We used to fall into this trap as advocates when reporters would ask, ‘What would have stopped this shooting?’ We’d be trying our very best to say, ‘This policy would have.’ And that was the wrong answer because it’s not true. There’s no one policy that’s going to stop any shooting—it takes a multitude of solutions. Many times our movement would play into the NRA’s defeatist…attitude.
Brian Malte
August 21, 2019
Trump Thinks Background Checks Won’t Stop Shootings. He’s Wrong.
[Although isn’t not in the form of a direct quote Malte is also credited with:
For their part, gun control activists have learned that it’s better to steer clear of the debate over what caused a particularly horrific shooting, explains Brian Malte, who was a senior official at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—now known as Brady United—in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre.
What I conclude from this article is significantly different from what the author and those interviewed conclude.
What I conclude is that they admit to knowing that the “solutions” they push in response to a mass shooting could not possibly have prevented those deaths. They push for them anyway.
They are admitting they are not stupid. They are admitting they are not ignorant. They are admitting that it is a deliberate infringement of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms with no possibility of reducing the harm they claim to be so concerned about. They are admitting they are evil.
This can and should be used at their trials.—Joe]
Obviously, there’s no slippery slope. Once the anti-gunners find the perfect magic bullet law that will save just one life, they’ll stop and go back to whatever they were doing before infringing RKBA. Or not.
Strange how that “it would save one life it’s worth it” argument seems to disappear from the left’s vocabulary when the subject is CCW laws.
Because if they accept the principle to any extent, they’ll have to admit that at least 100,000 violent crimes are averted by armed self defense every year.
And by advocating to eliminated CCW, they are outright arguing for the completed victimization of at least 100,000 people per year. Assault through battery through outright murder, at minimum 100,000 more victims per year, nationally. At the high end, an order of magnitude more (for innumerate people, that means at about 10 to 33 times more, at which point you start rounding up to two orders of magnitude).
Gun control: achieving this is totally worth at least 100,000 more victims per year that aren’t me.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I did some more thinking on this as I went to get lunch: I can’t see how advocating for the end of CCW is anything but an absolute dick move.
Let’s think about what happens if they get their way.
A lot of people, 100K to 1.5M per year, according to the CDC, who previously could have defended themselves with a firearm (ergo, they are gun owners and CCWers), will be left with inferior options for self-defense, therefore substantially raising rate rate of completed crimes.
Amongst specifically the formerly self-defending community.
Taking away CCW does not measurably reduce the victimization rate among the non-self-defending population. As we have seen from the example of England, by eliminating any legal forms of effective self defense, the offending population is emboldened and the victimization rates across the whole population go up.
The lawful self-defense population and the offending population have almost no overlap, due to the former being entirely devoid of prohibited persons, and the latter being quite heavily populated with prohibited persons.
So, let me boil down the position of an anti-CCW advocate: “When I get what I want, my political enemies in this matter will be subjected to assault, rape and murder that they used to be able to stop. One-hundred-thousand to one-and-a-half-million people that disagree with me, per year, according to official government estimates, will suffer bodily harm if I get what I want, and I’m OK with that, if not actually gleeful.”
I’m going to assume that anti-CCW advocates have never actually thought about it that way, or had it portrayed that way to them. Because if they had, there’s really no way to avoid considering the possibility that they are the baddies.
Nice analysis.
It ties to the quote Neil Smith has on his blog: “Gun control is the idea that it’s better to see a woman dead in an alley, strangled with her own pantyhose, than to see her with a gun in her hand.”—T.D. Melrose
It also reminds me of an observation about the $15 minimum wave push. Since blue state wages are already close to that, such laws will have little effect there. But in “flyover country”, it would raise starting wages dramatically, so the destructive effect on the economy there would be far larger. An intentional effort to selectively damage the economies of Republican-voting states? Surely not? 🙁
Remember in “Oh, God!” with George Burns, God makes some absurd (and forty-years ago, funny) comparison between murdering millions of people and some ridiculously minor crime (stealing office supplies), and saying words to the effect that at his distance from everyone there’s no difference between the two? I think something similar operates here. If we’re all chickens in someone’s factory farm, it doesn’t matter if the chicken that survived is the one that initiated the deadly violence or the one who was, in some obscure way in “Chicken Ethics”, the innocent one. They’re all going to Zacky Farms, Foster Farms, or Swanson Frozen Dinners, regardless.
Jeez! Maybe there’s more to the Lizard elites lunacy than anyone can admit! 😉
A fine addition to my collection of commentary and pithy remarks about gun grabbers.
Yup; the best defense you could provide for a leftist would be to grant him the ignorance or stupidity defense. Without such defense, he’s exposed to all the potential consequences of some extremely serious criminal charges, many of which carry a possible death penalty.
And yet how long have we delighted in “exposing the ignorance” of leftists? Answer; so much so that it’s become an industry! The majority of what all “right wing pundits” do is provide for the defense of leftists by “exposing” their “ignorance”!
And so; the next question must be; Do the so-called “right wing” pundits actually know what they’re doing (defending leftists by perpetually insisting that they’re stupid), or shall we grant to THEM the ignorance defense also?
Heh!
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If I legitimately shoot and kill one criminal, I save my life and likely the lives of others since criminals usually escalate in their aggressive behaviors. So CCWs can save at least two lives each, theirs and others.
The whole “if it saves a life” has just been TRUMPED.