Tag: gun control

Categories
crime and punishment Second Amendment rights

Gun Control of the Very Best Kind

The headline: “Husband and wife shoot gunmen who try to enter their St. Louis home, killing 1, police say.”

They acted when two thugs tried to force their way into their home by using the St. Louis couple’s 17-​year-​old daughter as a shield. She had been outside fetching something from her car when the men grabbed her.

Inside, the father happened to see what was happening and pulled out his gun. His wife also retrieved a gun. Home invader Terrell Johnson entered first and received the first bullets. He didn’t survive. His partner Cortez McClinton — arrested in 2010 on a murder charge, but eventually released because of uncooperative witnesses — managed to escape, if only briefly. His brother took him to a hospital for chest and thigh wounds. The police picked him up there.

Mom had also gotten off a shot but did not hit either intruder, leading one blogger to opine that although her heart is in the right place, she needs practice. A reader replied, rightly, that when your own daughter is directly in harm’s way, your shooting skill is hardly the only variable.

Besides, the goal in brandishing a weapon isn’t necessarily to wound bad guys, but better yet to scare them off. There’s a deterrent effect in owning guns.

I am surprised that advocates of gun control and their compatriots in the national MainStream Media are not all over this story. For here is yet another dramatic proof of the need for effective gun control on which they constantly insist.

The gun used to thwart the invaders was very effectively controlled indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
responsibility Second Amendment rights

Point Those Fangs Elsewhere

The death of Pentecostal minister Jaimie Coots, from a rattlesnake bite to the back of his hand, sure rattled William Saletan, at Slate, who took the occasion to make a point about how dangerous … guns are.

In “A Nation of Snake Handlers,” Saletan cleverly regaled us with stories of youngsters and others who died playing with snakes. But he had deliberately swapped “gun” with “snake” and “discharge” with “bite,” taking accidental gun deaths and turning them into snakebite deaths, to get our attention: “We are a nation of gun handlers, as reckless as anyone who handles serpents.”

In one year, he reports, there were over 12,000 gunshot fatalities. Americans own over 300 million guns. What to do?

I’m not going to tell you that the solution to this madness is to pass another gun law.… We need more than laws. We need to change our culture. We must ask ourselves whether the comforts and pleasures of owning a firearm are worth the risks. Having a gun in your home is far more dangerous than having a snake.

No one wants gun accidents. But “[h]aving a gun in your home is far more dangerous than having a snake”? Really? Hardly anyone owns poisonous snakes. But Americans own millions of guns, with comparatively few accidental deaths.

Sadly, Saletan played switcheroo with the stat on those 12,000+ gun deaths. Only a few were accidental (in 2010, the number was 606). Most were homicides.

The rule for handling snakes and guns is: peaceful people don’t point them at others. (Better not to point them at yourself, either.)

Respect danger. Respect the rights of others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture Second Amendment rights

The Gun Anti-Fetish

Would-​be gun-​grabbers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein and CNN’s Piers Morgan don’t just hate and fear all guns. They fear some scary-​looking guns more than others, and keep bringing them up even when not appropriate.

Take America’s most popular rifle. After every horrific mass shooting Feinstein and Morgan call for banning (or at least heavily regulating) these “assault weapons.”

Following the naval yard shooting the other day, Feinstein pronounced, “There are reports the killer was armed with an AR-​15, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol when he stormed an American military installation in the nation’s capital and took at least 12 innocent lives. This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-​style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time. When will enough be enough?”

It turned out that the killer brought only a shotgun to the massacre — a weapon endorsed by our current Vice President, as Jacob Sullum reminds us — and used two handguns acquired during the spree. No AR-​15 in evidence.

Sullum also notes that CNN justified Morgan’s post-​naval-​yard-​shooting anti-​AR-​15 diatribe in an off-​hand way, as if facts didn’t matter.

So, what matters?

The taboo. The anti-fetish, the magical thing reviled — the obsession with the scary look of an evil gun, over its actual use.

Why?

For lots of politically-​centered people, policy is more about symbolism than anything else. For such folks, talk of principles or about overall crime statistics or unintended effects means nothing. To understand their notions, bring in the anthropologists.

Or the shamans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall links Second Amendment rights

Townhall: Plumber Wrench into the Gears of Gun Control

The First and Second Amendment are very good friends. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re close, one always protecting the other, as we witnessed again last week in Colorado. 

For more on the big Rocky Mountain State recall vote, click on over to Townhall​.com. And then come back here for a few more links.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Guns Grabbed in New York

Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.

However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.

“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-​related disorders in the DSM‑5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.

Ask David Lewis, a 35-​year-​old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-​anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.

A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.

Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.

Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.

Thus it begins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

It’s Not About Responsibility

“It’s not about me,” insisted the President of these United States, before crowds in Hartford, Connecticut.

Barack Obama, in expert oratorical mode, elaborated: “Some in the Washington press suggest that what happens to gun violence legislation in Congress this week will either be a political victory or defeat for me.” After a long and impressive facial pause, he went on. “Connecticut, this is not about me; it’s not about politics. This is about doing the right thing.…” but he didn’t stop there. He listed the beneficiaries of “gun violence legislation”:

  • “for all the families who are here who have been torn apart by gun violence”;
  • “and all the families going forward … so we can prevent this from happening again”;
  • “it’s about the law enforcement professionals putting their lives at risk.…”

Not about politics? Sounds exactly like politics.

No discussion of the efficacy or practicality of what’s on the line, universal background checks on all gun sales. (Private trades in legal armaments now constitute a “loophole,” you see.)  What evidence is there that universal background checks would have stopped the murderous Adam Lanza — or most such hard-​to-​predict murderers?

The Orator-in-Chief’s earlier emphasis on the ostensible fact of 90 percent American support for this rule is also political. You can bet that the pollsters did not probe very deeply into the nitty gritty of the issue by asking about increases in bureaucracy, paperwork, the regulation of law-​abiding folk.

Or how to get criminals to comply.

None of that.

It is all politics. The feel-​good politics of politicians claiming they are “doing something.”

That is not principle. Not philosophy. And certainly not responsible policy making.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.