I am generally of the opinion that someone who can graduate from law school and become a state attorney general would have to be someone pretty smart. Hence, if they say a bunch of stuff that is totally wrong one must either conclude they aren’t that smart, they are lying or they are out of touch with reality.

I have yet to meet a lawyer I considered really stupid. Incompetent, yeah, I saw a public defender I wouldn’t want defending a dead dog. But he wasn’t really stupid.

Lawyers aren’t supposed to lie to the court. Supposedly they can get in trouble for that. But I’ve seen lawyers do it. Flat out, bald-faced lies to the judge. He had been given the facts just a few hours earlier and lied–big fat juice lies. My lawyers was flabbergasted and because he wasn’t expecting it was unable to present any evidence to the contrary or even put up a coherent argument about it. Other people that saw and heard it and a bunch of other actions he engaged in concluded he was a sociopath. Apparently you can make a lot of money as a sociopathic lawyer.

Another explanation for presenting false evidence is they are just out of touch with reality. They live in some sort of imaginary world that only occasionally intersects with reality–like a few times a day for water and food intake and semi-solid elimination.

I’m not sure if J. Joseph Curran Jr. is a sociopathic liar or is just out of touch with reality. But here is one of his semi-solid elimination deposits:

I further proposed that while hunting and other recreational uses of firearms should remain unfettered, our long-term goal should be an end to unrestricted handgun ownership. Sportsmen do not typically use handguns, and studies on self-defense make clear that people in households with handguns are more likely to be victims of gun violence than those in homes without them. I argued that handguns exact too high a price.

…

Legislation to close the gun show loophole nationally is pending in Congress. Childproofing handguns so only owners and authorized users can fire them would save many lives. The notion that guns in our national parks will make vacationing families safer should not carry the day. And surely we can agree that civilian ownership of military-style assault weapons, which make mass slaughters possible, serves no positive purpose.

Guns have killed 300,000 and maimed another 700,000 in the past decade – a million victims since Columbine. Had we done more 10 years ago, how many of those million might we have saved? Ten years from now, do we want to be asking ourselves the same question?

“Sportsmen” do use handguns. Both for hunting and numerous other sports such as USPSA, Steel Challenge, bowling pin shoots, IPDA, cowboy action shooting, and bullseye pistol just for starters. It’s not at all uncommon for some sportsmen to shoot 10K to 100K rounds through their handguns in a single year. This makes the use of handguns in the shooting sports much, much more common that rifle hunting. Is his statement a lie or is he out of touch with reality? He probably really doesn’t know what handguns are used for. So, I’m saying he is out of touch with reality on this one.

In his reference to “studies on self-defense” he apparently is referring to the discredited Kellerman study. That study was so bad that when congress held hearing on it (it was paid for by the government and questions were being asked about it being shoddy science as well as being written for a preordained political conclusions) Kellermen and others that approved of the study didn’t even bother to show up for the hearing to defend themselves. That hearing was in the mid to late 90s. One would think a college graduate with an interest in gun politics would know his pet piece of “evidence” had been completely and totally trashed in a very public forum. Unless, that is, he was intent on lying or he was out of touch with reality. I really can’t decide which it is.

There is no gun show loophole. The same laws that apply to gun shops apply to dealers at gun shows. Is he lying about this or is he out of touch with reality? He is a lawyer. He should know. He claims to know of the existence of laws in states that “closed their gun-show loopholes”. I say he’s lying on this one.

“Childproof handguns” do not exist. I used to work with biometrics (the type of technology proposed for use in making guns only usable by their owners) and I have my doubts the technology will ever be capable of delivering this dream. Let alone passing some law (like New Jersey did some years ago) and having biometrically equipped guns magically appear on the shelves. He must be out of touch with reality on this one.

The “notion that guns in our national parks will make vacationing families safer should not carry the day” implies he does not care about the facts. He apparently only cares that people believe as he does. He’s definitely out of touch with reality with this one–and he wants the rest of the world to join him.

“Surely we can agree”? No. We can’t agree. He implies “assault weapons” have no positive purpose. But he doesn’t come right out and say it. He is using weasel words to bias people’s thinking. I suspect he knows the “assault weapons” he wants to ban include millions of guns owned by everyday Americans. Most of the guns I own, rifles and pistols, qualify as “assault weapons” under one or more “assault weapon” bans in the various states. I call this a lie on his part.

Guns have killed or injured a million victims in the last ten years? No. Completely false. People using guns have killed or injured a million people, not necessarily victims. He doesn’t use any weasel words here. He flat out says guns killed people. And he calls all those people “victims”. About half of the deaths were suicide. Suicides are not caused by guns. There are many factors but gun ownership is not one of them. He completely ignores the justified and praiseworthy deaths and injuries of violent criminals by innocent victims using guns to defend themselves. He must be out of touch with reality to be unaware of these facts. Had he been lying I think he would have tried to use some weasel words to defend against the obvious flaws in his statement.

Final score:

I have to conclude that he is out of touch with reality. It’s time to send him to the funny farm and give him some meds.

James Kelly is at it again with this:

Another tragedy? Not to worry.
An absolutely heartbreaking story on CNN about a three-year-old girl who accidentally shot her two-year-old brother. In the past, I would have instantly jumped to naive and inappropriate conclusions about this event, viewing it as a fairly clear-cut example of a totally avoidable death that could not possibly have occurred without the lax gun laws in America. However, thanks to my recent long-overdue education on these matters, I now realise that having lots and lots of deadly weapons around doesn’t cost lives, it saves them. If you feel that this story appears to contradict that statistically proven fact, you need to bear in mind the following factors –
1) Guns are mere tools, and are no more dangerous than any other inanimate object. If the girl had not accidentally killed her brother with a gun, she would simply have done so with any other tool that happened to be to hand.
2) Legal gun owners have no problem keeping their weapons safe and secure, and out of the hands of children or other vulnerable or dangerous people. This is something that ignorant European liberals simply do not understand. Therefore, this tragic incident is either a figment of your imagination or not statistically significant.
3) You are either far too stupid, or far too stubborn, to understand the arguments. There is overwhelming statistical evidence to prove this is the case. It’s too complex to go into in detail here, but suffice to say it has something to do with the Tottenham Outrage of 1909, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and some chap you’ve never heard of called Colin Greenwood.
Enlightenment is a wonderful thing.

I responded with a comment that apparently is being blocked. When I pressed the “Post Comment” button I received a message of “Your request could not be processed. Please try again.” I tried changing some of the HTML but it still wouldn’t post.

Oh well, I’ll post it here where it will get more views anyway:

If one wants to ignore the specific enumerated right guaranteed by our constitution for the moment and look merely at the cost/benefit ratio I’m willing to do that.
James, you need to look at the actual numbers of lives saved versus lives lost because of the “mass legal gun ownership”. You do a fine job of expressing your opinion but not backing them up with facts. Which is the entire point of Just One Question. Which you still have not answered. You have come up with plausible hypotheses as to why it might be that firearms restrictions in the U.K. have not improved public safety but you have no numbers which show that it has improved public safety.
Until you can give us numbers you have nothing but opinions. And until you have numbers to back them up you are no different than someone ranting about how terrible it is that Jews, blacks, or homosexuals are “spoiling the neighborhood”.

I’m probably just going to get ignored by him again. But as Kevin says, it’s not because I hope to convince him. It’s because it might convince someone else.

Update: I apparently successfully added the following comment to his moderation queue:

I find it very telling that you are proud of your “gun death” rate but make no mention of your murder or violent crime rate.

Again, you avoid answering Just One Question.

At times I think they just have a lot of gall, like a “group” (actually only one or two guys) calling themselves the Freedom States Alliance and advocating anti-freedom laws against gun owners. And other times I have to believe they are just totally off in la-la land:

The Parker Heller cases were a devastating defeat for gun rights ideologies [in part because those decisions affirmed that a wide range of gun control regulation is both constitutional and permissible and because they refused to adopt a strict scrutiny standard for future regulations]. If the gun lobby does not accept the opinions of the courts, the constitutional challenge to them is to launch a campaign for a constitutional amendment. The cynical business of defeating legislation does not secure a constitutional right.

…

The Federal Government need do little more. That goal can only be accomplished by registration of ownership and reporting of private sales…

[The solution] is very simple: Resurrect the original militia concept and practices as manifest in the “Militia Act of 1792.” Registration for militia call-up—regardless that a call-up ever takes place—is a matter of military preparedness. It can have the added benefit of controlling the illegal traffic [in firearms]. We can call it the “Homeland Security Militia Reserve Act.”

The constitutional authority for such a national firearms policy is not the much overused Commerce Clause, but the militia clauses and the Second Amendment. Militia duty was conscript duty. Privately owned weapons were a public resource [used for] public duty. They were placed on inventories and reported to the president of the United States … Can the Judiciary Committee conduct a badly needed national civics lesson? There are no libertarian individual rights in a conscript military organization. After the Parker/Heller opinions there can be no constitutional objections.

Apparently they didn’t read the Heller decision. From pages 1 and 2:

Held:
   1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53. 
       (a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.
       (b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.

It’s amazing, absolutely amazing, what these people will convince themselves is reality.

A few weeks ago I piled on James Kelly with Kevin over the usual topic of gun control. I left the debate when Kelly admitted facts were irrelevant to his beliefs.

Yesterday Kevin dropped a nuke on him and Kelly responded, in part, with:

Secondly, if as Kevin earnestly believes, he has ‘statistically proved’ that more liberal gun laws actually make people safer, why can’t he show that the level of violence has not just fallen, but fallen to a lower level than in a comparable country that has had stringent gun laws for a prolonged period? As I’ve said repeatedly, that’s the kind of ‘statistical proof’ that would impress me, and it’s distinct absence is one of the reasons why most people in this country are secure in the knowledge that, at least on this one issue, we’ve got it right and countries like the US have got it disastrously wrong.

But Kevin showed that the U.K. violent crime rate dramatically increased after stringent gun laws were passed while U.S. gun laws remained “lax” and the supply increased while the violent crime rate went down. And if current trends continue it will only be a couple years before the official reports will show U.K. has more violent crime than the U.S. I say “official reports” because the U.K. government recently admitted they have been under reporting the numbers for years.

And furthermore Kevin pointed out numerous studies, including ones done in the U.K. that showed gun control laws, at best, did no good.

And what does Kelly say about Kevin’s post?

I will obviously never convince Kevin that those benefits exist, and he will doubtless continue to try to disprove their existence by resorting to a barrage of voodoo statistics, but I remain more than content that I am on the right side of this argument.

…the vast bulk of Kevin’s dissertation genuinely makes no sense to me at all.

He claims something would “impress me” then when given just that he says it is “voodoo statistics” and “makes no sense to me at all”.

He also takes the time to say that he didn’t read one of my posts because he didn’t like the title of the post:

I was also concerned at Joe Huffman’s semi-abusive blog post title, directed toward me personally. (Joe, incidentally, seemed astonished that I didn’t bother reading the contents of that post – did he seriously expect me to consciously choose to read a post entitled ‘What Was It That James Said That ****** Me Off’?) No-one with an ounce of self-respect would persevere with a ‘debate’ that had descended to that level.

That was “semi-abusive”? That was the reason he didn’t bother to read it? And he got the title wrong! It was actually “What did James say that pissed you off so much?”. Typical. He hears/reads what he expects/wants to hear/read rather than what was actually said.

And of course he refused to answer Just One Question with anything other than numbers that were easily demonstrated as wrong at which point he ignored it.

Kevin’s nuke from orbit was overkill for the pointy sticks and stones defense Kelly put up but it’s a great to have that post in the arsenal for next time.