someone stopped by searching for “key question about gun control.”
Inspector of Police Colin Greenwood of the West Yorkshire Constabulary, (Rtd) , in a report to Parliament tells of flying to Australia for an international conference of Criminologists. Everyone before his scheduled speaking time was high on the myriad virtues of gun control, so the Inspector scrapped his prepared notes and, stepping to the podium asked the hall full of criminologists if they knew of a single case in which gun controls had reduced crime rates, made anyone safer, or done anything else a sane person would consider “good.” No one did.
Inspector of Police Greenwood’s question is the key question about gun control.
Stranger
March 6, 2016
“The Most Important Fact About Gun Control?”
[Just one question.—Joe
Update: Sometimes what I think is blindly obvious and doesn’t need to be said, actually should be said…
This demonstrates those who support gun control do it for reasons other than the public good. So, one has to ask, what is the real reason they support gun control?]
That is, of course, the utilitarian argument: gun control is bad because it doesn’t do what it claims it will do.
The other argument is the moral argument: gun control is wrong because it makes individuals defenseless. That argument remains valid even if, hypothetically, gun control does reduce crime rates. As people have put it in the past: my right to be armed remains entirely valid no matter what crimes might be committed by my neighbors — those are not my crimes.
(The Constitutional argument is a variant of the moral argument, of course.)
Exactly. The utilitarian argument oozes with the septic puss of the Progressive, top down, command and control, central planning, the-government-is-our-father, the-smart-people-should-be-running-things, we-can-do-central-planning-better-than-the-Marxists mindset.
The moral argument invalidates that authoritarian mindset out of hand. It doesn’t MATTER who is smarter than whom, or who can or cannot do central planning better than the other guy, because central planning itself (wholesale coercion, viewing humanity essentially as cattle) is the crime.
Their motivation is to put a thumb in the eye of people they hate, us law abiding gun owners.
“So, one has to ask, what is the real reason they support gun control?”
Peer pressure. They don’t dare deviate from groupthink, lest they be expelled from the group.
It’s the same reason they agreed, just before the election, that the probability was 98% that Hillary was gonna win. There was no possible way for them to measure or compute what the probability was, but they agreed, en masse, that it was about 98%. Their obliviousness to their own motivation was manifest in their faces as the votes were counted.
The key question about “gun control”, by which we mean “violation of a basic human right” is;
“How can we best (most fairly and efficiently) get the perpetrators into prison or onto the gallows?”
I am increasingly dismayed at how we attempt to talk the criminals and criminal masterminds into giving up their criminal careers by pointing out to them how their crimes are failing to help people. Are we bloody insane?
That’s not how justice works. You don’t sit around talking, and waiting for the criminals to decide on their own to give up their crime sprees. That’s unfair to the on-going and future victims of those crimes. That’s injustice.
Justice would be getting together in force, with proper warrants, breaking in their doors, and dragging the criminals kicking and screaming into holding cells to await their trials.
Keep your eyes on the prize. The prize is NOT getting all the state governments to recognize a license that we never needed in the first place, for example. The prize is liberty and justice for ALL.
One step at a time.
Before we can get acceptance of prosecution of these criminals we will need to get sufficient agreement there has been a victim. Victim-less crimes tend to be hard to prosecute. This is especially true when the perpetrators have “good intentions”. I’m showing they don’t have good intentions and there are real victims.
You want one example? Ok – Travyon Martin was a violent criminal, who telephoned his girlfriend to tell her he was about to murder someone, before he tried to murder G. Zimmerman. No doubt Zimmerman would be dead and Martin would be committing more crimes, if Martin had had access to a firearm.
Or if G. Zimmerman had not.
Martin probably did have access to firearms, but preferred to beat down his victims with bare thuggery.
Colin Greenwood wrote a book called “Restricting Handguns” in around 1974, in which he exposed the uselessness of gun control in England. I bought the book at the time, but I no longer have it. As I remember, it was fairly well written and authoritative. It might be on Amazon, but I’m too lazy to check.