Just ban all guns. Except police. If you have a gun get the death penalty. So either your a cop or a criminal. Guns are stupid. A real man will protect himself with his fist like we were born to do. A big fat Wussy will use a gun because he is a chicken-s&*t that has to kill someone to get his point across.

TiredofOurGovernment
December 22, 2010
Comment to Gun Control Now!!!
[It’s possible this is sarcasm. For the moment I am assuming it is not.

“TiredofOurGovernment” has no respect for fundamental rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Hence he or she is advocating for a new type of government more like that of a police state. One has to wonder if someone who wants such a government why they don’t just move to a country that has laws more like those they advocate. I keep concluding they don’t really understand what they are advocating. The death penalty for the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms has a high correlation with the death penalty for the exercise of other fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and religion.—Joe]

More guns mean more gun violence, sometimes intentional or sometimes accidental.

Paul Helmke
President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
December 22, 2010
Palm Beach County plans to lift ban on guns in parks
[There are so many things to say about this I don’t really have the time to fully fisk this one sentence. But I’ll get you started and you can continue the work.

He says this as if “gun violence” were necessarily a bad thing. This is not true. For example if the “gun violence” stopped or prevented a violent rape then I consider that a good thing. Perhaps Mr. Helmke’s organization should be advertise themselves as being advocates of rapists and other violent felons. It would be more honest.

Let play the word substitution game by substituting one constitutionally protected noun for another:

• More n**gers mean more n**ger violence, sometimes intentional or sometimes accidental.
• More Jews means more Jewish control of the banks, sometimes lawfully or sometimes via their cabal.
• More homosexuals means more sodomy, sometimes intentional or sometimes accidental.
• More mixed race marriages means more black men having sex with white women, sometimes consensual or sometimes via rape.

Helmke should go find a more ethical job like selling cattle prods to police officers, representing a cigarette company, or selling sheets and pillow cases to Klansmen.—Joe]

And the “occassional freak” who does something like Dunblane is ACTUALLY LESS of a PROBLEM WITH A GUN than without one !

Without a gun, the Dunblane thing could have been done ‘better and more effectively’ with 2 cans of petrol – one poured round the outside of the building first, to prevent people leaving, then one inside to burn them out – it would kill everyone. (As Bomber Command how to kill thousands of people and the answer is fire, not shrapnel)

But we don’t ban petrol – we cart millions of gallons of the stuff through our city streets every day.

We SHOULD make guns a lot more accessible to the general public – as in Switzerland where EVERY adult male has an automatic assault rifle, no less.

john_u
December 12, 2010
WRONG – WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE ARMED !
[I find it encouraging this and a number of other pro-gun comments are showing up in a U.K media outlet. Gun rights is not completely dead over there.

I have sometimes considered analyzing crimes committed using firearms and showing there was a “better” way to have committed the crime without a firearm. The mass killings are the easiest to demonstrate this. And as john_u suggests fire is one of the better ways. Driving a vehicle through crowds of people and causing structures to fail are also “good” methods.

I have not done so for two reasons. 1) I’m hesitant to give people ideas on effective mass murder. And 2) There aren’t that many mass murders to analyze.—Joe]

Unlike section 12031, the District of Columbia law did not contain, and the Supreme Court declined to infer, an exception for self-defense. Id. The Heller Court did not reach the question of whether the law would have been constitutional had there been an exception for self-defense. See id. As a consequence, the Court declines to assume that section 12031 places an unlawful burden on the right to carry a firearm for self-defense.

Irma E. Gonzalez
December 10, 2010
United States District Court Southern District of California
Case 09CV2371-IEG (BGS), Order (1) Denying plaintiffs’ motion for partial summary judgment, and (2) Granting defendant’s motion for summary judgment
Page 8, lines 18-22.
[Sebastian also has a post on the topic  as does John Richardson.

I’m reminded of Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes—with a twist.

The Brady Campaign is quite pleased with this order because it says concealed carry is not a guaranteed right. But what they don’t mention is that the reason given by the judge that it doesn’t infringe is that an exemption exists for open carry. While the courts don’t always rule consistently this does imply that some sort of public carry is believed to constitutionally protected. Hence the Brady Campaign may be crowing about how sweet the grapes are because concealed carry restrictions are upheld while open carry becomes a guaranteed right beyond their reach.—Joe]

Most intensely bad gun laws are enacted in places like New York or California or Illinois, and we’ve only had the ability to sue them for a few months [since McDonald]. The idea that it’s time to throw up our hands and declare it’s over because the ink is barely dry [on McDonald] and nothing has happened except for crazy people in criminal cases [losing Second Amendment claims] is a little premature.

Alan Gura
December 9, 2010
You Must Get Gun Range Training. But You Can’t Get Gun Range Training. Shaping the future of the Second Amendment in post-McDonald Chicago by Brian Doherty
[I like to think of this as a message to Brady Campaign supporters as, “Just because you aren’t in jail yet doesn’t mean we aren’t coming for you or that we won’t get you.”

Via John Richardson.

Also note that Brian Doherty wrote Gun Control on Trial and interviewed me for it. See also these excerpts from it.—Joe]

We find no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides. In addition, tighter regulation of gun shows does not appear to reduce the number of firearms-related deaths.

…

If anything, we find  evidence of a modest decline in the number of homicides following the average gun show.

Mark Duggan, Randi Hjalmarsson, and Brian A. Jacob
October 2008
The Effect of Gun Shows on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from California and Texas
[Via email from Mark M. who sent me a link to this NYT article which referenced the paper I quote above.

Again, we have to ask Just One Question of the anti-gun people. One of the few remaining domains they believe they can gain traction on is the “gun show loophole”. Yet the evidence is that such regulation has, at best, zero benefit. If they were to base their legislative agenda on facts and reason they would be force to look at some other domain of firearm law. But from the Brady Campaign’s own website their stated goals are restricting gun shows, banning “assault weapons”, “giving law enforcement new legal authority to crack down on corrupt gun dealers” (I don’t know what this means and I’m not sure they do either), and “one gun a month” laws. Yet where and when they have been implemented none of their legislative goals has ever demonstrated an increase in public safety. Hence we can only conclude one of two things: 1) Public safety is not their true goal; or 2) Data and reason are irrelevant to them—they are bigots.

I find it interesting that although they don’t list restrictions on the carriage of firearms in public as part of their goals they do frequently whine about it and push back against it when it does come up before the legislatures. It could be that they realize that is a losing issue. They fought that battle for 25 years with the result being they slowly lost essentially the entire country:

The force of darkness has been pushed back. We must now drive it into political extinction no matter how much they whine.—Joe]