sort of gun buy-back and destruction program.

EricNM
October 2, 2017
Comment to Preventing Future Mass Shootings Like Las Vegas
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.

EricNM is delusional. It addition to “buy-backs” presuming facts not in evident (the government can’t “buy-back” some they never owned to begin with), there may be as many as 660 million guns in the hands of private citizens, voluntary “buy-backs” have been found to be ineffectual in our country every time they have been tried, and even if it were politically possible legislate mandatory confiscation the most likely result would be for the police and military to, at best, ignore such laws to infringe upon the inalienable right of the people to keep and bear arms.

There would also be a significant chance the surviving politicians would find themselves arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. But don’t expect delusional people break out of their alternate reality no matter what the evidence.—Joe]

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14 thoughts on “Quote of the day—EricNM

  1. Not only is the conclusion delusional, the starting premises are full of lies. For example “highest of any developed nation” — no, it’s middle of the pack. More importantly, the murder rate does not derive from the prevalence of guns in the hands of good people, but from the presence of bad people who may be armed with guns, knives, bats, or fists.
    So long as you hear politicians talk about “getting guns of the street”, as I hear every other day from the ones in Boston, you know they aren’t interested in solving the problem. Once they start saying “getting criminals off the street” I’ll start listening.

  2. America doesn’t have a gun death problem. America has a black crime problem. If you statistically remove black people from America, it becomes one of the 5 safest countries in the world in all categories.

    If we aren’t talking about removing black people to solve the problem, then we aren’t talking about removing guns to solve the problem either.

    • Except that it’s not a black crime problem either. It’s a fatherless young black male problem. And since we’re not going to get rid of black people any more than we’re going to get rid of personal firearms, for pretty much the same reasons, the remaining obvious solutions are fourfold:

      1, Immigration restriction, to stop backstabbing black fathers in the socioeconomic marketplace;
      2, Marriage and custody reform, to stop the pernicious government incentives destroying families regardless of race, but black families in particular;
      3, Deregulation, to encourage job creation in general, and for black fathers in particular, and finally;
      4, Vasalgel, to help rebuild the crippled foundation of the fundamental social contract between men and society, i.e. rewarding men with paternal certainty for the self-sacrificing, dirty, dangerous, deadly work almost exclusively assigned to them.

      I do take your basic point, Phelps, but it doesn’t really help anyone. It’s more about scoring points against the out-group than solving the damn problems.

      We can complain all we want about what the other side is saying but real, substantial, and above all *reliable* change only happens when people are offered a superior alternative.

      • The problem is, when your illegitimate birth rate is 77% and rising, the “fatherless” distinction is useless.

        And the point isn’t to play out-grouping, it’s to point out that the point of gun control IS outgrouping. They don’t care about guns. They love when the government has guns. They hate the kind of people who legally own guns. They hate conservatives, and that has to be the focus.

  3. One person can effectively wield one gun at a time. Obviously then, the number of guns is irrelevant.

    You can take two dozen guns along with you, but that will in no way increase the number of shots you can fire, and having to spend time and energy lugging the redundant guns along will probably reduce the number of shots you can fire.

    I’m beginning to wonder if a majority of Americans can understand something so simple.

    The other simple concept that doesn’t get through to the left is that people do illegal things. Ban this or ban that, and the law breakers will still do it or have it.

    It was suggested on one of the Brit news sites yesterday that the left concentrate on passing a law that makes it illegal to break the laws, such as murder. So you break the law against murder, and you’ve also broken the new law which outlaws law-breaking. That would be every bit as effective as any gun restriction.

    Here’s a starting premise that both the leftists and the so-called conservatives or even libertarians all share;
    We’ve been brainwashed into believing that government’s job is to take care of us and make us safe. That has nothing to do with the promise of “liberty and justice for all”.

    Liberty means the absence of official coercion by government. It also means you’re taking care of yourself. Justice means organized, predictable and certain retaliation against criminal (coercive) acts. It does NOT mean that such acts have been somehow eliminated from the world or that you’ll be safe, or that someone will be forced to feed you. Until you understand that, you’ll never be able to make sense of anything in politics– your delusions will leave you flailing around in contradiction, and promoting policies of failure.

    • On your starting comment, exactly. If people don’t understand this, perhaps this analogy would work: is a person who owns 10 cars a more dangerous driver than someone who owns one car?

    • When did Russia become a developed country? They’ve always been roughly 300 years behind the rest of Europe.

      • so about another century before they’re likely to start wrapping their heads around democratic forms of governance, then? that’d be nice. let’s hope they won’t be late.

  4. If this person is actually concerned about death rates from items, perhaps banning automobiles should be the focus. Vehicles kill scores of people and not a peep about it.

    How about illegal heroin? Could we start executing gang members who bring this poison into our communities? Seems like they should be first on the list for severe government action.

    Given we are awash in firearms, our criminal death rates involving them is actually very small. Major logic fail on the part of EricNM, but don’t let facts get in the way of the march toward totalitarianism.

  5. Until that number actually reduces, rather than grows as the NRA wishes, our nation’s gun death rate will always be the highest of any developed nation.

    Asserted, not proven. The hypothesis that more guns = more gun death is certainly testable, but we have to get some definitions straight first. Are we talking about civilian guns or all guns? For purposes of this test, are police civilians or not? Do justifiable gun homicides count? What about justifiable gun homicides at the hands of police? How do we classify cases where the justifiability of the homicide is unknown, or in dispute?

    Or, more likely, is this just a meaningless rhetorical catchphrase designed to make people reflexively nod their heads in agreement? They probably assume no testing is needed, or perhaps they are content with an indeterminate truth value. Or perhaps they would prefer to leave the truth value indeterminate rather than risk discovering something else.

    • In fact, I have a statistics PhD friend who has blown that assertion out of the water, and has already passed peer review and is awaiting publication. More guns reduce crime. Period.

      It will be interesting to see if she gets any press.

  6. Of course, the single significant feature in his reasoning for what constitutes a “developed nation” is fewer shooting deaths than the United States. If there are more, it isn’t a “developed nation”. Special definitions different from what people expect is key to his arguments holding up to scrutiny by true believers and the ignorant.

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