I’m “reading” (listening to actually) Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours. Today I learned that after spending four months, numerous hours off work, and hundreds of dollars in fees trying to exercise her 2nd Amendment rights the District of D.C. required her to have a 10-day “cooling off period” before she could take possession of the firearm she had finally been allowed to purchase.

I wouldn’t be “cooling off” during that time. Miller reported she “stewed”. Right now I’m “stewing” over it and it didn’t happen to me. I’m not sure what my response would if it were to happen to me but it probably would more closely resemble a pressure cooker with the relief valves welded shut than a stew in a slow cooker.

D.C. law has to change. They do not recognize the 2nd Amendment and people should go to prison over that.

I forget which book it was (I know Thomas Sowell has written about it some but I think there was someone else that did a better job) that I read a couple years back that talked about the culture of the southern United States and how it affected violence. Thanks to rhodeskc I have another, shorter, source for the equivalent information. I have some relatively minor disagreements with the author on some points but the following I have no quibbles about:

… immigrants, who populated what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,” which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a “culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying on official legal intervention.

More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates, comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words, they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”

Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch, French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms.

But it’s not just herding that promoted a culture of violence. Scholars have long recognized that cultures organized around slavery rely on violence to control, punish, and terrorize—which no doubt helps explain the erstwhile prevalence of lynching deaths in Deep South and Tidewater.

Honor/shame based societies tend to be violent. Muslims will kill their own daughter/sister if they bring dishonor to the family. Certain African-American cultures will get violent if they are “dissed”. In the book I read it said they acquired it from the slave-holder culture they evolved from. The majority of the slave holding white culture dropped that attribute in the last 150 years but a large proportion of the former slaves have not. What clinched the argument for me was that certain language patterns related to the honor culture could be shown to exist in Scotland and Ireland then traced to the Southern slave owners and still exist in “black English” long after they had disappeared in the U.K. and whites in the U.S.

The anti-gun people like to point out the higher rates of violence in the south and claim it is higher rate of gun ownership that accounts for this. Of course they ignore the high rate of violence in places like “gun free zones” Chicago. The truth is that it’s the culture that creates the violence, not the guns. And as long as there are those that insist all culture is equal and that we respect diverse culture, as long as it isn’t that yucky gun culture, we will have violence cultures and have to deal with the problems.

It’s possible this could be a good case to take much further and set a good precedence:

The Second Amendment Foundation has filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Arkansas on behalf of a legal resident alien, alleging that his right to keep and bear arms is being violated by a state law that prevents him from obtaining a concealed carry license.

The lawsuit, on behalf of Martin Pot (pronounced Poht), a citizen of the Netherlands, challenges the Arkansas statute because it “completely prohibits resident legal aliens from the concealed carry of guns, in public, for the purpose of self-defense.

SAF, “winning back firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time”.

A good case could be made that the more people that have guns the less likely mass shootings are to occur. It a little tough to do the experiment because how do you know of a mass shooting was stopped because more people have guns?

But there is evidence even if we can’t do a fully controlled experiment like we would like. There are a number of cases listed here (H/T to John Lott) where the bad guy left a note or had made a modest start toward challenging previous mass shooting body counts when they were stopped by someone with a CCW and a gun.

There is also evidence presented in John Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime as well. In the first edition (not sure about later revisions) the number of mass shootings prior to allowing people to exercise their right to keep and bear arms in public (no CCW) there were a modest number of mass shootings, then after passage of right to carry laws the mass shootings in that political jurisdiction went to zero. This was prior to the Gabby Giffords shooting which, of course, was in the gun friendly state of Arizona. But given that one exception when mass shooting occurs you can make a very safe bet that it happened in a “Gun Free Zone”.

It’s time to stop the mass shootings. We must stop government from infringing on our rights.

I’m backing up this comment here in case “Reasoned Discourse” breaks out over there.

Gun ownership is a specific enumerated right. Driving a car is a privilege.

Gun ownership is much closer compared to freedom of religion. We don’t, and can’t legally, require all the Jews, Catholics, and Muslims to register, pass tests, and register all their religious books. And so it is with the right to keep and bear arms.