Tag: gun panic

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies too much government

What Doesn’t Fly

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen

After the Orlando massacre, isn’t it finally time to get guns out of the hands of … licensed security guards?

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the Pulse nightclub, worked for the globe’s largest security firm, Britain’s G4S. He passed two background checks conducted by the company, and his government credentials included “a Florida state-​issued security guard license and a security guard firearms license.”

Not to mention that Omar Mateen was twice investigated by the FBI — in 2013 and again in 2014 — and cleared by the agency both times. Though on the terrorist watch list for a while, he was removed from that list after the FBI closed its investigations.

So we need more and tougher background checks? Must the FBI check every gun purchaser three times, is that the charm?

Even if the Feds blocked gun sales to those on the terrorist watch list and the “no-​fly” list, it wouldn’t have affected Mateen, for he wasn’t on these lists when he purchased his Sig MCX.

Nevertheless, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy led a 14-​hour filibuster to bring attention to his gun control legislation … that wouldn’t have stopped the Orlando massacre … or the shooting in Newtown.

“I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me,” tweeted Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, “about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.”

If our government ever uses a secret list developed by security agencies to deny citizens their rights, without due legal process, without innocence until proven guilty, we will sorely need our Second Amendment rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen

 

Categories
folly general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard national politics & policies

Nobody Could Make This Stuff Up

Orlando shooting, gun violence, gun control, meme, illustration

Today’s headline:

Radical Islamist Stages Gun Massacre in LGBT Nightclub!

Caring Progressives Demand that American Citizens be Disarmed!

 

Orlando shooting, gun violence, gun control, meme, illustration

 

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Most Murders?

murder, gun, gun control, statistics, crime, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

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.

Printable PDF

murder, gun, gun control, statistics, crime, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

 

Categories
Second Amendment rights too much government

Drawing Gunfire

Thank goodness the CIA didn’t investigate my preschool drawings. I went wild with pencil and pen, drawing such mayhem that surely my parents should have been hauled into a klieg-​lit interrogation room.

But they weren’t. Such dystopian dynamics had to wait a few decades and befall 4‑year-​old Nevaeh Sansone and her father, Jessie Sansone, of Kitchener, Ontario.

At school, Nevaeh drew a picture of her father holding a pistol. What was her father doing with the gun? Reportedly, little Nevaeh informed adults, and I use that term loosely, her dad was “getting the bad guys and monsters.”

No wonder, then, that when Jesse Sansone came to pick up Nevaeh and his other kids at school, he was picked up, instead, by police.

The child’s concerned teacher had tattled to school officials, who then contacted Family and Children’s Services, who brought in the, uh, big guns — who arrested and strip-​searched the child’s father.

Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler informed reporters that Nevaeh and her siblings told police where in the house the gun was stored and that the children had accessed it.

“It is a four-​year-​old that we’re taking the information from,” Thaler explained, “but the fact is that this disclosure was very descriptive and very alarming to the officers investigating this.”

He elaborated: “The kids were scared.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they were.

After several hours of harassing the children, humiliating the father and scaring the pregnant mother, the cops figured out that the gun was a toy. According to the father, it was “completely transparent. It doesn’t even resemble a real gun, at all.”

Fake gun. Real panic. Foolish, fear-​ridden officialdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.