Today’s headline:
Radical Islamist Stages Gun Massacre in LGBT Nightclub!
Caring Progressives Demand that American Citizens be Disarmed!
Tag: gun control
America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.
But they know what they hate.
After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.
When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.
The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”
As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).
Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.
That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
As the nation reels from another school-place murder spree, this time at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, The Detroit News took notice of a not wholly unrelated milestone: St. Louis, Missouri, took “title” to “nation’s murder capital” from Detroit, Michigan.
Detroit’s Chief of Police waves, as he put it, a “flag of progress,” not a “flag of success.” Crimes overall are down … as are (interestingly) police forces. Still, as the FBI stats for 2013 make clear, “Motor City’s overall violent crime rate remains the nation’s worst for the second straight year for cities of more than 100,000 residents.”
St. Louis scored 50 murders per every 100,000 population; Detroit went down to 44 per 100,000.
But hold your breath: all this is based on a per capita reckoning: Detroit still tallied more murders than did St. Louis, 298 to 59. Detroit just has more population.
In total terms, Chicago actually leads the nation, with 411 murders. (These include all murders, not just gun-related homicides.) New York follows with 333. Then it’s Detroit, followed by Los Angeles (260), Philadelphia (248), Houston (242), and Baltimore (211).
The 2013 murder count for the nation?14,249. Subtract the seven highest grossing murder cities and the number is 12,246.
That’s still a lot, but remember: nationwide, the murder rate (including murders with guns) continues to plummet — even with more guns in private hands. Could it be that more than “more cops” and “more jails,” more guns is the answer?
Dramatic Gun-Free-Zone shootings are trend exceptions. Most usages of guns remain in self-defense. Real gun control has been, in a sense, privatized.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I praised Juan Williams the other day. Let me balance that out.
On Tuesday’s The Five, a Fox news opinion chat show, in the wake of the Mall of America terrorist threat, Greg Gutfeld decried “gun-free zones” advancing the “more guns, less crime” argument that economist John Lott has more famously made.
Mr. Williams expressed incredulity. “I don’t think that makes sense, that everybody in the mall has a gun. Let the police protect us.”
Gutfeld laughed. There was banter. Some accusatory explanation. Oh, you lefties! But then Gutfeld regrouped.
“This is not an either/or — like everybody’s armed [or] everybody’s not. The concealed [carry] permit creates a level of uncertainty on the people that are choosing an attack.”
Other things being equal, the secretly (or discreetly) gun totin’ are safer than the rest of society. The more folks who secretly carry means that those prone to violence face higher risks.
There may be more than one reason why gun violence has plummeted over the past two decades. But one must be this: as Americans have accumulated more guns per capita than ever before, as more households possess guns than ever, the “celerity of punishment” (that old Benthamite term for swiftness of bad repercussions) has increased, nudging the marginally criminal to choose to commit fewer violent crimes.
Making society safer.
Since Williams seemed to have some difficulty with this, let’s translate it for him: compare gun violence and peaceful gun ownership to viral infection and vaccination.
It’s herd immunity, only to violence. Just as the more vaccinated make us all safer, the more peaceful people discreetly carrying guns make us all safer.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
If somebody tries to polemically gun down your rights, button your flak jacket and shoot back.
It may take years — say, if you’re John Locke answering Robert Filmer.
Sometimes you’ve got only seconds.
You’re on a gab show being watched by millions. Somebody says something unwise, illogical and destructive — but possibly persuasive to a certain percentage of viewers. Unless you reply, instantly, with something wise, logical and constructive, you lose your chance.
If it’s dueling YouTube videos, maybe it takes a couple of days to blast the enemy and win a viewership the size of a small city.
The offending “celluloid” I have in mind is a Bloomberg-funded skit that opens with the caption “Warning: this video depicts scenes of domestic violence.” An armed ex-boyfriend breaks into a woman’s home and threatens to take their kid. The woman calls the police — minutes away when seconds count. The video implies that the way to “stop gun violence against women” is to get rabid-ex-boyfriend-empowering guns off the streets.
Two days later, Liberty PA had posted a parody-rebuttal. This time, the prospective victim flourishes a shotgun to scare off the ex. Opening caption: “Warning: this video depicts scenes of self-defense.” Closing caption: “Stop gun control against women.”
Bull’s‑eye.
The video-rebuttal didn’t cost much more to make than the quick wit and time of a few alacritous participants. Within a couple days — credit partly yours, O modern technological infrastructure! — it had garnered 72,000 hits.
On Fox’s Red Eye and elsewhere the inanity of the original propaganda piece was pointed out. But it was the Liberty PA video response that really brought the point home.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
This week, a major-party politician said that “we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”
How can simply having a viewpoint — a very American thing to possess, by the way — terrorize anyone?
But of course, this person wasn’t talking about real terrorism. This person — a Democratic Party politician of high standing — was using the T‑word to smear defenders of the Second Amendment.
Yes, it was Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, and former U.S. Secretary of State (an office she has now taken “full responsibility” for holding), who trotted out those words, allegedly to encourage “a more thoughtful” debate about gun control.
Demonizing her opponents as “terrorizing” her comrades is hardly a way to produce the stated result.
Them’s fightin’ words.
I know of no one who defends the Second Amendment and opposes the gun control agenda of the Democratic Party who also supports the terroristic activities of spree murderers. Not one.
We have more complicated reasons to oppose gun control than merely focusing on such violence.
But understanding those reasons would require a “more thoughtful” attitude than besmirching opponents with the word “terror.”
And as for terrorizing, there are few words more frightening coming from an American politician than “we cannot let a minority” exercise their rights — whether to arms or … holding “a viewpoint.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.