You, Mr. Rubin, are fertilizing that weed with the manure you published in your “irrefutable” column.

Kevin Baker
July 20, 2009
Refuting the “Irrefutable”
[Kevin also uses the word “bigot” three times in his post which made me smile a great deal because Kevin listened to my little speech about that a few years ago.

Closely related is that for todays QOTD I was quite tempted by Robb Allen who said, “The other side has emotional appeals, a complete lack of facts to back up their assertions, and an appalling lack of apostrophes. We have Kevin Baker.”–Joe]

Only 13% of U.S. residential burglaries are attempted against occupied homes. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Household Burglary, BJS BULL. at 4 (1985). Criminologists attribute the prevalence of daytime burglary to burglars’ fear of confronting an armed occupant; burglars report that they avoid late-night home invasions because, “That’s the way you get yourself shot.”

George Rengert & John Wasilchick
Suburban Burglary: A Tale of Two Suburbs page 33.
(2^nd ed. 2000)(study of Delaware County, Penn., and Greenwich, Conn.)
[This disincentive goes away if the victims have been disarmed. In fact it then becomes beneficial to “visit” when the victims are present so they can obtain wallets with cash, credit cards, and the combination to the safe.–Joe]

Shortly after I began my career as a lawyer and advocate for the nation’s leading gun control group, I started to notice a peculiar repetitiveness in my opponents’ arguments. Whether it was on radio or TV talk shows or panel discussions or speeches with audience Q&A, there was a striking similarity in the substance of the arguments, and even the language, used by my opponents. Over and over again, I would hear that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” I would hear “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I would hear “An armed society is a polite society.” I had seen these sayings on bumpers stickers for years, but I discovered that my opponents actually argued in these terms. Even when these exact phrases weren’t used, the thoughts they express were conveyed in other words. In more scholarly settings, critics of gun regulation would dress up their arguments in the arcane language of academia and in mounds of statistics, but their basic claims could, to a remarkable degree, be boiled down to the same themes I had heard on countless talk shows.

Dennis A. Henigan
Pages 5-6, Lethal Logic — Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy
[I’ve addressed some of his points in this book from a press release here. I now have the book in hand having borrowed it from Carnaby last night. We’ll see if there is anything particularly interesting in it. So far, part way through the prologue, he is just complaining that the gun control movement has trouble getting any traction and all the pro-gun people have is bumper stickers.

It seems to me that if your opposition is able to hold you down with a few bumper stickers then perhaps your vehicle is lacking substance under the hood.–Joe]

The fact that militias were among the primary culprits the Framers identified as violating the right to bear arms renders any continued suggestion of a purely collective right belonging to state governments impossible to square with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Steven M. Simpson
D.C. versus Heller
Brief for the Institute for Justice as Amicus Curiae in support of respondent.
[Of course, as pointed out by Workman, many of the anti-gun bigots make no effort to square reality with their beliefs.–Joe]

There’s certainly nothing wrong with properly trained adults engaging in these activities.

Daniel Vice
June 28, 2009
Senior attorney for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence
Referring to a Southern Ohio Machine Gun Shoot.
[Something to remember the next time the Brady people start talking about an “assault weapon” ban.

H/T to Buckeye Firearms Association.–Joe]