Early this morning The New York Times posted an editorial by Nicholas Kristof titled “Preventing Future Mass Shootings Like Las Vegas” and described infringements upon the right to keep and bear arms which would have done absolutely nothing to have prevented the mass shooting:
After the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, the impulse of politicians will be to lower flags, offer moments of silence, and lead a national mourning. Yet what we need most of all isn’t mourning, but action to lower the toll of guns in America.
Here is what this liar said, “that would, collectively, make a difference”:
- Impose universal background checks for anyone buying a gun.
- Impose a minimum age limit of 21 on gun purchases.
- Enforce a ban on possession of guns by anyone subject to a domestic violence protection order.
- Limit gun purchases by any one person to no more than, say, two a month
- Tighten rules on straw purchasers who buy for criminals.
- Make serial numbers harder to remove.
- Adopt microstamping of cartridges so that they can be traced to the gun that fired them, useful for solving gun crimes.
- Invest in “smart gun” purchases by police departments or the U.S. military, to promote their use.
- Require safe storage, to reduce theft, suicide and accidents by children.
- Invest in research to see what interventions will be more effective in reducing gun deaths.
The intentional deception continues with comparison to regulations on ladders in the workplace and automobile accidents. This deception conflates accidental deaths with intentional deaths. If he were being honest here he would have compared accidental deaths by falls off of ladders or automobile accidents to firearm accidental deaths. Or the use of automobiles in violent crime such as bank robberies, kidnapping, and terrorist attacks. That would be fair. But it’s obvious Kristof is not interested in fair or honest.
Lets do an “apples to apples” type comparison with accidental firearm deaths and see how gun ownership stacks up. I’ve reported the accidental death by firearm numbers before, but here is it again with slight editing to make it consistent with this blog post.
Here is the data I downloaded from the CDC on accidental firearm deaths.
From 1985 to 2015 the total number deaths dropped from 1649 to 489. A decrease of over 70%. And if we look at the death rate instead of total deaths it went from 0.69 to 0.15 per 100,000. That’s a drop of over 78%. And that’s without a government program.
I can’t say that it is cause and effect but the NRA Eddie Eagle program (gun safety for children of any age from pre-school through third grade) was developed in 1988. And there was a big push for more NRA firearms instructors in the mid 1990s.
But don’t expect Kristof or any other anti-gun person to talk about the successes of the private sector or gun organizations. It’s not about safety. It’s about government control.
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