"Remember that the pro-gun lobby has the benefit of monetary support from firearm manufacturers who have a great financial stake in defeating gun control legislation." No, they don't. Remember Smith & Wesson? They were the largest US firearm manufacturer. One of those huge corporate behemoths - with gross sales slightly lower than Ben&Jerry's Ice Cream. (Mistaken assumption #1 - the gun manufacturers aren't terribly large, and they don't have the billions of dollars to throw around that, for example, the tobacco companies do.) In any case, back during the Clinton Administration, S&W thought that it'd be good business to voluntarily sign …
All 27 comments by...
jdege
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Scholars engaged in serious criminological research into "gun control" have found themselves forced, often very reluctantly, into four largely negative propositions. First, there is no persuasive evidence that gun ownership causes ordinary, responsible, law abiding adults to murder or engage in any other criminal behavior -- though guns can facilitate crime by those who were independently inclined toward it. Second, the value of firearms in defending victims has been greatly underestimated. Third, gun controls are innately very difficult to enforce. The difficulty of enforcement crucially undercuts the violence-reductive potential of gun laws. Unfortunately, an almost perfect inverse correlation exists between those …
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You know, I've been trying hard to find a polite way to respond to Maria's last. But there isn't one. Seems that she thinks that the problem is that we're violent, knuckle-dragging, neanderthals, who have no place in a civilized society. She calls us bigots and hypocrites, while simultaneously calling us violent, racist, and inhumane. She clearly demonstrates a large part of the problem - it's not so much guns that she hates, as gun owners. She knows zilch about us, but she feels free to accuse of every vile thing she can imagine, based on no more than her own …
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http://www.jpfo.org/ragingagainstselfdefense.htm The Common Thread: Rage In my experience, the common thread in anti-gun people is rage. Either anti-gun people harbor more rage than others, or they're less able to cope with it appropriately. Because they can't handle their own feelings of rage, they are forced to use defense mechanisms in an unhealthy manner. Because they wrongly perceive others as seeking to harm them, they advocate the disarmament of ordinary people who have no desire to harm anyone. So why do anti-gun people have so much rage and why are they unable to deal with it in appropriate ways? ... Identity as …
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Fifty years ago, the medical profession used to think that long distance running was bad for you, because it resulted in an enlarged heart and an abnormally low pulse rate - symptoms that were linked to heart disease in sedentary people. Today, we understand that an enlarged heart and slow pulse is not a symptom of heart disease in someone who engages in high levels of aerobic activity. We've learned that the presence of an enlarged heart is shared by two distinct populations who have very little in common. In other words, we are no longer so ignorant as to believe …
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In response to Maria's last rant, all I can do is refer to Dr. Sarah Thompson's paper, and the how important it is to some people to maintain their self-image as victims.
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"The reality is more complicated than their Manichean categorization: parents who kill themselves or their children or their spouses to prevent spousal custody of the children, lovers’ disputes, workers who kill their supervisors or their coworkers to avenge their unemployment or humiliation on the job, children who kill their childhood antagonists, or accidentally kill themselves (what’s the point of locking up your pistols when the purpose, to begin with, is to defend your family from the violence of your neighbors), all of them fatalities or injuries which could easily have been avoided or mitigated with more comprehensive restrictions on the ownership …
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"Maria, your statement reveals everything we need to know about your stance. You’ve already decided that all gun owners are a bunch of fearful psychotics, and there’s nothing that can be said or done to change your mind on the subject, irrespective of the facts." Yep. Like I said, it's not fear of guns, it's prejudice against gun owners. Simple bigotry.
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Maria, should you apologize for that? We all of us start out ignorant. It isn't necessarily a permanent condition. Back in the Carter Administration, the National Institute of Justice funded a study that was intended to be the final nail in the coffin of gun rights - proof once and for all that we needed more gun control for public safety. The problem is that they hired some honest researchers. All of the authors had demonstrated an anti-gun bias prior to beginning their research, two of the three had written anti-gun opinion pieces. But when they were done, they found that …
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>> Yet people like you continually use hate speech in your attempt to cast gun owners as villains. >> It’s a quaint bit of sophistry to refer to “gun owners” as if they all are, by definition, upstanding law-abiding citizens, and their “criminal” counter-parts are all, again, by definition, evil cold-blooded sociopaths, when in fact all of them, the citizens and the sociopaths, are gun “owners”. QED
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"just so you can feed your heroic fantasies of authoritarian retribution" Like I said, you're a bigot. You attribute malign characteristics to all gun owners, based on nothing more than ignorance and prejudice. "Making handguns illegal will reduce the number of handguns in circulation," Wrong. True, making handguns illegal will reduce the number of handguns owned by ordinary, law-abiding citizens. But their guns are causing no problem. Making handguns illegal will not reduce the number of handguns owned by criminals. There will always be sufficient handguns available to arm those who are willing to violate the law to obtain them. They're …
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"Why you letting kids like that kid in ohio who just whent on a killing ranpage have guns?" It was already illegal for him to have guns: He was a minor. He had been treated for mental illness. He was in a school zone. Where did he get the guns? He didn't walk into a gun dealer and buy them.
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"You dont need no glock to hunt anyway!" The Right to Keep and Bear Arms isn't about hunting. If by taking away every middle-aged guy's hunting rifle, I could put a Glock into the hands of every single woman living or working in the inner city, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
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http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=28978 October 11, 2007 Shrunken Majority Now Favors Stricter Gun Laws Percentage favoring stricter gun laws has declined in recent years, while most still oppose handgun ban GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
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Here we are, pointing out how too many gun-control advocates portray gun owners as all being violent, malicious, anti-social, dangerous, etc. Refusing to distinguish between the few criminals who use guns in crime and the many who own guns and use them in a lawful manner. And then we see the same sort of thing, about how all liberals ..., etc. I disagree with all liberals. Because I disagree with their basic premises. But I don't think all of them are idiots, and I don't think all of them are malevolent. Some are. Most are simply ignorant. They think the world …
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"Canada’s Gun Control Laws" And: http://www.unicri.it/wwd/analysis/icvs/pdf_files/key2000i/index.htm "An overall measure of contact crime was taken as robbery, assaults with force, and sexual assaults (against women only). The highest risks were in Australia, England and Wales, Canada, Scotland and Finland: over 3% were victims. This was more than double the level in USA, Belgium, Catalonia, Portugal, and Japan (all under 2%). In Japan the risk of contact crime was especially low (0.4%). " Those gun control laws seem to be working well, aren't they?
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"Registration will assist in criminal investigations by allowing firearms to be traced back to their original owner." Except that it never has. Oddly enough, most criminals obtain their guns from illegal sources. New Zealand used to have a firearms registry. After 20 years in which it had never been used in solving a single crime, the NZ police asked that it be scrapped, so that they could use the resources in a more intelligent manner. Canada's registry has cost a billion dollars. That's enough to pay for thousands of police. Are the Canadians really safer for having spent billions on this …
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"If Brady worked as its proponents say it does the gun crime trend should have dropped at a much faster rate after 1994 when the law was implemented." Actually, there's a more telling statistic. Prior to the passage of the Brady bill, some states already required background checks. Some did not. So the Brady bill imposed background checks on some states, and not on others. If background checks had any influence on violent crime, we should have seen a relative decline in violent crime in those states in which a background check was being imposed, compared to those in which one …
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"One man’s patriot is another man’s tyrant." - Major Major "Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? More just it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, their liberty, than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow slaves. They who seek nothing but their own just liberty, have always the right to win it, whenever they have …
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"Public health research has shown that firearms violence is directly related to firearms availability and density." Sorry, but no. The public health literature is full of politically-motivated fraud. http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html "The abysmal quality of the anti-gun health advocacy literature may be explained by six conceptually discrete factors: intellectual and locutional sloppiness; intellectual confusion; ignorance of criminological or other facts; fraudulent omission of material fact, or statement of part of the fact calculated to deceive by the suppression of the whole;[63] overt misrepresentation of facts; and what we call gun-aversive dyslexia--a reading disability engendered by a fear and loathing of guns so profound …
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"I was under the naive impression that protracted unemployment, chronic ill health, inadequate education, mortgage foreclosure, business failure, spousal and child abuse, racial discrimination (including the playful deposition of symbolic representations of mob rule), to name just a few, all contribute to the collective apprehension of a progressively paranoid population." Yep. There it is again. Bigotry and prejudice.
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"Guns have killed more people during the last century than all the “knives, bats and fists” combined throughout the preceding nineteen centuries." Guns are inanimate object. They have no volition. All those millions killed, in the last century, were killed by people. The majority by their own government.
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"New Harvard University Study Shows Direct Link Between Gun Availability And Gun Death Among Children" Yep. That's the one I was talking about. The one that used gun death as an estimate of gun availability, and then "found" that there was a link between gun availability and gun death among children. What the study really found was that there was a link between gun death and gun death among children. It's impossible for anyone who understands the slightest about statistics to read the details of the methodology used and to not conclude that this was an intentional fraud. http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?id=3208 Cooking the …
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"The five states with the highest levels of gun ownership were: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia." Except, of course, that they weren't. The states with the highest level of gun ownership are Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Vermont, and South Dakota. Unfortunately, all have very low rates of deaths involving firearms. So Hemenway invented a measure of "gun availability" that discarded them in favor of states with lower levels of gun ownership and higher rates of firearm-related death.
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"Ireland’s been awash with firearms for at least the last century. But most of those weapons were hidden and cached in Ireland and used by the IRA in Northern Ireland." Exactly. Guns in the hands of the criminals and the thugs. It's a very different thing from guns in the hands of the average citizen. Ireland hasn't had an armed citizenry since, well, forever.
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"If you ban handguns from general circulation, then you reduce the number of weapons available to the criminals." The number of weapons available to the criminals so greatly exceeds the number they need that no conceivable reduction in their number will make any difference. It's not like there aren't places where guns aren't banned. Jamaica is a wonderful example. It's an island. A small island. With no gun factories. And with the strictest gun laws in the world - at one time prison without trial for being caught with a single cartridge. There hasn't been a legal gun on the island …
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"Are you sincere in thinking that shooting a person like, say, Hillary Clinton, will actually serve the cause of freedom in America?" Someone else put it better than I could "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it …
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