Gun Control Means Using Both Hands

Criminals take the path of least resistance

2009-04-11T22:52:00.005-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me how much faith gun banners have in gun control laws.

They accept that there are already laws against all of the ways that people can misuse guns, like armed robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. They very clearly realize that those laws are broken with impunity by criminals. Somehow, though, they think it will be different when just the right gun control law is enacted (and have no doubt about that-- the one they want is a total prohibition of all guns of all types... they have passed thousands of "common sense" measures over the years, and all it does is whet their appetite for the grand prize).

Gun haters like to cite the statistic that 2/3 of murders are committed with guns, and leap from that observation to the conclusion that banning guns would cut our murder rate, if not by two-thirds, then at least by some other large percentage.

They seem to think that the people who are defined by their disobedience to laws (criminals) are going to obey the law that says they can't have a gun-- when most of them (having felony records) ALREADY are not allowed to possess a gun.

It boggles the mind-- yet a lot of people still make the argument. It's a kind of fuzzy logic that leads them to make statements like "There are already too many guns on the streets, as anyone who reads the newspaper can see. Anything we can do to reduce this will be a good thing."

That's all the justification they need to pass any gun control laws they can ram through. They don't ever stop and consider that the only people who will be disarmed by a gun law are the good people who would only use a gun to defend themselves or others. They have the idea that any steps they can take to even incrementally reduce the number of "guns on the street" will be beneficial, even if those "guns on the street" they're eliminating are all from people who only want to protect themselves from criminals.

I don't like it any more than the gun haters do, but the truth is that armed criminals are here to stay. That genie is simply not going back into the bottle. If you want to stop armed criminals, the only way to do that is to put them in prison for a long time. It is not possible to make them into nice people by writing law after law until, finally, guns simply cease to be.

The gun grabbers like to point out that most criminals get their guns by stealing them from lawful gun owners (or buying them from the burglars who have). This, they think, is evidence as to why those lawful gun owners must be disarmed: If they didn't own the guns, they could not be stolen and end up on the black market.

In truth, there are countless ways the criminals can and do get guns. Stealing from lawful people is one of those, but by no means the only one. Even if it is by far the biggest source of guns for criminals, that does not mean that if there were a change in laws that affected the supply line to criminals, that one of the other sources would not expand to fill the void.

Any cop who has worked in drug interdiction will tell you that it's an endless fight. There may be one big drug lord who controls most of the drug market. The cops can spend a ton of resources going after him, and finally they manage to arrest some key people and that drug cartel falls apart. And as soon as that happens, another one pops up to take its place. The disruption in supply will barely be felt. As long as there is money to be made in selling something, then someone will be there to make that money.

With drugs, it's like the "Whack A Mole" game you may have played. You can cut off the main supply, and the instant you do, one or more of the lesser supply chains immediately grows to take up the slack.

It's not just like that with drugs. The supply chain of guns (which, like drugs, are illegal for criminals) is the same way. You can observe that the main source TODAY is from this or that, and the second you close it off, another supply appears. It's like trying to stop water from seeking the lowest level.

The war on drugs has been a complete failure. People who want drugs can still get them, despite decades of total prohibition and many billions spent on enforcement. But the criminals always find a way, don't they?

The armed criminals in America have gotten used to doing "business" the way they do. They want guns, and as history has shown us, if a criminal wants to get something, he will get it. Since it is already illegal for criminals to possess guns, there is already an established black market for them in the US. Banning guns would not make them go away any more than Prohibition made alcohol go away, or drug banning has made drugs go away.

How else could criminals get guns, if not from burglaries and straw purchases?

They could import them. From China aboard a giant container freighter (China manufactures a huge number of guns, and I don't think their government would have any issue with them being sold to our criminals, as long as they could deny knowledge), or perhaps from Central America via Mexico.

Despite what the media has been trying to tell people, the vast majority of guns and other arms being used in the drug war in Mexico have not come from America. (The "90%" figure you may have seen in the media refers to the percentage of guns that Mexico has asked the BATFE to trace for them which end up being of American origin. The Mexican authorities don't ask the US to trace the origin of the arms that are clearly from their own military, or the military of Guatemala or Nicaragua.)

The arms being used in the Mexican drug war are machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars-- the kinds of things you don't see in gun shops in the US. Corruption in the Mexican army and police forces, and other governments in South and Central America, leads them to sell military and law enforcement arms to gangsters. Government officials are often given the choice of taking a bribe or taking a bullet; it's not hard to see why many of them opt to play along with the gangsters.

In Jamaica, it apparently is not uncommon for thugs to ambush and kill police officers in order to steal their guns. This has thankfully not happened (or not happened enough for me to read about it) in America, since criminals don't have to go to such extremes to get guns. But think about the things criminals have killed for that we've heard of in the news-- they have killed for a nice set of shoes! Does anyone really think criminals would not stoop to this level if they could not get guns through other means? Shoes make your feet look good, but guns, for the armed criminal, are a necessity. I think they'd go at least as far for a gun as for a pair of shoes!

And if that ever did happen here, imagine how much more often the police would end up shooting innocent people who turned out to be holding a cell phone or glasses case, because those officers were so terrified that they were about to be killed so some criminal can take their guns.

In Los Angeles, many members of the famous Crips and Bloods gangs managed to infiltrate the LAPD, and it is also known that gangs have had their members join the US armed forces as well. If it became necessary to their operations, they could use this as a source of guns, by stealing them from the armory or the evidence room.

Or maybe the enterprising criminals would just make their guns. There is a Youtube video floating around of a Pakistani arms bazaar, including footage of them manufacturing copies of various guns. Using crude tools, under a tent, they make fully functioning machine guns, rifles, and handguns. And the average home hobby machinist has better tools than these Pakistanis!

It should be abundantly clear that a criminal who wants a gun will get a gun. Making laws to ban guns will only prevent good people from defending themselves-- it won't stop the criminals from arming themselves.

Every criminal who wants a gun has one, and that won't change. The best we can do is lock the criminals up for a long time, and support the right of the good people to own and carry guns to defend themselves. Going after the guns rather than the people who think it's okay to murder has never worked. It's not the gun that's the problem... it's the criminal. Even if we could make guns disappear forever, the people that are so full of hate, who think murder is okay, would still not be safe for us to have in our society.

American Exceptionalism and Gun Control

2009-02-08T14:00:00.002-07:00

America is unique among nation-states in that it is the only one founded on an ideal-- liberty. From its first colonial days, the people of America fled their home countries in order to find an existence without oppressive governmental control.

When the colonists could no longer tolerate the tyrannical control of a monarch on the other side of the Atlantic, they did the unthinkable: They went to war to overthrow the existing colonial government under the Crown of England. These men were (quite literally) revolutionaries, and they formed the first government of the United States of America, and drafted and ratified one of the most remarkable and perfect political documents of all time, which we now refer to simply as "The Constitution."

All of the philosophy of the founders of this great nation is encapsulated in the Constitution. It is the distilled essence of their wisdom and ideas on governance. It is more than the law of the land. The Constitution IS America.

The Constitution is a document that exists not to empower goverment, but to restrict it-- severely. The founders recognized that power is inherent within every person; that no person, by virtue of bloodline or any other cause, has any more inherent or natural power than any other. This is in direct contrast to the monarchies that were in place across Europe, where a king or queen inherited total power, and where the people had only those rights (more properly called privileges) that the sovereign (the monarch) decided to allow them.

The founders recognized that this was unjust, and that no person had any more right to rule than any other person. The new government they formed, as described by The Constitution, was one where specific powers were delegated to the government by the people-- the reverse of a monarchy.

Under the Constitution, the government had only those specific enumerated (listed) powers that the sovereign people (which was all citizens) allowed it. All other powers were and are strictly off limits to the federal government. Those powers not listed as belonging to the federal government are the exclusive property of the people-- or the states, if the people of that state should decide to delegate those powers to their state of residence.

In a monarchy, the people are the servant of the monarch. Under the Constitution, the government exists only to serve the people, who have delegated specific powers to that government toward that end.

The government described by the Constitution was a very radical thing when it was ratified. It still is-- and even though the republic is one that has spread throughout the world, the concept that rights, as well as all political power, is/are inherent within the people and exist independently of any government, is still a uniquely American idea.

This idea, as codified by the Constitution, has led to America's position as a beacon of freedom throughout the world, and is directly responsible for the country's growth from a piece of some other country's empire to the sole superpower in the world.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that see the Constitution not as the distilled wisdom of the founders and the essence of everything that is America, but as a document that has quite a number of very serious flaws. And even though the Constitution has a very specific procedure for correcting such errors (the amendment process), there are those who wish to change its meaning without going through the necessary process.

The people who think this way are easy to spot. They're the ones who use a key phrase when they describe the Constitution: "A living, breathing document." These words are poison to the liberty within the Constitution, and anyone who uses them should be immediately suspected of being a usurper of liberty that belongs to the people whether or not the government recognizes that it does, or a person who has been duped by such a usurper into believing that the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean what it says, but instead means whatever the Justices of the Supreme Court decide it should mean.

It is the Legislative Branch that has the sole power to propose and enact laws, and to amend the Constitution. This power was delegated by the people to the Congress, and to the legislatures of the various states. The power to decide what the Constitution should mean belongs to Congress and Congress alone.

That's why the "living document" idea is completely, totally wrong. The power to reinterpret the Constitution and change its meaning was never delegated to the court at any level. The job of the Supreme court is to act as a referee when it is not clear whether a certain law passed by Congress was within the specific limitations imposed by the Constitution. A referee does not change the rules of the game!

What all this means is that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Any amendments mean exactly what they meant when such amendments were ratified. There is absolutely not one iota of leeway in this. The Constitution was written by a group of men who had just overthrown their tyrannical government, and who instituted a new government with one purpose in mind-- to cripple the ability of that government to ever become tyrannical again.

It is self-evident that such people never would have intended for Supreme Court Justices, who are in fact agents of the federal government, to decide that the main limitation on the federal government's power doesn't mean what it says. If you read the many writings of the founders, you will see that the idea that the judiciary could change the meaning of laws or (heaven forbid) the Constitution was unthinkable to them.

What all of this means in terms of gun control is that not one of the many federal gun control laws is Constitutional. This is true even if the Second Amendment is ignored. In many ways, the argument about what the Second Amendment means misses one very important point, and that is that the federal government was never delegated the authority to regulate guns in any way, shape, or form.

The Bill of Rights was seen by the Federalists (the group of people who supported the Constitution) as unnecessary. Since the federal government had not been given the authority to establish a national religion, regulate free speech or expression, to regulate the bearing of arms, et cetera, it was held that a Bill of Rights specifically protecting these rights (which the people, sovereign as they are, did NOT delegate to the government) was repetitive and unnecessary.

Ultimately, the Bill of Rights was included as a compromise to convince the states which were uneasy to ratify the Constitution. If any of the founders had been able to predict the degree to which the federal government has usurped powers that it is not allowed to have, the Bill of Rights may have been longer than the unamended Constitution.

For much of the 20th century, there has been controversy about the meaning of the Second Amendment. (Before that, it was absolutely uncontroversial; it was universally held to protect the right of citizens to own and carry state of the art military firearms.) People who wished to limit or eliminate the right of the people to keep and bear arms began to argue that the prefatory clause limited the scope of the protection to actual militia service (which they have then described in various ways.)

What is a prefatory clause? Simply, it is the clause (the chunk of the single sentence that comes before the second comma) that acts as a preface. The other clause, the operative clause, is the one that actually does the work.

The Second Amendment is as follows:

"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The prefatory clause tells the reader why the Second Amendment exists: because the founders thought that a well-regulated militia (description of what that means below) was necessary to the security of a free state. While the inclusion of a preface in the Bill of Rights is unique, it is by no means unusual as far as laws go. It was common practice at the time to preface a law with a "finding" by the legislature that serves to justify the operative portion that follows. The preface didn't have any force of law itself; it was merely an explanation and a context for the law that followed.

To this day, many bills (proposed laws that have not yet been passed, if that's not already obvious) still contain a preface that describes the reason for the law. This is no secret to most of the people who disingenuously try to tell us that the Second Amendment is obscure or hard to comprehend. They want us to believe that it is obscure or murky in meaning so that we will accept the gun control schemes they wish to pass, even though the operative (legally binding) part of the Second Amendment is quite clear in stating that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Such usurpers have chided freedom enthusiasts for only considering the second (operative) clause of the Second Amendment when it comes to gun laws. They insist that the prefatory clause limits the bearing of arms to an official state militia, such as the National Guard.

This is wrong on many levels. First of all, the National Guard was not created until more than 100 years after the Constitution was ratified. The militia the founders referred to in the Second Amendment was the unorganized militia-- the whole of the people, excluding some government officials.

So even if the prefatory clause meant that only members of the militia could own guns (and it doesn't-- it's an explanation which has no force of law itself), it would still prohibit all gun control schemes, because all of us are members of the militia.

Recently, the usurpers have latched on to the "well-regulated" wording as a justification of gun control. That's wrong, too, because "regulated," at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, did not mean limited by a series of laws. Rather, a well-regulated militia would be well disciplined and competent with their arms (and the best way to accomplish that is to have those arms be the private property of the members of the militia).

The thrust of all of this is that the 2008 U.S. v. Heller decision was right insofar as it said that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right. While the usurpers have cried foul and accused the Roberts court of legislating from the bench (usurping the power delegated strictly to the legislature), it was clearly the only decision that could be reached by anyone who believes that the Constitution means what it says.

The fact that 4 of the justices voted against the Heller decision is direct evidence that they have no business on the bench at all; they are trying to amend the Constitution by judicial fiat because they don't like the right the Second Amendment protects. If they want to ban guns, there is a means by which the Second Amendment can be repealed-- and it's not by having the Supreme Court saying that it doesn't mean what it clearly says.

President Obama has made some statements, prior to his election, that ought to make every American very suspicious. He stated that it was unfortunate that the Supreme Court did not, in any of the civil rights related decisions of the past, allow for redistribution of income.

There is clearly nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to take money from someone who earned it and to give it to someone who did not. The founders would have been mortified by such a suggestion. The Supreme Court never put income redistribution in any of its decisions because there is no such mention of that power having been delegated to the federal government.

No person who respects the Constitution can possibly support the idea that nine justices, uneelected and not accountable to anyone, would be allowed to amend the Constitution in any way they please. The process for amending the Constitution is very difficult, and that was intentional. Certainly, there was no intent for it to be as simple as a popular vote of 5 of the 9 justices!

Further, it almost goes without saying that anyone who loves America and thinks that it means anything at all cannot condone the desecration of that document that defines all that America stands for. Anyone who wants to change the Constitution by judicial fiat is supporting an idea that is thoroughly unamerican and repugnant to all that America stands for. That would be true even if the thing that the usurper wished to "read into" the Constitution was something that was completely non-controversial and agreed upon by every American as just and right. If it is just and right (such as the abolition of slavery), then there should be no problem amending the Constitution accordingly!

What all of this means is that unless and until there is a Constitutional Amendment that repeals the Second Amendment AND grants the federal government the power to prohibit guns, all gun restrictions at the federal level are wholly unconstitutional. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

In my next post, I'll get more into the practical issues of why gun control is unworkable in America.

Wishing for an Obama failure

2009-01-30T04:08:00.004-07:00

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been at the center of a firestorm recently over his comments that he wants President Barack Obama to fail. While the leftist media has taken this out of context (as always), the comment Limbaugh made regarded Obama's plans to turn the country into what Obama sees as a socialist utopia.

I agree with Limbaugh. I want Obama to fail too.

Now I am sure if I had posted that over on Politico (and with over 1000 comments already, I didn't bother-- I am sure it's all been said), I would be painted as someone who hates the country and puts politics over country. They've already said that about Limbaugh-- and if they had ever bothered to listen to or read what Limbaugh thinks, it would be evident how wrong they are.

They miss the point entirely. I want Obama to fail because I love the country. I hate what Obama wants to do to the country-- America is not a socialist country with a huge, all-controlling government (at least it was never supposed to be). Of course I want him to fail in his goal of making the country worse, less free, less the beacon of liberty it has always been (though that beacon has dimmed more with every passing year, thanks to the actions of both Democrats and Republicans).

And before anyone tries to bring up Bush (under the bizarre idea that a person must agree with everything that either the Republicans or Democrats do): I would have liked for the efforts to invoke the PATRIOT act to fail as well. I wish that Bush had failed in his efforts to hand obscene amounts of money to banks that made terrible decisions (unlike leftists, I don't like subsizidizing failure). Bush made a lot of mistakes, too... like Obama, he is a big government authoritarian. Obama simply brings to a higher and more terrifying level than Bush did.

I want Obama to fail in his plans to revive the economy too. This does not mean that I want the recession to turn into a depression (to score political points or for any other reason)! Far from it. I want the economy to recover as quickly as possible. So why would I say I want Obama to fail in this?

Simply put: Obama's plans to "stimulate" the economy with a wild spending spree won't help the economy. It will only make things worse. The government can't put more money into the economy, since every dollar they pump in had to be taken out first.

I know that no one wants to accept this, but the real estate market was monstrously overvalued and credit was way, way too easy to get by people who had little qualification. That was a recipe for disaster, and it simply could not have continued on as it had. The house of cards came crashing down. It had to. And now it is going to take a while to get things back on track. There's not a lot the government can do to fix this... except get out of the way and let the people that make the country work do so. The only real way for the government to help with this is to cut corporate taxes (ours are already among the highest in the industrialized world) effective immediately and get out of the way and let the market work.

I know we tend to like politicians who promise silver-bullet solutions, but not every problem has a neat and tidy fix like that. Most don't, as a matter of fact, but that does not stop politicians from trying to sell their snake oil.

FDR's misguided efforts to spend his way out of the Great Depression only served to extend what probably would have resolved in two years into a seven year debacle. Keynes was wrong, wrong, wrong. We're not going to spend our way out of this recession, and the more that Obama spends in the effort, the more that future generations are going to pay the price for Obama's folly. All the Democrats (and the Republicans who forgot why they are Republicans) will succeed in doing is running up the national debt, thus increasing the amount of taxes we all will have to pay to cover the interest.

Of course, many of the people that were screaming at Bush for spending up the deficit and the national debt (and rightly so) are now the biggest cheerleaders for this spending orgy that Obama wants (and wrongly so). Increasing the national debt with a Democrat in the White House is no less damaging than increasing it with a Republican in the White House.

So do people like Rush Limbaugh and me hate the country when we want Obama and his plans to fail? Obama failing in his efforts to socialize the US and to spend a trillion dollars on pork would be the best thing we can hope for at this point if we care at all about what America is to be.

Conservatives (and libertarians like myself) believe in small government, not to mention fiscal restraint and responsibility. It's only natural that they would want plans to the contrary to fail. And that's all Obama has... plans for even bigger government and spending that would make Bush look like he understood what "fiscal responsibility" meant.

Consider Bill Clinton's presidency. After his election, he immediately tried to push an economic stimulus plan to address the recession at the time, and to nationalize health care ("HillaryCare" as it had been dubbed). Both measures failed, even with a Democratic Congress.

Americans, disturbed by the socialistic bent of Clinton, and especially by his ramming through of unconscionable gun control measures, voted the Democrats out of both houses of Congress. Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majority implemented a great deal of their "Contract with America" agenda.

Clinton was concerned about the conservative renaissance he had helped to bring about with his leftist overreaching. Dick Morris developed the strategy of "triangulation," which basically meant to jump to the right of the Republicans and steal their positions from them, thus making their popular issues into his, and insulating himself from any criticism about his leftist bent.

It worked, and Clinton began his second term. And the economy flourished.

To this day, people tend to credit Clinton for the economic growth during his terms, even though it is evident that if he had not failed in his efforts to socialize the economy, the economy would have been much worse than it was. I hoped that Clinton would fail when he first took office and was planning his big-government socialism, and fail he did! And because of that failure, his presidency ended up being viewed as a success. It would not have if his leftist impulses had not been curtailed by Congress (including his own Democratic Congress for the first two years).

So wishing Obama will fail does not mean wishing that his entire presidency will be viewed as a failure. I know what Obama stands for, what he wants to do, and he's very close to being wrong on every single issue. I want him to fail miserably, unequivocally, and totally in every one of those things. If he does not fail in those things, he could very well be a one-termer, because succeeding in the things he wants to do means more socialism, more government, more control by him and his cronies.

If Obama does fail, as Clinton did, to advance his ambitious left wing agenda, he may well win a second term and be remembered as a good President. And that, in fact, is the only way he will be remembered as a good President, because the policies he touts now are complete duds, having failed every single time they have been tried across the world. Socialism does not work, and it never has.

Now... some may ask why I have posted this on a gun related blog. It does relate to guns in several ways, though. First, part of Obama's big government plans include more gun control, and we don't need that. We already have way, way too much gun control; we need less, not more.

Socialist ideologies always require big government, because only a big government has the power to steal money from people that earn it and give it to those it deems more worthy. As such, a big government is never the servant of the people as the founders of this great nation envisioned. A big government is the caretaker of the recipients of its largesse and the taskmaster of those from which it takes. And to any government that is the master of its people rather than the servant, the prospect of an armed populace is terrifying.

That means that a big government will always seek to disarm its people, in its own interest and against the interest of the people themselves, who will no longer have the means to cast off a tyrannical government-- a founding principle of the country. A government that serves the people would never seek to disarm them, since all power is inherent within the people, not in the government. A just government only has power that has been delegated from the true sovereigns, who are the citizens themselves.

A government that has usurped power never delegated to it by the people will always act to further its own power and control over the people. There can bedno doubt that the U.S. government acts primarily in its own interest, and considers itself to be a ruler of the people rather than a servant of them. Obama is clearly the worst we have seen in this way during my lifetime. And like all would-be despots, he supports massive gun control.

I want him to fail in that too.

Grasping at Straws

2009-01-16T20:02:00.002-07:00

There has been a change in the rules regarding the carry of handguns in America's National Park system. For years, it was illegal even for holders of concealed-carry permits to carry their lawful arms into a National Park, National Monument, or National Wildlife Refuge.

After several years of work by the pro-liberty grassroots, the rule has changed. Now a person who has a concealed-carry permit may carry his handgun into a National Park as long as he obeys all laws in effect in whichever state the National Park is located.

All that means is that if a person who is licensed to carry his handgun in a grocery store, movie theater, fast-food place, et cetera, in a state that recognizes his permit, then he is allowed to carry in a National Park within that state as well.

Of course, the anti-gun people are upset about this... and once again, the arguments against lawful carry are spurious.

In 1987, Florida passed a law allowing anyone who did not have a criminal record to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun. The need for some "authority" figure to subjectively decide if the applicant really deserved to receive a permit was removed. Anyone who passed the background check (and met certain objective requirements like passing an approved gun safety class) would be issued a permit, period.

The anti-gun people went nuts; there were predictions that arguments about parking places or the number of groceries in the express line would erupt into gunfights. They called Florida the "gunshine state," and made all sorts of dire predictions of blood running in the streets if ordinary people were allowed to carry guns for their own defense. Histrionic comparisons to the "wild West" were in newspaper editorial pages nationwide.

Of course, none of that never happened. The worst fears of the gun-phobes never materialized; in fact, the record of safety and lawful gun use in permit holders was impressive. And despite rising violent crime in the rest of the Southeast, Florida's fell.

Other states took notice of the success, and liberalized concealed carry swept the nation. State after state enacted "shall issue" concealed carry laws, and in each case the gun haters reacted the same as they had when Florida enacted their law. It apparently never occurred to any of them that their predictions of impromptu gunfights over trivial reasons had never materialized in any of the growing list of states that had enacted such laws.

The trend of states adopting such laws has continued right into the present. In 2006, Nebraska and Kansas joined the "shall issue" club, leaving a total of 39 states with liberalized concealed carry laws. None of the states to have passed such a law has repealed it, further emphasizing how well these laws have worked.

Even with that record, though, we still get the same old arguments every single time there is a proposal to remove one of the arbitrary "no gun" zones. If one were to take these arguments seriously, he would have to believe that a person who carries safely and responsibly as he goes about his everyday business will suddenly flip out and do something stupid when he crosses into one of the areas in which those guns are not allowed.

Some states prohibit people with concealed-carry permits from carrying into a church. Other states allow this, and it simply has never been a problem. That, though, does not stop the gun haters from opposing extending carry into churches in this state (whatever state that may be). They would have us believe that a responsible person who carries safely everywhere else would be a danger in a church-- but only in the state in question, and not in others, where he could walk into a church and still be quite safe.

The same old anti-gun arguments have been recycled for city parks, state parks, public gatherings, sporting events, restauraunts, schools, colleges, and just about any other place which has been arbitrarily made into a victim disarmament zone in a given state. The absurdity of thinking that people who carry safely won't be able to do so in certain other arbitrary areas never seems to dawn on them.

National Parks are just the most recent additions to the list of places where some would have us believe that people inexplicably can't carry guns safely as they do everywhere else (it wasn't even an issue until the rule changed to allow lawfully concealed guns provided the state in which the park allows it). Any time the government (at any level) realizes that good people don't undergo a change of character and become bloodthirsty killers because they have walked into a certain area, we hear about how it would be a bad idea.

The people who oppose lawful carry in National Parks assure us that the parks are safe, and that concealed guns are not needed. This is just a variation on the same old argument against concealed carry (in whatever area is in question at the time)-- that the danger is not sufficient to allow people (even those licensed by the state) to carry the only truly effective means of self-defense.

If it were possible to know when and where an attack would take place, any rational person would simply make sure he's not there at the time. If it were that easy, we would not need concealed guns. We can't see the future, though, and history shows us that an unexpected attack can happen anytime, anywhere. How many times have you watched on TV as the reporters interview witnesses that are in absolute disbelief that such a thing could actually happen to them here, in such a safe area?

People that ask why a permit holder would want to carry into a given place miss the point-- it's not about strutting around like Roy Rogers. It's about having the means to defend themselves (and others around them) if an unexpected attack were to happen. And while it's natural to think "that can't happen to me," the fact is that it can. It has before to many others who thought the same thing. It's happened to people who thought they were in a safe place.

That's why the arguments of the gun haters who insist that National Parks are safe enough, and that the right to effective self-defense can and should be denied there, fall flat. It's not "safe enough" if someone decides to attack you at the time you happen to be there.

If a person chooses not to have the means to defend himself because he thinks it won't be necessary in a given place, that's certainly his prerogative. He does not, though, have the right to make that choice for others. Who is to say what is "safe enough?" Attacks have happened in places that were "safe enough" on many, many occasions. The fact that some person far removed from the situation has declared that it is "safe enough" to justify prohibiting effective self-defense is cold comfort to the person who is attacked and who finds himself helpless, as required by law.

Concealed weapon permit holders have proven to be responsible and safe. They're not the ones to worry about misusing guns, inside a National Park or not. The people to worry about are the ones that disregard the law and the safety of others. They very happily bring their guns into whichever place you don't think guns should be, regardless of the rules or laws. They already bring their guns unlawfully into places where guns are prohibited! That is why ordinary people need to be able to effectively defend themselves against these criminals, anywhere they go.

An even sillier argument against allowing concealed handguns into National Parks is that (get this) it will increase POACHING!

This is so ridiculous that it hardly deserves a response. Poaching? They can't be serious.

Poaching is illegal. The people that poach do it because they want to, and they don't care what the law says. (Obviously.) If they don't poach in parks (and in some cases, they do), it's not because the law says they can't bring their concealed handgun to the park! It's because they fear being caught.

If you think someone who is willing to break a law against poaching in a National Park, but not against bringing a handgun into a park, you obviously don't get the whole concept of "criminal." Such people would not go through the trouble to obtain a concealed handgun permit any more than they would bother with a hunting permit.

Second: Who poaches with a concealable handgun? The change in the law is for concealed carry, and rifles and shotguns just don't lend themselves to concealed carry. The rules regarding long guns are not in question.

Nothing bad is going to become of this rule change in National Parks. The same arguments against the rule change have been made dozens of times over the last 22 years, and they have been wrong every time. There's nothing supernatural about a park that is going to make an otherwise responsible permit holder start behaving differently when he passes the park's welcome sign. He's still the same person who was responsibly carrying before he entered the park.

Histrionic, irrational fears of guns don't trump Constitutionally-protected civil rights. The facts speak for themselves, if one is inclined to look for them. The people arguing against concealed-carry in National Parks obviously aren't.

The Lessons of the Past

2009-01-13T03:36:00.004-07:00

In 1992, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton ran against incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush. Like most modern Presidential candidates from the anti-gun Democratic Party, Clinton made an effort to convince skeptics that he was in favor of gun rights.

Clinton won the election, of course. What followed was an avalanche of gun control laws, with the 1994 "Assault Weapon" ban being the most notable.

That year, during the midterm election, the Republicans swept the Democrats out of control of both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. President Bill Clinton credited (or, from his perspective, blamed) the National Rifle Association for the drubbing the Democrats had received at the hands of the voters.

The Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress until disapproval of Republican President George W. Bush resulted in the Democrats recapturing their majorities in 2006.

Fast forward to the 2008 Presidential campaign. Democrat Barack Obama is running against Republican John McCain.

Like Clinton and Kerry before him, Obama makes a point of assuring the American people that he is in favor of gun rights. Specifically, he endorses the individual rights decision of the Roberts Supreme Court in the Heller decision. Obama's running mate Joe Biden states that if Obama wants to take his Beretta (shotgun), he's going to have a problem. Factcheck.org (a site run by the Annenberg Foundation, which has been associated with Obama and Bill Ayers) bashes the National Rifle Association for stating that Obama would support gun confiscation if elected.
Various media pundits and bloggers assure us that Obama's position on gun control is the same as McCain's; that is, he's against it.

In November, the supposedly pro-gun Barack Obama wins the election, and the Democrats expand their majorities in both houses of Congress. Anti-gun groups are giddy; Sarah Brady states that she has never been so confident that they can push their agenda. The Brady Center uses the example of the election as proof that gun rights is a losing issue (how that squares with Obama nearly doing backflips to convince people he's pro-gun to be elected is anyone's guess).

The Brady Center has reason to be enthusiastic about the Obama victory. While Obama's supporters bashed the NRA for suggesting that Obama wanted to ban guns, his own web site shows that indeed, he does (scroll down about two-thirds of the way to "Address Gun Violence in Cities").

The anti-gun lobby is telling their supporters that now is the time to strike, that the Republican party is in disarray and unable to mount much of a defense. The American people are more concerned about the economy now, so to them it's a great time to strike.

I wonder why, if they think that gun rights are a losing issue, they are being so sneaky about pushing their agenda when the opposition party is weak and while the people are looking elsewhere? If it is a losing issue, those things ought not matter!

Obama and the Democrats would do well to ignore the Brady Center and other gun-ban lobbies. It does not take much thought to see the strong parallels between the present time and the first two years of Clinton's first term. The Republicans were in disarray after their incumbent President was defeated by Bill Clinton, too... and nothing brought them, and the gun owners of America (whom the NRA and other "gun lobby" organizations represent at the grassroots level) together more than this wholesale assault on a Constitutionally-protected civil right.

In many ways, Obama could even pay a higher price for supporting gun control than Clinton did. Obama and his spokespeople went much further in trying to convince Americans that he was pro-gun than Clinton did. Obama even stated, on the record, that the surge in gun sales since his election was unnecessary, since he was not going to push for gun control.

A lot of people say that while Obama does favor gun control, he has much bigger issues to deal with, like the economy. That may well be true, but some members of Congress, like the author of the new, even more egregious "assault weapon" ban, Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, don't have more important issues with which to deal. McCarthy is pretty much a one-issue legislator, and that issue is banning guns.

All she needs to do is submit her bills and have the sympathetic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, push them through. With the Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, it is very possible that McCarthy's bills would land on Obama's desk for signature-- and it won't take much time at all out of Obama's efforts to spend his way out of this recession with money we can't spare, with money borrowed from China that will dry up as soon as the Chinese realize how bad an investment further lending would be.

If Obama signs a gun control bill now, even a fairly innocuous one, he will be proving the NRA right, and making himself and his supporters into liars. Given the number of right-leaning people who voted for Obama out of disgust with President Bush, that could be a very bad thing for the Democratic party. It would use a considerable amount of Obama's political capital, and make it more difficult for him to push his extremely questionable economic policies through.

Things in America have changed since Bill Clinton pushed through the original "Assault Weapon" ban in 1994. Since then, the number of states that allow any person without a criminal record to obtain permits to carry concealed handguns in public has grown significantly, and as such, there is a whole new group of people who have familiarity with firearms and who understand that gun bans only disarm people like them who wish to defend themselves.

For some people, guns are larger-than-life things. They're not inanimate objects; they are symbols of power and violence, like talismans that make their wielder turn into some sort of Rambo. If you read the op-eds they write in opposition to gun rights, you can see how deep this runs. They portray gun owners as wannabe Matt Dillons or Wyatt Earps. References are made to "packing heat" or "packing a roscoe." There are too many examples to list, but they're all drenched in sarcasm and contempt, and they are all lifted from movies or television (their primary source of information and opinion about guns and gun owners, apparently).

The people who, upon realizing that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, go out and take advantage of the liberalized concealed-gun permit laws that have passed in the majority of states (many of them since the original "assault weapon" ban) may have delusions as described above when they step into the gun class, but they soon realize that (get this) movies and television are works of fiction.

When a person becomes familiar with guns and gun owners, he realizes that there is nothing mystical or "larger than life" about a gun. It's an object, one whose good or evil effect is entirely contingent upon the person who wields it. When one gets to know gun owners, or (heaven forbid) actually becomes a gun owner, the movie-inspired stereotypes become rather laughable and silly.

The concealed-carry movement has been a wonderful triumph, not only because of the incredible record of safety and responsibility by the millions of permit holders across the land, but also because it shows that people do understand that they need to take some responsibility for themselves rather than thinking they need to be completely taken care of by the government (which can never accomplish the task, but will happily steamroll every civil liberty we have in the attempt).

People who have obtained concealed carry permits are a lot less likely to buy the arguments by hysterical gun haters who are obviously so ignorant about the very civil liberty they wish to eliminate.

If anything, this is a particularly bad time to campaign on gun control. Perhaps that is why Obama and his supporters worked so hard to cast Obama as a pro-gun candidate.

Obama would be wise to continue the illusion, even to the point of vetoing any gun control bill that lands on his desk. Doing that would "prove" the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby wrong, and would lead many Republicans to "go along to get along" rather than giving them a rallying point with which to take back Congress in two years.

It looks very much like Obama may have to decide between the gun control he favors or the rest of his agenda. He may be able to suckerpunch the American people with a gun control bill when he ran as pro-gun, but that will seriously harm his credibility, and will give the gun rights lobby and the Republicans a "remember the Alamo" moment like nothing else.

US and UK murder, part 2

2007-10-05T22:49:00.002-07:00

It is sort of amazing to me that considering all of the things I have written here, it is the comparison of the US and the UK murder rates that seems to interest the readers the most.

In that post, I noted that since the draconic gun ban in the UK (which is part of a broader campaign against the idea of self-defense), the rates of gun crime, violent crime, and murder have increased in the UK, even though they had been falling prior to the ban. I also showed that in the years since it became possible for any lawful person to carry concealed handguns in the majority of states in the US, violent crime and murder have fallen greatly.

I picked out a few cities in the UK where the rate of murder is as high or higher than many cities in the US, which shows that violence is a function of (get this) violent people, not a function of the gun laws in the place in question. I'll give you an example in just a moment.

The thrust of this is to show that you can't simply look at a country's murder rate and the national gun laws in place within that country and determine that one caused the other. America's neighbor, Mexico, has strong gun control laws, and their murder rate is several times higher than that of the US-- just for one example of many.

In both the US and the UK, the murder rate varies wildly from place to place; in some areas, murder and violence are nearly unheard of, and in some areas, you are risking your life simply to walk down the street. There are places in the UK where, despite the ten year old ban on handguns, you are far more likely to be murdered than places in the US where guns are readily available.

If America's murder rate is a function of our relatively easy access to guns, why is it that the areas with the most permissive gun laws are the ones that have the lowest crime rates, and the ones with the most restrictive bans are the ones with the worst rates of murder?

Let's take a look at one thing that happened in the "nonviolent" UK:

"Jack Brown was thrown down two flights of stairs, punched repeatedly in the head and body and slashed all over his face and neck.

He needed hundreds of stitches on his face and takes daily medication to numb the pain from the injuries he received."
"Mr Brown said the thug teared the skin off his face with a sheet of glass and tried to gouge out his eye.

He broke free and reached the metal railing outside the flats but could not grip the bars because his hands were covered in blood.

He was dragged back in by his feet and the thug then slit Mr Brown's throat and stabbed his neck."

Yeah, the gun control is working great, isn't it? There are no more violent people over there now that the gun ban went into effect, since we know that guns are responsible for violence, not people. It would have been a tragedy, I am sure, to the gun haters if Mr. Brown had shot the thug who mutilated him and tried to kill him. Better to have an innocent person mutilated and nearly killed than have a violent criminal's life cut short by the bullet of one of his victims.

Where were the police when Mr. Brown was being attacked? The article states:

After around 30 minutes a policeman arrived and pulled the attacker away.

Better late than never, right? The attack went on for a half hour and the victim was utterly defenseless, as required by law. He did what he was supposed to do, as a lawful citizen, and look at what he got for it.

You may say that while that did happen in the gun-banning UK, things like that are more likely to happen in violent America. You'd be wrong, though, because the violent crime rate in the UK is higher than the violent crime rate in the US, across the board, except for murder and rape, and the attack on Mr. Brown was neither.

An article from the UK's Telegraph states that "People living in England and Wales are at greater risk of falling victim to crime than citizens of most other industrialised nations."

To those of us who don't think that being helpless is a good way to discourage criminals from attacking us, that this would be the case is no surprise. The UK has criminalized self defense like no other western country, so the surge in victimization by sociopathic criminals really ought to be obvious.

To people who harbor the illusion that there is no difference between a brutal criminal and an upstanding citizen except for the weapons he possesses, it is utterly incomprehensible that violent crime could possibly be a problem in the UK. How could it be-- we banned guns there, and we all know that gun control fixes violent crime!

The anti-gun CDC, in a study of a variety of gun control laws, "found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." Another study published in the Harvard Journal of Law found that there is no link between firearm ownership rates and murder rates. The evidence is getting harder and harder to ignore, but (unfortunately) there are those who are up to that task.

Race and crime

2007-09-20T22:04:00.001-07:00

We have a problem with violent crime in America. As you can see by the comments on my "Comparing the US and UK murder rates" post, there is a significant contingent of people who like to compare the United States to countries that happen to have low rates of murder and low rates of gun ownership, and for them to try to establish a link between them.

Never mind that there has never been a credible study that has shown that gun control reduces crime-- they believe it. Even gun grabber Bill Clinton's government funded study could not prove that his gun control measures had reduced crime (and proving that was the whole point of the study).

Conversely, we now have several studies that show that gun control tends to elevate crime, and that reducing restrictions on private gun ownership tends to reduce crime. We have the example of the UK, which has one of the tightest gun bans in the western world, and has subsequently seen violent crime escalate rapidly.

This, though, is not enough for the people who stubbornly insist that it is America's refusal to ban guns that is responsible for our violent crime rate, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But if its not guns, what exactly is it?

Analyzing this requires getting uncomfortably close to the third rail of crime, and that is discussion of differences between racial groups. Usually, anyone who attempts to even mention what I am about to discuss is accused of racism, and any conclusions are never heard. But there are differences, and we can't possibly hope to arrive at a solution without talking about the problem. This is one reason why urban politicians so often grasp at gun control laws-- it makes them look like they are "doing something" about the crime rate, without them having to get too close to the third rail of race in America.

People of different races commit crimes at vastly differing rates, despite the fact that gun control laws (which were originally enacted in America to keep guns out of the hands of blacks specifically) no longer discriminate on the basis of race. Black, white, Asian, indigenous-- all are subject to the same laws when it comes to buying a gun.

Official Department of Justice statistics show that black people committed 52.2% of murders for the year 2005 (the most recent statistics available at this time) despite being only 12.1% of the population. Whites (which under US law, includes Latinos), who represent 74.7% of Americans, committed 45.8% of murders.

If we assume a population of 300 million in America for 2005, that means that there were approximately 36.6 million blacks and 224.1 million whites that year.

The total murders by all races in 2005 was 17,029. 52.2% of those were committed by blacks, or 8,889 murders. 45.8% were committed by whites and Latinos, or 7,799 murders.

What this means is that the rate of murder (talking about offenders here, not victims) among all blacks in America is 8,889 in 36.6 million, or 24.7 murderers per 100,000 black people. The rate of murder among whites (including Latinos) is 7,799 per 224.1 million, which equates with 3.38 per 100,000.

The way that the FBI collects data makes it difficult to try to ascertain the differences in crime rates between "Anglo" whites and Latino "whites." In common usage, Latinos and whites are considered separate races. We can arrive at an estimate using the published California statistics for arrestees for murder.

In California, with an estimated 2005 population of 37 million, Latinos represented 35.9% of the population, or 13.3 million people. They were arrested for committing 48.4% of 2005's 1956 murders, which means that there were 946 arrests of Latinos for murder.

946 murders per 13.3 million people breaks down to a rate of 7.11 murder arrest per 100,000 Latinos.

Now for the white arrests. Whites in 2005 were 43.0% of the population of California, or 15,910,000 people. They represented 19.7% of the arrests for murder, or 386 arrests. That represents a rate of 2.42 per 100,000.

What this tells us is that any given Latino was 2.94 times more likely to be arrested for murder in California than was any given white.

Let's assume for a moment that the ratio between whites and Latinos is the same in terms of arrests for murder in California and convictions for murder nationwide, and apply that ratio to the above statistic for the murder rate of whites and Latinos combined. It may not be exactly correct, but for want of better statistics, it's the best estimate for the time being.

There were about 41.5 million Latinos in the US in 2005, and about 182,600,000 "Anglo" whites, and both groups combined committed 7799 murders. If the rate of Latinos murdering is 2.94 that of "Anglo" whites, that puts the white rate at 2.63 per 100,000, and the Latino rate at 7.73 per 100,000.

So there we have it. Latinos commit murder at a rate of nearly three times that of "Anglo" whites, and blacks commit murder at a whopping 9.4 times that of "Anglo" whites.

Now to the meat of the argument. Gun availability is the same for all of these racial groups. If gun availability has anything to do with propensity to commit murder, why is there a three times greater propensity for Latinos to kill than whites, and a nine times greater propensity for blacks to kill than whites?

Clearly, there is some other thing at work here. I don't pretend to know why this is, but it's not the availability of guns. It's certainly not going to slow the murders down by ignoring the vastly different rates of murder between different races and favoring things like gun bans that are proven to make things worse.

If you find these statistics hard to swallow... so did I when I first read them. If the much higher conviction rates for blacks and Latinos was a result of white racism against minorities, it would seem that the conviction rates for Asians (which includes individuals whose ancestry goes back to India as well as China, for example) would not be lower than that of whites, let alone blacks and Latinos, and it would also seem that the rate of conviction for Latinos would be much closer to that of blacks than it is.

There is some cultural or sociological effect here. I suspect that in the case of the blacks, it has to do with the lingering effects of our history of slavery. While blacks are more equal now than at any point in history, the subcultural legacy of having been brought to America as livestock remains. I don't think that asking people who never owned slaves for reparations to people that have never been slaves is the answer. I wish I knew what was.

It's clearly not the lack of gun control, though. It is going to be a lot harder than simply passing a law that says that no one can have guns. Clearly, murder is about people who choose to kill, not about the tool that they choose. People use guns to commit the majority of murders because they are efficient for that purpose... but that does not mean for a second that getting rid of guns (if that were possible, which it obviously is not) would solve the problem of more than ten thousand people a year (obviously, some of the murderers in 2005 were responsible for more than one of the 17,029 murders) deciding to kill.

That is the problem, and we need to be able to defend ourselves against people who don't value the lives of others.

The Problem of Collectivism

2007-08-20T00:56:00.000-07:00

The anti-gun people have been trying to tell us for some time that the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America confers a right only for people "collectively" to be armed, rather than the more obvious interpretation that it protects the right of individuals to bear arms.

In many ways, this "collective right" vs. "individual right" debate (which, by the way, has been definitively settled in favor of the individual rights view, with even liberal Constitutional scholars such as Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz admitting as much) is a good representation of the worldviews of the people who advance each argument.

In the days since the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, there has been discussion about whether holders of concealed carry permits should be "permitted" to carry on campus. People like me have argued that no-guns policies don't mean a thing to people who intend to harm others; after all, if you're willing to disregard the law against murder, what does a no-guns policy possibly mean to you?

There are no guarantees in life, but one thing that is pretty obvious to most of us is that you have a better chance of protecting yourself against a madman like Cho if you have a gun than if you don't. Having only textbooks and bare hands when your attacker has a gun puts you at a severe disadvantage. If you freely choose such a state of defenselessness, that's your prerogative, but no one should be forced into such a vulnerable state by ill-conceived gun bans that do nothing to stop people like Cho from their murderous plans.

I have seen a lot of people advance similar arguments, often throwing in statistics about how infrequently lawfully armed citizens commit any kind of crime. Something happens, though, in the mind of the members of the collectivist left when they hear such arguments. Time and time again, they miss the point, at least as I see it.

I have seen our argument for concealed carry on campus described as "the answer" to school shootings. One writer attempted to show that, based on the percentage of individuals in Virginia who have concealed-carry permits, that the odds are that there would not have been a CCW (carrying concealed weapon permit) holder at the site of the shooting to stop Cho.

There have been many such rebuttals to the point the collectivists seem to think we were making, but they all miss the mark.

When I say that the right of each CCW-holding to carry into the classroom should be observed, I am not saying that this is "the" answer to mass shootings. Whether the statistical odds show that a CCW permit holder would have or would not have been in the hot zone on that day is irrelevant.

I am primarily concerned for the person who realizes that it is not the duty of any other person to rescue him if some criminal puts his life in danger, and has made provisions (such as obtaining a CCW permit and a concealable handgun) to defend himself if necessary. As multiple court decisions have affirmed, the police have no duty to defend individuals, and it can take considerable time before they can get to where they are needed.

The police responded quickly to the shooting in the classrooms of Virginia Tech. Cho had chained the doors shut, and it took the police a few minutes to get in. By the time they got in and were ready to intervene, Cho had already shot fifty-seven people, thirty-two fatally.

It makes me angry that some would tell us that we should rely on the police to rescue us in such situations. If that worked, there wouldn't be any murders, because the police would arrive on-scene and rescue every person before they could be made into a victim. It only takes seconds for someone to inflict a lethal injury, and the police do not arrive in seconds. At best, they get there in a few minutes, and that's if you had time to call 911. That's not fast enough.

Being told to rely on others (the police) to defend us, when that obviously does not work, is bad enough. Being told we MUST rely on others, though, is unconscionable. It is essentially telling us that we have a duty to die when a madman like Cho decides to commit murder, all in the name of a no-guns policy that is meant to make people "feel safe."

I find it very distressing that so many people don't get that pro-CCW people are suggesting that people must take responsibility for their own safety. When they talk of the odds that a CCW holder would be in the class to stop the crime, they illustrate very clearly that they are picturing themselves not as the person taking action to save himself (and thus everyone else as well), but as the helpless victim who expects others to protect him!

That would not be so bad if the people who cannot break out of the role of helpless victims only put their own lives in danger, but they're not content with that. They have to make ALL of us into helpless victims. In their simplistic logic, they think the only difference between themselves and people like Cho is that Cho had a gun-- and as such, they can't tell peaceable armed citizens from crazed murderers!

People have the right to decide to be defenseless. They can also choose not to wear a seat belt and to not have a fire extinguisher or smoke detector in the house. No one, though, has any right to force others to be as defenseless as they choose to be. That is why "no guns" zones at places like Virginia Tech are a terrible thing. The fact that criminals will think twice before attacking a group that may include someone who can fight back, thus conferring a protective effect upon the collective as well as the individual CCW holder, is icing on the cake.

I am all in favor of reducing the crime rate, which is a collective statistic. However, I also realize that abstract statistics about how often this or that crime happens mean nothing to the person who is picked to be a crime victim. For that person, a means to fight back and survive is needed, and at that moment, the collective means nothing. All violent crime is individual to the victim.

The "guns reduce crime" argument is presented by pro-CCW people like me as a rebuttal to the ever-present argument by the gun haters to the effect that allowing regular people to own or carry guns increases crime. What we're telling you is that not only does it not increase crime, it decreases crime. The idea is to demonstrate that the fear of increased crime is incorrect, and the irrational fears of increased crime should not stand in the way of allowing good people the tools to defend themselves.

So, you see, it is not relevant whether any one of the victims at Virginia Tech would have been armed if not for the gun ban on campus. If they had been allowed that right, and still no lawfull armed students were among the victims, I would be asking why none of them exercised their individual right to carry tools of self-defense, not lamenting that the protective effect of allowing guns didn't work in this case.

If people choose to be defenseless, that's certainly their prerogative. Not the wisest decision, but theirs to make, certainly. I would work to educate those people and let them know that it is their job to protect themselves, but ultimately it is each person's decision to make as an individual.

What I have a problem with is when the government steps in and tells people that they may not carry their self-defense tools. In that case, the decision not to carry defensive tools is imposed on them from without, and the entity that made them defenseless never accepts any moral or legal duty to defend those people it has made defenseless.

Certain deaths mean more than others?

2007-07-13T03:44:00.000-07:00

We all know the claim. 10,000 people in America are murdered with guns each year. Each story of a murder that involved a gun in the news media is accompanied by questions like "How many people have to die at the altar of the right to keep and bear arms?"

Sometimes the number is inflated to about 30,000. To do that, the gun haters have to include suicides-- implicitly suggesting that people so depressed that they shoot themselves to death would not have killed themselves if not for their access to a firearm.

Pro-gun people like me always like to mention that the rate of suicide in Japan is far higher than in the US, despite the prohibition of guns in Japan; where there's a will, there's a way. Somehow they are only concerned about the deaths that come from guns. Presumably, if all Americans who kill themselves with guns switched to poison or razorblades, eliminating the gun suicides but not the suicides themselves, the anti-gun people would consider this a major victory.

I wouldn't, because dead is dead. I think that suicide prevention is about ending the depression that would make people think they have no recourse but death. Trying to eradicate one method of committing suicide, even if it could be done effectively, would only shift the suicidal into different methods.

One can only conclude that somehow a suicide commited with a gun is somehow more tragic than one using other means.

Nowhere is this strange concent more visible than in the comments the gun haters make about murders committed with guns. They have nothing to say about murders where the assailant used a knife, a length of re-bar, a baseball bat, or a length of cord is used to kill someone. They don't for a moment lament the fact that the victim did not or could not defend themselves (have you noticed how infrequently the victim did have a gun for defense, but was killed anyway?).

No, the gun haters are only upset when someone is killed with a gun. The editorials calling for banning the people who didn't do it from having guns are legion after each incident. Ban the guns, they say; even one gun murder is too many.

I think one murder is too many too, but I don't restrict that to murders committed using guns. A third of America's murders annually are committed without guns, and I think those are just as tragic as the ones that involved guns.

I think the gun haters realize that it would be impossible to ban potential murder weapons other than guns. Knives are essential tools for cooking, camping, fishing, and many other things. Poisons are abundant and necessary for our daily lives. So are gasoline and other flame accelerants. We could never ban all ropes, chains, and even lamp cords that could be used to strangle someone, nor could we ban the millions of items that can be used as clubs.

The gun haters do realize, in the case of these non-firearm weapons, that the peaceable uses are so significant that attempting to ban the items would impose excessive hardship on the vast majority of people who use them properly. They recognize that life is not a safe activity when it comes to things other than guns.

Cars kill four times more people than guns every year. A person who dies in a car accident is no less dead than one murdered with a gun, yet fatal car accidents rarely make it into the national media as gun murders do. There is no hue and cry to ban cars, even though "even one person killed by a car is too many." We take reasonable steps to make cars safer, such as requiring airbags, seat belts, and prohibiting drunken driving, but the ability to own and use cars is never questioned.

Once again, the gun haters understand that while driving has risks, its tremendous utility more than outweighs the dangers. There is no effort to take cars (or licenses to operate them) from people who have not shown themselves to be irresponsible operators of cars. No one tries to do a background check on someone to try to predict if they will drive recklessly or while intoxicated. We all recognize that people should be presumed to be acting in good faith until proven otherwise.

These 40,000 deaths per year, though, are less tragic than the 10,ooo gun murders each year, if you go by the amount of editorials devoted to the banning of cars and guns following the tragic use of each. Somehow some deaths are more tragic than others.

A baseball bat, a car, and a gun are all perfectly innocent items when being operated by the vast majority of people. No one questions that cars and baseball bats should be readily available, and that the buyers of cars and baseball bats should be presumed to be purchasing such items for lawful purposes, even though those items potentially cause death when misused. And this is as it should be.

When it comes to guns, though, some people presume that the potential buyer is purchasing for evil purposes unless proven otherwise. Gun buyers are subjected to background checks which disqualify many people even though they have never used a gun to harm anyone. There is a presumption that certain things make people more likely to misuse guns, and based on those wild guesses, people are deprived of the right to bear arms for a lifetime.

No one does this for cars. A person is not required to state, under penalty of perjury, that they are not a habitual drunk before purchasing a car. No one is banned from buying a car if they have been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence... or felony domestic violence. Or felony anything else.

Cars are a lot more dangerous than guns, but you would never know it by the number of hoops gun buyers are required to jump through in order to keep and bear arms. And this is true even though the right to keep and bear arms is a protected Constitutional right. There is no right to own and drive cars, or to own and use baseball bats, but it's a lot easier to buy one of those (presuming you have the money) than it is to buy a gun.

While the gun haters obviously see the legitimate uses of cars and other dangerous things, they fiercely deny that there are any such uses of guns. They do not think the sporting uses of guns mean much... hunting, target competition, IDPA competition, skeet, trap, and other sporting uses are considered trivial. The sporting use of a baseball bat, by comparison, is not questioned, and anyone can purchase a baseball bat with cash and absolutely no questions asked.

They consider those uses trivial, but at least they recognize them. The other, more important uses of guns are flatly denied, and all sorts of histrionic hypotheticals and made-up statistics are offered in an attempt to prove their points.

Defense of the self and of the family is a far more important use of a gun than sport. This would be quite obvious to anyone, so the gun hater must negate the defensive use of a gun in order to justify their ambitions of prohibition. So we are told that guns don't work for self-defense, that having one in the house is 43 times more likely to be used on a family member, friend, or acquaintance than an intruder, on and on.

Some things are so obviously nonsense that people really have to stretch to believe them, but cognitive dissonance is a powerful motivator to do that stretching. When one has a fear or hatred of an inanimate object which is used for nefarious purposes in a tiny minority of incidents (the vast majority of guns are never used in any crime, ever), they must reconcile that dislike with the obvious defensive uses of guns.

It is telling that the same people who tell us that guns have no defensive use are the ones who are telling us that only the police should be allowed to have them. What use does a police officer have for a gun that an average citizen does not? Why would a police officer even NEED a gun?

Why, because they deal with criminals, right?

Eureka. Guns are useful for defense against criminals. That's why the gun ban crowd always makes exceptions for the police. They need to be able to defend themselves because they contact criminals.

And the rest of us don't, apparently. Except that the violent crime statistics show that thousands of us ARE contacted by criminals. The cop needs a gun to defend himself, but somehow the rest of us are made safer by making us defenseless, giving all the power to the criminal. Empowering criminals makes us safer.

Yeah, that one puzzles me too.

We are told that if we try to use guns for defense, the criminal will take it away from us and use it against us. (Criminals, apparently, are unique in this ability; police are not expected to arm themselves by taking criminals' guns, and no one suggests that citizens try this with armed criminals either.)

All of the phony statistics about how guns in the home make you less safe have been debunked. Kellerman's "43 times" statistic was so dishonest that Kellerman himself no longer cites that study. The statistics that have held up to peer review show that guns are used defensively between 800,000 and 2.5 million times a year in the United States. Most of such incidents involved no shooting, and are thus not considered newsworthy by the "if it bleeds, it leads" press. A small percentage of such incidents are reported in newspapers, and usually only locally.

The gun haters, by concentrating on the harm done with guns and totally ignoring the good done with them, are essentially trying to do a cost-benefit analysis without looking at the benefits.

Gun control is likely to eliminate a great number of the defensive gun uses, since the victims are often honest people who obey the law. This would (and has) resulted in many avoidable deaths, rapes, and woundings, as citizens find themselves overpowered by criminals. But even a total gun ban would have hardly any effect on the murders which are now committed with guns, as criminals already have great numbers of guns, and they will continue to get illegal guns just as they continue to get illegal drugs, despite decades of total prohibition.

Even if we could wave a magic wand and make guns disappear, the criminals whose hatred and contempt for human life was so great that they thought it ok to murder would still find ways to kill. Guns are simply the most convenient of an endless number of methods to kill; don't think for a moment that making killing somewhat more inconvenient will make a killer into a choirboy.

Blaming the tool a criminal used to kill is wrong-headed, and can only lead to more killing. The gun is merely the tool; it takes a criminal to make one harmful to ordinary people. Making us all defenseless only empowers criminals, and it is the height of folly to think that empowering criminals is going to make us safer. Gun control only increases safety for criminals.

The Virginia Tech Gun-Free Zone

2007-06-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, there was a horrific mass shooting at Virginia Tech. Historically, high profile shootings have always been a catalyst for the imposition of more gun control. In other words, every time someone gets shot, there is a is an impulse to take guns away from the people who didn't do it.

Shootings scare people, and they look to the government to "do something" to make them feel better. The something that is done need not actually help to solve the problem, but that's okay, because it's not meant to. It is meant to make constituents feel as if the government is addressing the issue, which is all they want.

This is a big problem. Too many Americans think that nothing bad can ever happen unless there are not enough laws, enough regulation, enough interference with our daily lives (certainly nearly all politicians believe this). Something bad happens and people wonder why the government didn't foresee it and prevent it with just the right combination of laws.

Bad things happen. It is a part of life. Unfortunately, some people now believe that they have a right to feel safe (as illusory as that is). They think it is the job of the government to prevent them from ever feeling frightened. They applaud laws that make them feel safer, even if it is fairly obvious that these laws don't have any possibility of delivering on their promises.

One example is the banning of lawfully concealed firearms on the Virginia Tech campus. It made them "feel" safer to have a rule banning guns, so it was a good thing, right?

That question needs no answer, given the grisly results. A rule that bans guns is not going to stop anyone who actually intends to do harm to anyone. Murder is already banned. So are aggravated assault, robbery, and all other ways a criminal can misuse a gun to harm someone. If someone intends to use a gun to victimize someone, he is going to have to break the law even in the absence of any gun bans.

If a person is willing to break the law that says you can't murder people, what in the world makes anyone believe that he would follow a rule that says guns are not permitted on campus? What makes anyone believe that any additional law that criminalizes possession of a gun in any way is going to have any more effect than the "no murder" law?

The people who obeyed the Virginia Tech ban on guns were the ones who also were obeying the "don't murder people" law. And, of course, when there was a madman who decided that he had the right to break the law that says "don't murder people," it turns out that he didn't pay any attention to Virginia Tech's gun ban either. Who would have thought?

What the Virginia Tech ban did was to ensure that the victims had no means to defend themselves from the shooter. It made sure that the people who had no desire or inclination to harm others (but who might have been able to protect themselves or others against the killer) did not have guns, while doing nothing to stop the rare rogue who DOES have the desire and inclination to harm people.

The Virginia Tech no-guns rule may have made some people feel safer, but it didn't actually make them safer. It only made Cho's murderous actions easier. Remember, he stopped murdering others and shot himself to death the moment the police burst in. The moment Cho faced resistance, he gave up and committed suicide. This is not unusual... mass killers usually count on being unopposed.

It is well-known that people who have licenses to carry concealed guns are more law-abiding than the general public. The person who goes through all of the procedure and follows the law to the letter in order to get the permit, and who is able to pass the background check that is performed before a concealed weapon permit is issued, is not the kind of person who is going to disregard the law that says you can't murder people.

The objections that people raise to having lawfully armed people on campus are senseless and reactionary. They are based in bare fear; that is, fear that has no rational basis. They talk of how a college campus is supposed to be a place where ideas can be freely exchanged, and how guns would have a chilling effect upon that.

See what I mean about bare fear? They imply that anyone who has a gun is going to present a problem if he hears ideas he does not like. But hearing things one does not agree with is a part of life, and the person who has a concealed-weapon permit has already undergone a background check and shown, by virtue of his lack of criminal history, that he doesn't go around attacking people.

Gun bans are a bizarre thing that make some people feel safer by making sure that the most non-violent, lawful people don't have guns, while doing nothing to prevent violence by violent criminals (you know, the people who break laws). In short, they disarm the good guys, and only the good guys.

When Cho was slaughtering the defenseless students at Virginia Tech, do you think any of those students under fire would have said they are glad there were no armed good guys in that classroom, as per Virginia Tech policy?

The reality is that there are bad people who will do bad things, and no law is ever going to change that. You can't legislate away the sickness and hatred they have within them. You can't prevent people who are willing to disobey laws from having access to guns and other weapons.

The idea that we can "keep guns out of "the wrong hands," as gun control proponents say, is a flawed one from the start. Society has never been able to prevent anyone from getting ahold of items they really want. Look at the resources the American government put into banning alcohol in the 1920s and early 1930s. No one who wanted a drink in the '20s went without one, and the ban caused a huge rise in violent crime as gangsters exploited the high demand for alcohol and the lack of a legal supply. All the things that prohibition was supposed to fix got worse, and the law was repealed as a complete failure.

Similarly, the current "war on drugs," which has been raging for decades, has not come even close to making illegal drugs unavailable. Anyone who wants marijuana or cocaine can get it.

The criminals have proven that they can import anything they want, regardless of the law. It is not logistically possible for the government to inspect every cargo container imported into this country. Additionally, there are the millions of guns that are already here. Even if a total ban on guns were passed tomorrow, those guns would stubbornly go right on existing.

Since it is impossible to make sure that criminals or madmen never get ahold of weapons, The best we can do is to untie the hands of the good people and allow them to defend themselves. This is not "the" answer to incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting. There is no such thing as "the" answer; such incidents cannot be legislated away.

Making people defenseless does not increase their safety, as the horrific shooting at Virginia Tech showed. The "feeling" of safety that some people may have had on campus was an illusion, one that was shattered when reality crashed the party. They may have felt safer with a gun ban in place, but they would have been safer if there had not been a policy ensuring that only the bad guys would be armed.

Every mass shooting in recent memory has taken place in an area where the citizens were not permitted to carry guns. Can this really be a coincidence?

Comparing the US and the UK murder rates

2005-10-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

For years, anti-gun activists have pointed to the UK as an example of what gun control laws can do. They are being proven right every day; the gun laws do seem to be producing a notable change in the rate of crime, but not in the way the anti-gunners intended.

For years, Britain has had a very low rate of murder. For just as many years, the US has had a much higher rate of murder. Indeed, even now, if you look at the murder rate for the US as a whole (5.5 per 100,000) and the rate for the UK as a whole (1.4 per 100,000), you can see that the UK's rate is much lower as a whole. However, the total murder rate is far from being the final word.

In the US and in the UK, crime rates (and murder rates) vary wildly from place to place. In the US, the murder rate in Washington, DC is about 80 per 100,000 population; in Arlington, Virginia, just across the half-mile wide Potomac river, it's 1.6 per 100,000. Does the overall US murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000 tell you anything about whether you would be safe in Arlington, VA or Washington, DC?

The same disparity can be seen in the UK. While the country as a whole has a low rate of murder, there are areas where the murder rate is high. In Glasgow, Scotland, the murder rate is 5.9 per 100,000 (cite). In London, by contrast, it's 2.1 per 100,000 (cite). In the Manchester metro area, it's 10 per 100,000. And in the Manchester neighborhoods of Moss Side and Longsight, and in the Manchester suburb of Hulme, the murder rate is a monstrous 140 per 100,000 (cite)-- which is considerably worse than Washington, DC, America's most murderous city.

If you're thinking that the claims that America's murder rate is a function of its liberal gun laws are beginning to look fishy, you're right.

Washington, DC has a UK-like ban on handguns, and it has the highest murder rate in the US, by far. Right across the river, Arlington, Virginia, has a murder rate lower than that in London. Virginia has no handgun ban, and allows any lawful citizen that passes a training course to carry a concealed handgun in public. Now, you tell me-- does gun control really reduce crime?

Some people say that the effectiveness of the DC gun ban is thwarted by the easy access to guns in other states (such as Virginia), which can then be imported into DC by criminals. This, of course, begs the question: If this easy access to guns causes gun crime, why doesn't it affect Arlington and other Virginia cities where such loose laws are in effect?

The idea that gun control can be thwarted by criminals importing guns from another part of the country is obviously bunk. Look at the UK, which passed a comprehensive ban on handguns in 1997. There are no areas of the UK where handguns are available; it is a national ban, the same type that the architects of DC's high crime rate (the gun banners) want to bring to the whole US. And even with that in mind, the UK's murder rate is soaring, with some UK cities being considerably more dangerous than many US cities where handguns are legal.

If gun control was going to work anywhere, it would be in the UK. It's a small island country, with relatively little coastline to protect, and the only international border is a short one between Northern Ireland and Ireland. But even under these ideal circumstances, the UK is suffering a terrible rise in gun crimes (including gun murders), while ours in the US falls (not coincidentally, following the legalization of carrying concealed guns in the majority of US states).

Like in the US, the majority of the murders in the UK are being committed by gang members, mostly against other gang members. This is true whether one speaks of murders with or without guns. The murders are not distributed evenly across either country; they are localized in rather compact "hot spots" which bring up the murder rate for the whole country. And even though the UK has a total handgun ban, its hot spots of murder are just as bad as those in the US, and they are getting worse.

There are a lot of reasons why the US has long had a murder rate that exceeds that in the UK. The easy legal availability of handguns, though, is not among them. If liberal gun laws caused murder, we would expect to see more crime in the US following the passing of laws allowing lawful citizens to carry concealed handguns, but we're not. Our murder rate is the lowest in 20 years here in the US.

If handgun bans prevented murder, we would expect to see low murder rates in the cities where handguns are banned, like Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York City. We don't... those three cities have crime rates far above the national average. We'd expect to see high murder rates in states that allow concealed carry and otherwise have loose gun control laws, but we don't.

If gun bans prevented murder, we would expect the murder rate in the UK to have been trending downward since 1997, if not before then (in the decade preceding the 1997 total ban on handguns, the UK government passed a series of laws and regulations making it harder and harder to get guns). We don't... we see a country where the rate of murder is increasing, where there are some areas that are more dangerous than America's most dangerous city, and where criminals have all the guns they need. When we look at the UK, we see a country where the violent crime rate is 2.5 times higher than that of the US.

British criminals prove that when criminals want guns, they will get guns. It is folly to think that a piece of paper called "a law" is going to stop criminals from getting anything they want. Our ban on alcohol failed; our ban on drugs failed. Britain's ban on guns failed, as have the bans on guns in every city in the US where they have been enacted.

How much more will it take for the gun-haters to recognize that crime is a function of people's choices to disregard laws and harm others, not of the availability of guns? Haven't the anti-gunners noticed that their laws have failed to reduce crime every single time they were tried, and that expanding self-defense rights has reduced crime? Will they ever?

Gun Control Group Goes Ballistic

2005-09-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

The ironically named Brady Campaign to Reduce Gun Violence has gone ballistic.

First, let me clarify. "Going ballistic" is a term that was originally used to describe guided missiles that have lost use of their guidance systems, and which continue to fly unguided, turning a "smart" missile into a "dumb" one. They follow a ballistic trajectory, like any other unguided projectile. That's what they meant by "gone ballistic."

The Brady Campaign has gone ballistic with their most recent effort. They are taking out newspaper ads in several cities, and passing out flyers at Miami International Airport. The content of these ads and flyers is intended to frighten away potential visitors to the area, in an attempt to force Florida to repeal its new law removing the duty to retreat before using lawful force in self-defense.

Yeah, Brady Campaign, good thinking. Florida is going to repeal its law to get you to stop publishing idiotic and misleading ads. (If I were a Florida official, I would consider suing them for wrongfully causing harm to their tourist trade.)

As usual, the anti-gun zealots show absolutely no remorse for making wholly misleading and intellectually dishonest statements. Taking away the duty to retreat does not mean that people can start blasting away whenever they want and not have to worry about being prosecuted-- although you would think this is precisely what the new law will do if you were to listen to the hysterical shrieking from the Brady bunch and other anti-gunners.

All the new law means is that people who are confronted with an attacker who has the intent, means, and opportunity to do grave bodily harm will no longer be required to run away first.

Any of us who have had any defensive firearm training at all (or who have even done much serious thought about it) realize that if we can run away, that would usually be the best choice. Shooting the attacker is the last resort-- escape, if possible, is a better option.

The problem with a law that requires running away first is that it is not usually possible to do so without suffering the wrath of the attacker. If victims could always escape, no one would ever be successfully attacked; the intended victims would just leave, every time (assuming they are able-bodied).

The lawful citizen who carries a revolver or pistol for his or her own defense already is at a disadvantage in a lethal attack (although not nearly so much as an unarmed person). The criminal picks the time and place of the attack, and waits until conditions favor him the most. The intended victim doesn't learn of the attack until it has started, and he has to instantly devise a response to an attack the criminal may have taken considerable time in planning.

The last thing that citizen who is trying to survive needs is some law, written by legislators who are not there in the parking lot or garage, on the street, et cetera, that says that everyone has to try to run away first, regardless of circumstance. Such a law tilts the balance of power in the criminal's favor.

I question the motives of anyone who thinks a duty to retreat is a good idea. Why do anti-gun groups like the Brady Campaign consistently support laws that tilt the balance of power in favor of the criminal? Every time there is a law to disarm victims, to extend how long the lawful have to wait before getting a gun, to limit the places where the good guys can carry guns, to restrict how the lawful can use guns, they're right there arguing in favor of such a law. I am sure they are not so stupid as to believe that the criminals are going to follow any such law, so obviously, their efforts are quite universally slanted toward empowering criminals.

Let's look at that. If you were a criminal, would you be more or less likely to attack someone if you knew he had a lawful duty to run away before he could use force against you? Would you, the criminal, support a law that restricted how people could defend themselves against you?

If lawful defensive shooters actually obeyed the duty-to-retreat law, undoubtedly many of them would be maimed or killed by the attacker they tried to run away from. People that were armed and capable of stopping an attack would still fall victim to the criminals. The whole point of carrying defensive arms would be thwarted-- which is obviously what the Brady bunch wants. If they can find some reason to say that defensive arms don't help save lives, they can make the case that carrying arms should be banned. And they don't care how many good people have to be killed by criminals to achieve that end.

Now let's look at the other side of it. What possible good could come from a law that requires the lawful to run away before shooting in self-defense? The only thing that would potentially come from that would be the preservation of criminals that think it is okay to inflict grave harm on others at will. It would not stop wrongful shootings of people who are not attackers; with or without the duty to retreat, lawful self-defense requires that there be a grave and immediate threat before lethal force can be justified.

So, it boils down to a choice between preserving innocent victims of crime at the expense of the lives of their criminal attackers, or of protecting violent criminals from defensive action from their intended victims.

The really silly thing here is that many states, like my home state of Arizona, never had a duty to retreat. The new Florida law repealing the duty to retreat will go into effect on the first of October, 2005, and from that point forward, Florida's lethal force laws will be like the laws we've long had here in Arizona. I don't see any news stories that Brady is going to be "warning" people about the danger of armed Arizonans. Our lack of a "duty to retreat" has never been a problem.

But then, anti-gunners have never been particularly concerned with truth or reality.

Another depressing example...

2005-09-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

...of how relying on others for your security can be a very precarious proposition.

It has happened many times throughout recent history, and it will happen many times into the future. Right when the people need it the most, the government fails to provide them any protection at all, leaving them to fend for themselves. It has happened during the L.A. riots, where the police withdrew and let the violent rioters take over the city for days. People that thought that they didn't need a gun because they could call for the police were left defenseless, and those who never thought they would need a gun were shocked to find that they would have to wait more than two weeks to before they could get a gun-- by which time it would be too late.

It happened in Columbine High School, where the police hid behind cars outside the school while the murderous teens casually executed their classmates. They saw it as too risky to go in and try to confront the murderers. Their job was not to save any given person from violence, but to make sure that the bad guys were caught and brought to justice. Ultimately, the killers committed suicide, but if they hadn't, it was pretty certain that they were not going to get away with so many police surrounding the school.

It happens every day when people call 911 and find that the police arrive 40 minutes later, if they arrive at all. The police in areas with a lot of crime have to prioritize the calls to which they respond. I remember when I lived in the high-crime city of San Bernardino, California, where the police told me they do not even send officers out for reports of shots fired unless there is something else, like screaming, a body, et cetera.

Few people in San Bernardino, I would hope, really thought the police would be there in time to help them if something "went down." The sad thing is that people in other areas of the country harbor the Pollyanna belief that the cops will be able to get there in time to help them if they were to be attacked.

The truth of all of this has been underscored time and time again in the courts, where it has been stated repeatedly that the police have no obligation to help you-- even if you have a restraining order against the attacker. They will do the best they can, or at least the best they're willing, and you'll have to be happy with that. If you're not, you have no recourse-- you can't sue them for not helping you when you needed it most.

Now, the same thing is happening again in New Orleans, on a grand scale. In the wake of the killer hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a hellish free-for-all. Criminals rule the waterlogged New Orleans streets. Thugs have exploited the breakdown of society, and the good people again find themselves without police protection. Police in New Orleans are turning in their badges and acting in their self-interests... one cop told a tourist that asked for help "Go to hell-- it's every man for himself."

The criminal element is hard at work in New Orleans, and the police, once again, are deciding that it's too dangerous to try to fight the criminals for their police salaries. Their job is to fight the war on crime, and in battle, it is often necessary to make a tactical retreat when the enemy has the advantage. The police do this all the time; I have illustrated a few examples here. When they do that, who is going to be there to protect you from dangerous criminals if you're not willing to do it yourself?

If people can't be bothered to wield arms for their own defense, how can they expect a total stranger to step in and do it for them whenever they need? The police (and many lawful armed citizens) will do so when they can, but they're primarily interested in making it home at the end of the day.

And that should be your concern too. Hopefully, it is becoming evident that you can't rely on someone else to make sure that happens for you. Sure, eventually, the police do regain control of situations like the one we see in New Orleans. Until they do, the people there are on their own.

That is the purpose of defensive weapons. They are not to allow people to go out and act like police themselves. They are to provide immediate protection from threats until the police can take over the task of controlling the scene.

A defensive gun is like a first-aid kit. A first-aid kit is certainly no replacement for paramedics and hospitals. A first-aid kit is an immediate-use tool that allows lives to be saved while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. A defensive gun is an immediate-use tool that allows lives to be saved while waiting for the police to arrive. And when waiting for the police can be a process that takes days and days, having your security first-aid kit (a gun) is vital.

As the people of Los Angeles learned during the riots, you can't put off buying a gun until you really need one. If society falls apart as it has in Los Angeles during the riots or New Orleans now, it will be too late to get one. Waiting until society fails before you buy a gun would be like waiting to buy a first-aid kit until someone was hurt, or waiting until a fire starts before you buy a fire extinguisher. It would be like waiting until you get into a car accident before you put on your seat belt.

If you ever are in a situation where someone has decided to risk your life, and he's not willing to stand around and wait for you to dial 911 on your mobile phone and wait more for the cops to arrive, a gun may well be the only thing standing between you and severe injury, rape, or death.

If you don't have the means to forcibly repel criminals, then you are defenseless. Don't fool yourself into thinking the cops will be able to get there in time to help you. If you have no means to force criminals to stop harming you, then you rely on the goodwill of those criminals for your very life. And criminals are not renowned for their kind hearts.

Guns in the workplace

2005-08-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

The issue of guns in the workplace has been in the news ever since Weyerhauser decided to fire employees for having guns in their personal cars out in the parking lot, and since the NRA called for a boycott on ConocoPhilips after the petroleum company filed legal papers in an effort to overturn Oklahoma's law allowing employees to keep guns in their cars.

The anti-gunners have referred to some study that showed that workplaces that allow guns have a higher rate of gun murders. This is "common sense," they say.

The anti-gun side hasn't exactly got a good record with regard to studies or common sense.

The Kellerman "study," the one that purported to show that a gun in the house was 43 times more likely to injure a family member, friend, or acquaintance than an intruder, is one such example. The purpose of this article is not to rebut that study; that has been done extensively elsewhere, and even the author of the "study" admits the problems with his work. Of course, that has not stopped anyone on the anti-gun side from continuing to author similar studies with similar problems.

Oh, ok. Just a bit on why the "43 times" study fails.

First of all, it only considers killings to be significant. If a person aims a gun at an intruder, and that intruder has a sudden moment of clarity and runs away, that is not counted in the Kellerman study. And that is a very big flaw, since most defensive gun uses (estimated at 98%) do not involve any shots fired. And in the 2% where there is a shot fired, the majority of them are not fatal-- and these, too, will not be included in Kellerman's figures.

Second... most attacks are not perpetrated by total strangers. If someone wants to murder you, he usually has a reason for it... and it's not usually that he was in a killin' mood as he happened to stroll by your house. He wants to kill for some reason, imagined or real, and that means he knows you to some degree. Voila-- he's an acquaintance.

If the home invasion robber posed as a vacuum salesman to "case" your house the day before he invaded, he's an acquaintance.

If the rapist that broke into the house is someone that became obsessed with his intended victim at work when she turned him down for a date, he is an acquaintance.

As you can see, the inclusion of "acquaintances" in the criteria mean that the vast majority of incidents of justifiable homicide are counted as killings of friends, family, or acquaintances-- which Kellerman would like us to believe is evidence that guns are dangerous to have around.

Further, the study includes suicides-- which account for the majority of homicides in the "study." Most people that commit suicide with a gun would have done so without a gun around-- they only used a gun because it was handy, and if it wasn't, they would use whatever else was handy. Japan has a much higher rate of suicide than the US does, even though they have virtually no gun ownership, so certainly it should be obvious that there is no link between rates of gun ownership and suicide.

Since the study only considered homes in which firearms deaths occurred, the suicides without guns (like the defensive gun uses that did not result in death) are handily ignored. If you get the idea that the "gun deaths" in the "study" are being taken way out of context, you're right.

Needless to say, the "study" has been thoroughly debunked. And it is certainly not atypical of studies authored by the anti-gun ideologues. Michael Bellesiles, in his book Arming America, tried to make the case that the gun culture in America is a recent invention, not something that has been around as long as America itself. His book won high praise in the mainstream media, and eventually won the prestigious Bancroft Prize... until the web of lies in his book came to light. The book turned out to be a total fraud, and the Bancroft Prize was revoked. The fallout from Bellesiles' deception also cost him his job at Emory.

All of the "research" favoring the gun-prohibition agenda has similarly been shown to be pure bunk. Honest studies authored and sponsored by anti-gun ideologues have been unable to show that gun control works. There is a reason for this.

One of the most notable books published regarding the topic of gun control has been John R. Lott's More Guns, Less Crime. The book describes the definitive study of crime rates in every county in America, and overwhelmingly shows that violent crime rates drop following the loosening of restrictions on carrying concealed handguns. There have been the predictible reactionary voices from the gun-ban camp assailing Lott's research, but it has withstood the criticism well, and Lott has industriously and successfully worked to address criticisms of his methodology.

Other studies have backed up Lott's assertions. At worst, research has shown that liberalized concealed carry laws have not caused an increase in violent crime. Laws that make concealed-carry a possibility for ordinary citizens do not result in ordinary arguments turning into gunfights, and they don't increase crime.

All of this means that I am more than a little suspicious of the alleged "study" that shows that workplaces that allow gun possession have a higher rate of workplace shootings than those that prohibit guns.

In things like this, invariably, the devil is in the details, just like in the Kellerman "study" described above, where Kellerman defined most perpetrators of violent crime as being part of the "friends, family, or acquantance killed by guns" group.

The question of guns in the workplace is a microcosm of the gun debate in general. And in the debate in general, the question has been answered.

In 1987, Florida started a national trend of states liberalizing concealed carry laws. The "shall issue" laws require that the state or other permit authority shall issue a concealed handgun permit to any person that meets the objective criteria (such as not having a felony record, passing a certain training class, et cetera). Since that time, more than twenty additional states have adopted "shall issue" carry laws, for a grand total of 38 (three quarters of the states) as I write this.

Most of the shall-issue states have by now at least a decade of experience with liberalized carry laws, and repealing those laws has not been a serious issue in any of those states. If the carry laws had been even a minor problem, the shouts for repealing the laws would be long and loud. The absence of such complaints about concealed- carry from the authorities speaks volumes.

It seems that the kind of people who commit crimes with guns aren't the type that would apply for a permit, nor are they the kind that would obey a sign or a law that says that they can't carry a gun into a given place. What makes anyone think that a person that would disregard the laws against aggravated assault or murder would obey a company policy that prohibits guns?

If a person is trustworthy with a deadly weapon in public, he's not suddenly going to become a murderous maniac at work. Work can be stressful, and there can be confrontations, but the same is true for the rest of society. The people that hold concealed weapon permits have shown, overwhelmingly, that they are able to handle the stresses and insults of society without resorting to violence.

If you look at all of the facts, the allegation that allowing weapons in the workplace (and for the sake of this argument, I have been talking about allowing permit holders to carry their concealed guns at work) results in more violence makes no sense. The violent individuals are not going to obey a ban on weapons in the workplace, and in fact would much rather that their intended victim be completely helpless.

Collectors and sportsmen, indeed!

2005-08-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

"Guns are for sporting purposes."

It comes up almost every time discussion of homeland defense rifles (sometimes erroneously referred to as "assault rifles") are discussed. Someone mentions that "you don't need an AK-47 to hunt deer." Sarah Brady, one of the most strident voices for gun control, has said that to her, "...the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes." Even the Gun Control Act of 1968 forbids importation of handguns that are not "readily adaptable to sporting purposes." And both Bill Clinton and John Kerry made a big show of going hunting in an attempt to garner votes from gun owners.

Of course, anyone familiar with the concept of the right to keep and bear arms knows that it has nothing at all to do with hunting. I am sure that the anti-gunners out there know this too. Still, they persist with this idea that guns are for sport.

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.

If the anti-gun people can reframe gun ownership to be only about hunting, target shooting, and collecting, it will be very easy for them to claim that guns should be banned altogether. If guns are only useful for sport, then certainly there can be no moral opposition to an outright ban-- after all, what is the relative worth of sportsmanship compared to that of saving people from gun crime?

The Founding Fathers did not put the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights to preserve our right to hunt. They had just cast off an oppressive and tyrannical government by means of an armed rebellion, and were trying to create a blueprint for a government that would protect liberty for them and their posterity, as well as to ensure that if their descendents found that their government had grown tyrannical, they would have the arms needed to cast off that government and begin again. Duck hunting was the last thing on their minds.

In fact, it might even be argued that the Second Amendment only protects arms that are suited to military usage, like "assault rifles," and not a hypothetical hunting rifle that has no potential military application (although I can't think of a hunting gun that would have no potential military use).

The intent of the Second Amendment is clear from its first clause: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state..." The idea was to make sure that the people would never lose their right to own military-grade arms. In U.S. vs. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that "The Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with a view to its purpose of rendering effective the Militia."

As to the definition of the word "militia," the court ruled that "...the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense..." and that "...ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."

The purpose of the Second Amendment was much more important than any sporting use. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, it was about protecting liberty from the government. The Founders recognized that the natural thing for government to do was to continue to seek more and more power for itself, crushing liberty in the process, replacing it eventually with tyranny.

Initially, the Constitution was thought to be sufficient to protect liberties without the Bill of Rights. Since the powers of the federal government were clearly described, it would be impossible for that government to become tyrannical. That was the thought of the Federalists, a group that included people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

In order to satisfy the Anti-Federalists, who were not convinced that the unamended Constitution was sufficient to protect valuable liberties, the Bill of Rights was added. Certainly, few people from either side of the political aisle today would say that the inclusion of the Bill of Rights was unneeded, as the government has encroached upon liberty to a degree that would make the Founders sick to the stomach, even with the Bill of Rights in place. I shudder to think what life in America would look like without it.

It is ironic that the "militia" clause, which the anti-gun people try so often to use to show that the Second Amendment does not apply to the people, actually does precisely the opposite (even if we ignore the part of the U.S. vs. Miller decision cited above that stated that the guns were to be "supplied by [the militia members] themselves).

As I write this, David Miller, mayor of Toronto, Canada, is proposing that all privately-owned guns be stored in a central location, to keep them out of the hands of thieves. "There's no reason to own a gun in Toronto -- collector or not," he says.

It is easy to suggest that guns be required to be kept in a central location, subject to government approval and scrutiny, if their only use is sport. Again, what value is sport compared to the danger of guns in the hands of criminals?

However, if guns are meant for militia use, where a tyrannical government itself is the foe the militia may be facing (the possibility of which being why a well-regulated [disciplined, in today's English] militia is necessary for the security of a free state), certainly it makes no sense to require that guns be stored in a central government-approved repository.

Military-grade guns in the hands of freedom-loving people across the country are meant to deter the government from seeking more power than it should rightly have. Guns that are in a central repository, or that are registered, are easily confiscated by the very government that has grown tyrannical enough to warrant armed insurrection.

So, the next time someone tells you that you do not need an AK-47 or any other "weapon of war" for deer hunting, look him squarely in the eye and tell him "Precisely-- and that is why my right to own one and keep it in my home is protected by the Second Amendment."

Prohibiting carrying of firearms by the police?

2005-07-21T06:16:00.000-07:00

The police in America are armed with handguns, and many departments equip their units with military-style semiautomatic rifles-- incorrectly known to some as "assault rifles."

The anti-gun people tell us that handguns are not useful for self-defense, and that assault weapons are "weapons of war" that have no use except to kill large numbers of people quickly.

I wonder, then, why the anti-gunners always make exceptions for the police in their proposed gun bans. Police officers, unlike soldiers, have no need to kill large number of people at once; like other civilians (and police officers in America ARE civilians, no matter what they say; they are not military police), their guns are to be used exclusively in the lawful defense of themselves or others.

Again and again, the anti-gunners scream that handguns are not useful for self-defense, that they only make things worse. If that is true, then why shouldn't police be disarmed right away? Obviously, if handguns have no utility for defense, which is the only reason that non-military individuals carry them, we should disarm the police, on and off-duty.

You can't have it both ways, guys. If you think that guns are not useful for self-defense, then the only valid reason for the police to carry or shoot a handgun is, itself, invalid. Why don't you advocate disarming police?

Before you answer that, let me pose another question. If you and your family are being attacked by a group of thugs, would you specify, if you had the chance, cops that have no guns of any kind, or would you want cops with guns to come to your rescue?

If you wanted the armed cops, then you are tacitly admitting that guns do have positive value for lawful defense of the self or others. You may not want to defend yourself with a gun, but if something happens, you would like someone else to come and defend you with a gun.

That means that if you argue that guns have no value as defensive tools, you are being dishonest. Either guns are a useful defensive tool or they are not. A gun is a bunch of metal (and sometimes plastic) parts; it has no brain, no will, no capacity to form intent. It does not know if it is being wielded by a police officer, a lawful citizen, or a criminal.

Police officers are not supermen. They're human beings, like everyone else. Most are not firearms experts-- a good number of them I have talked to do not even know what model of gun they carry, nor what type of ammo with which those guns are loaded. They don't receive a great amount of training in firearms usage and lethal force laws. Their training includes many, many things, and most of it is not about guns at all.

Range officers (the people that run shooting ranges, not usually police officers themselves) will tell you that the way that many cops shoot is terrible. Negligent use of firearms is not uncommon with police. Unlike armed citizens, who carry guns because they want to, many of this type of police officer only carry guns because they are required to-- the gun is simply part of the uniform.

Not all cops are that way. Some are very professional and knowledgeable about guns, and they know how to use them. Know what? Most cops like that are what anti-gunners would call "gun nuts." They have an interest in, and love for, firearms that is quite separate from their chosen profession as a police officer.

Many people that are derisively called "gun nuts" end up becoming police officers because of their affection for firearms. The very people that the anti-gunners describe as vigilantes, rednecks, and all of the other things they call firearms aficionados make up a significant part of the police forces that they say are the only ones that should have guns.

So, anti-gun people, if you are being attacked by a person with, say, a knife, do you want a cop that knows almost as little about guns as you do, or do you want a "gun nut" cop?

If the anti-gun people were being intellectually honest, they would not continue to claim that guns have no utility in lawful self-defense. People like Sarah Brady could not continue to say that the only valid reasons to own guns are for sport and hunting. The question would become one of how much training a person needs before his gun becomes useful for defense of the self or others. And they very much do not want that to become the focus of the debate, because if it did, it would become impossible to ignore many of the facts that they currently pretend don't exist. One of those is that guns are used an estimated 2.5 million times per year in lawful self defense.

There have been many attempts to figure out how many times per year ordinary (non-police) citizens use guns to defend themselves. One article mentions 13 such studies, with an average of 1.7 million defensive gun uses per year indicated. One of the source studies was Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, a study funded by the Clinton Administration, performed by two anti-gun scholars, and published by the National Institute of Justice. This study indicates a best estimate of 1.5 million defensive gun uses per year in the US.

Perhaps the best indication that guns are excellent self-defense tools is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which has shown that if you are attacked, the response least likely to result in injury to the victim is for that victim to resist with a gun.

All of this shows that the amount of training that is needed to produce a person capable of successfully wielding a gun in self-defense is already sufficient.

If the anti-gunners were intellectually honest, that's the debate we'd be having. Since we agree that police successfully use guns for defense of self and others, it is not even a real question that guns are useful defensive tools. The question becomes one of what, in their minds, separates police officers (who they say should have guns) from the rest of us (who they say should not have guns). They would be forced to say that if an ordinary person were trained as well as a police officer with regard to firearms, he would be just as deserving of the right to carry a handgun as a police officer.

Obviously, if the debate ever got to that point, the pro-gun people will already have proven that what we've been saying all along is true. The debate would be over whether there should be any training requirement at all for what is a protected Constitutional right. And that is why the anti-gun people cannot afford the luxury of being honest with themselves or with others.

Addressing America's murder rate

2005-07-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

I have seen it written far too many times: The claim that America's (and by that, I mean the United States of America) murder rate is directly related to, if not a function of, our high rate of firearm ownership.

To be sure, our gun murder rate is quite high, as is our overall murder rate. This, along with our high rate of firearms ownership, is enough for many people to believe that our non-prohibitive gun laws are the cause of that high murder rate.

Of course, reality rarely lends itself so readily to rushed judgments like that. Let me substitute another thing for gun ownership in there, and I will show you what I mean.

America has a higher rate of light truck ownership (pickups, SUVs, vans, minivans) than any other country. America also has a higher rate of murder than many other countries. Thus, we should support prohibition and confiscation of light trucks, with a few exceptions for people involved in law enforcement or that can demonstrate need.

Doesn't that sound silly? It certainly does to me... it leaves me wondering what the connection between light trucks and murder would be. It would appear to be quite obvious that the apparent correlation between the two (rate of murder and rate of light truck ownership) is coincidental. There is no obvious link between them, and without a rather detailed explanation of how the two are related, no one should believe that the "solution" of banning light trucks makes any sense at all.

If we go back to the gun ownership rate vs. murder rate question, can anyone say that the connection is clear? If you said 'yes,' please allow me to cite a few more data:

The non-firearm murder rate in the US is higher than in those countries people are always comparing the U.S. to (England, Australia, Japan, et cetera). Did the availability of guns in the U.S. somehow cause a rise in murders that are done with matches, poison, knives, baseball bats, ice picks, hammers, shovels, et cetera? Even if every murder that was committed with a gun were erased from history, our murder rate still would be higher than in these countries.

Mexico, our southern neighbor, has a murder rate more than twice that of the United States, yet it has very restrictive gun controls. Estonia, Philippines, Brazil, Taiwan, and Northern Ireland also have higher rates of murder than the US. If the murder rate in the US is caused by our high rate of firearm ownership, doesn't that then suggest that this is true in all of those other countries-- even though they don't share America's"permissive" gun laws?

Different racial groups commit murder at vastly differing rates in the US. The supply of crime guns (which are primarily stolen from lawful owners) is the same regardless of the race of the criminal seeking the gun. If our rate of crime is a result of gun availability, why does 12.7% of our population commit 55% of the gun murders (this is from US government numbers)?

All three of those bullet points (no pun intended) above suggest that the causes of high murder rates are not related to gun ownership rates, but to much more complex sociological causes. America has long had a high murder rate, while countries like the UK have long had low ones. This was true before the US or the UK had any meaningful form of gun control. Yes, there was a time when guns in the UK were almost totally unregulated, and the UK still had a low rate of murder.

Isn't it silly to claim that the UK's low murder rate is a function of their strict gun control, when they had a very low murder rate long before that gun control was invoked? The relative murder rate in New York City and London has remained relatively constant for more than a century, a trend that started before the UK's current hysteria about guns. (And while the murder rate in the US continues to decline, it is skyrocketing in the UK. If things continue as they are going now, the UK will surpass the US in murder rate in the near future.)

It is a politically incorrect thing even to notice, but countries that are ethnically or culturally diverse tend to have high rates of murder. The problems in Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland to that effect are obvious, and they should be in the US as well. I am convinced that much of the murder we're seeing in the US now is the lingering legacy of the abomination of slavery, and in the institutionalized racism that we still have not managed to quash (although no one would dispute that much progress has been made).

Like it or not, there are no easy fixes for America's high rate of murder. Some people say it's all about easily-available guns, but it is patently obvious that it's not. Some other anti-gun people are more candid, saying that strong gun control (such as a total ban on handguns) would not instantly stop crime, but would be "a step in the right direction" or something similar.

A step that does not address the root problem of why people so often choose to murder other people is not a step in the right direction. Quite the opposite, in fact-- it is a step in a very wrong direction, since it seeks to blame objects for the actions of people, not people themselves. People don't wish to kill other people because they have guns. Criminals have guns because they want to victimize people.

Even if you could cast a magic spell that made all guns instantly disappear, you would still have all of those people that want to kill. And when humans have wanted to kill, they have always found a way to do so, no matter how much anyone tries to regulate the things they use to kill.

In the short term, we have to incarcerate the people that prove, by their actions, that they think it is okay to commit murder and otherwise victimize others.

In the longer term, we have to learn why a select few people turn to crime, and what can be done to change circumstances so that people don't so often choose a life of victimizing others.

Certainly, at no point in this process should be support any form of gun control-- because such measures reduce or eliminate the ability for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from criminals, while having no effect on the criminals.

Will banning guns make them less available to criminals?

2005-06-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

We've been saying it so much that it has almost become trite.

Banning or regulating guns won't stop criminals from getting guns, because criminals don't obey laws.

It seems so simple, yet there are a lot of people who still manage to disagree. How anyone, in this day and age, can claim that a piece of paper (and that's all a law is) is going to stop criminals from getting guns is beyond me.

I've seen it argued that banning guns will result in a large reduction in gun crime, because most guns the criminals use start out as legal guns. This is notable in itself; it shows that there are some people on the "gun control" side that aren't pretending that gun shows and lawful private sales are not a significant source of guns for criminals. (The true purpose of trying to end gun shows is to put a crimp in America's gun culture.)

Even so, let's look at that argument. If a draconian gun ban were enacted today, where all firearms of all types were totally illegal for anyone who is not a police officer or member of the armed forces, would that really keep criminals unarmed?

First of all, even if such a law were passed, it would not do anything to undo the supply of guns the criminals already have. A gun is a durable item; properly maintained, they tend to last longer than their owners. Guns would be removed from the streets gradually, as armed criminals are captured, but the process would be slow. The criminals have enough guns (and ammunition) to terrorize and kill people for decades to come.

Of course, a gun ban would not stop the flow of guns into criminals' hands. This is easy enough to demonstrate. Cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and many other drugs are illegal, and despite several decades of "the war on drugs" by the most powerful nation on the planet, they are readily available. Drugs are trafficked because there is money in it; when you ban something that people that are willing to break the law want, you create a huge financial incentive for criminals to seek to supply that need.

That is why drug enforcement has never worked. No matter how many shipments are intercepted, there will always be more waiting. No matter how many dealers and traffickers are arrested, there will always be more people waiting to take their place. There's too much money in it for it to be otherwise.

Right now, there is a lot of trafficking of illegal guns. Presently, those illegal guns are mostly guns that have been stolen from honest gun owners who owned those guns legally.

If the supply of guns stolen from lawful owners dried up, how many people really think that gun traffickers will simply throw in the towel and get a job at McDonald's? Illegal trafficking of illegal items or substances, like water flowing down a rocky hill, seeks the path of least resistance. Damming the flow of water down the hill will not stop it-- it will only result in the water quickly choosing another path.

The very same supply channels that supply the drug market would quickly be expanded to start bringing in guns from elsewhere. If we can't keep drugs out, how will we do any better with guns?

Even if peaceable citizens were totally disarmed, some of the ways criminals would get gums are obvious even now. News stories of thousands of guns going missing from police and military (including the National Guard) armories and evidence lockups have been televised from time to time. Some of the guns that go missing from the police evidence lockups will be those guns previously confiscated from criminals-- again, there have already been incidents of theft from evidence lockups.

The harder up criminals get for guns, the higher the "street" price for a gun will go-- that's simple supply and demand. The higher prices go, the more likely that people that have access to police and military guns will steal those guns and cash in. The more profit incentive you give to criminals, the farther they will go to exploit it-- and the more willing they will be to kill to protect their trade.

Of course, an even simpler way of getting a gun has already been seen in other countries, such as the Philippines. Criminals will simply use the guns they do have, or other weapons, to rob or even kill police officers, members of the military, security guards, et cetera, that have guns.

It is well-known that it is a relatively small number of criminals that commit the bulk of violent crime. They've got guns, and they've got hate. What they have not got is any respect for your life or for mine. Do you think these guys are going to turn in their guns if yet another gun law tells them to? If they don't, they're going to be armed until they are arrested-- which would be a perfect opportunity for us to send them to a place where they can't harm us with or without guns. (I know, blaming the person for his crimes rather than his gun is a novel idea, but it's just crazy enough to work!)

If somehow the cops got ahold of a given thug's gun but did not send him to prison, does anyone honestly believe that he would not be able to get another gun in short order, whether they are illegal or not? And perhaps more importantly: would we really be any safer from someone like that if, somehow, he could not get a gun? His hate and willing to commit horrible acts of violence won't go away if he can't get a gun.

Guns are the most common murder weapon, but that does not mean that banning them will make them stop existing... and even if we could cast a magic spell to make guns stop existing, criminals would turn to other means to kill people, and the blood they spill would continue unabated.

Banning guns would be a dismal failure here in America-- if the goal is to curb violent crime. The British have instituted a series of draconian anti-gun laws, and violent crime is still rising. It's higher than violent crime in the US-- a lot higher. Our murder rate is still higher, but it's falling; theirs is rising.

Now that guns have been banned in the UK, they're going after BB guns, which have long been popular toys for older children. They are going after Airsoft guns, which shoot plastic pellets that won't even break the skin. They're going after harmless toy guns that don't shoot anything. And, now, they are going after large kitchen knives. Still, their crime levels rise.

When you try to control the means of violent crime rather than the criminals themselves, you are doomed to fail. Guns are but one of an endless series of tools with which a violent person can commit murder or other violent crime. You can't ban them all, just as you can't block all of the means a criminal can use to get a gun, no matter what the law may say. The human spirit will prevail-- but unfortunately, the human spirit I refer to here is that of dangerous criminals.

One way to cut violent crime would be to make a criminal's job harder. Criminals are known to expend considerable effort looking for victims they think will be easily overwhelmed. They prefer small people, women, and those whose body language indicates that they would be compliant victims. They are not looking for a fair fight.

Career criminals, who commit the vast majority of crime, depend on a ready supply of willing victims. When you offer no resistance to a criminal, you're a willing victim. You are not responsible for his actions, but you have enabled them; you have reinforced the idea he has in his mind that his chosen career is one that works for him.

Imagine what would happen if just one in four people were prepared to repel violent attacks. The career criminals would soon encounter several people that just were not willing to go along with his plans. Even if he was not shot (and most of the time, self defense with a gun does not involve any shots; the criminal realizes he made a bad choice when picking a victim, and he runs), he would have some serious reflecting to do about his career choice after having encountered a few armed citizens.

Put another way: There is no evidence that gun control has ever reduced crime. The question now is about how much gun control increases crime, and how much reverse gun control (like the recent trend of allowing ordinary citizens to carry concealed guns) reduces crime.

This should be simple-- if you selectively disarm the people that obey laws (the non-criminals), you will be tilting the balance of power in favor of the criminals. No gun law is going to stop criminals from getting guns; we have to be realistic about that. Most of the crimes are committed by a few people that repeatedly break laws. Those that have grown accustomed to using guns to victimize people are not going to let a little thing like a gun law stop them. They are already banned from possessing guns if they are felons, and most of them are. What makes us think that if we had just this one more law, or just that one more law, things would be different?

Let the police do their job-- carry a gun!

2005-06-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

It seems to be the mantra of the anti-gun left. "Let the police do their job." The implication here is, of course, that it is the job of the police to protect people against crime, not the job of those people themselves.

There is only one minor problem with that-- it's not true.

It is not, nor has it ever been, the job of the police to defend you, me, or any other individual. The "we serve and protect" slogan emblazoned on many police cars refers to the cop's employer-- the city, county, or state for which he works. He serves and protects his jurisdiction by arresting those accused of crimes, gathering evidence against them, and testifying against them in court. By doing so, he prevents them from continuing to victimize his jurisdiction.

Of course, in order to arrest someone accused of a crime, there has to have been a crime committed. For the person against whom that crime has been committed, it is too late for defense; the crime has already been completed. The police are a reactive entity-- they come to draw the chalk outlines and collect the evidence after the crime has been completed-- and all too often, after the victim has been raped, grievously wounded, or killed.

Think of all of the crime stories you hear about on the TV news... those episodes of "Cops" you saw. If you know a crime victim (or are one), think of that. How often did the police get there in time to stop the crime in progress? They often get there shortly after the crime is completed, and are able to catch the bad guys before they get too far... but that's still getting there after the crime is finished.

Think of the Los Angeles riots, where the police found it to be too dangerous and pulled out of the riot zone for days. Think of the lifetime gun-control supporters that hurried to gun shops to buy something they had been telling us for decades that no one needs, because the police are there to defend us. Think of their outrage to learn that they had to wait fifteen days before they could take a gun home-- laws they had helped to pass, but had long since forgotten about.

We like to tell ourselves that things like that can't happen to us, but they can, and for the people of Los Angeles, they did. And while high-profile, ongoing crimes like the L.A. riots are relatively rare, violent crimes as a whole are not. In the U.S. each year, more than five million people fall victim to violent crime.

If "let the police do their job" protected individuals against crime, there would not have been more than five million violent crimes last year, the year before, and the year before that. The cops can't protect you once the crime has started.

From the time that a criminal begins his assault to the completion of that crime is typically a very short time, ranging from several seconds to a few minutes on average. Even the best police department cannot get to crime scenes fast enough to help the majority of victims-- and that presumes you are able to call them right when the crime starts. More than likely, you'll be too busy trying to stay alive to do that.

The police do protect us all from crime. They put dangerous crooks in jail, where they cannot harm us. But for every one they get, there are many more they didn't, or that were released before they got too old to commit more violent crimes-- a function of our "revolving door" justice system. The officers would love to be able to get there in time to stop every crime before another innocent person is raped, maimed, or killed, but they can't. That is why the vast majority of street patrol officers wholeheartedly support the right of citizens to carry guns for their own defense.

Yes, you read right. Conventional wisdom says that "law enforcement" favors gun control, but rarely, if ever, do they interview the actual patrol officers to see what they think. Usually, what they mean by "law enforcement" is police chiefs and other elected officials-- otherwise known as politicians. The actual officers that see, day after day, people that were defenseless against dangerous criminals do not support gun control. They know all too well what happens when people are not able to defend themselves.

Carrying a gun for your own defense is not "trying to do the job of the police." You're not trying to seek out and arrest someone that has just committed a crime, nor are you gathering evidence to be used against him in court. That's the job of the police. What you would be trying to do is protect yourself from a criminal attack.

Being ready to defend yourself against a violent attack complements the work of the police. It prevents a successful crime in the cop's jurisdiction, and provides a living witness (you) to assist the police and prosecutors in putting your attacker in prison. There is nothing about being a willing victim that is helpful to the police in doing their jobs. You make a much better witness if you live to tell about the encounter.

While everyone gains safety (as proven by the U.S. Department of Justice/National Institute of Justice Crime Victimization Survey) by carrying a gun for defense, this effect is the most pronounced for women. It's not hard to imagine why.

A typical unarmed man easily can overpower a typical unarmed woman. Even if that woman is armed with a knife or other such weapon, the typical male criminal is more than a match for her. Pepper spray may or may not work-- if it does, great-- but if not, the chances of serious injury just got worse.

Of course, of the criminal has a gun, he easily has a huge edge on her. No matter what non-gun defensive weapon she has, the typical unarmed male is still more than a match for even an athletic, fit woman.

If a woman has a gun, though, the worst things can be for her is an even match for the bad guy. The gun does not depend on strength to be effective, so the male/female differences are wholly negated (women, in fact, are often better shooters than men). And if her attacker has a knife or just his bare hands, she's better armed than her attacker. That is why resistance with a gun is by far the safest option when confronted by a violent criminal (again, from the government's Crime Victimization Survey.)

Larry Elder put it succinctly: "A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders."

Taking responsibility for your own safety is not "trying to be a cop." It is not uncivilized or morally inferior. It is a just and noble thing-- and if every good person was equipped and ready to repel violent crime, there would not be any violent crime. Would you want to be an armed robber, a rapist, a murderer, if you knew that nobody was willing to be an easy, passive victim?

When a criminal attacks, he intends for it to be your life that is risked, not his own. When his chosen victim produces a concealed handgun, that all changes. Now he is not concerned with robbery, rape, or murder-- he is concerned with survival. He didn't count on that-- he counted on YOU being the one fearing death, not him, and he does not like it.

Criminals are generally cowards. They work hard to pick out people that are weak and vulnerable. They are not looking for a fair fight. They want to overpower and dominate you, not fight you. When their minds switch from "attack" to "survive," criminals will usually have a sudden moment of clarity. That's why most defensive uses of guns end with the attacker running away, no shots fired.

A lot of people claim that guns are no good for self-defense, that they just make things worse, but I strongly doubt that any one of those people would truly rather not have one when they see that shadow approaching them in a dark parking lot, without a cop or passer-by in sight. It happens, even when you think you've done all you can to prevent it. Criminals are experts in picking out situations where their victims are at a strong disadvantage. It's what they do. Unfortunately, if a person needs a gun now and does not have one, s/he may never need one ever again.

There is no gun show loophole

2005-06-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of the so-called "gun show loophole" lately, and what a red herring that is. Put succinctly, the loophole does not exist.

Those who think that the purpose of guns is to arm criminals, and that background checks prevent the arming of criminals, see any legal means by which a criminal can potentially obtain a gun as a "loophole." Of course, that really does not make any sense, if you look at those premises.

If a gun exists only to arm a criminal, and a background check prevents the criminal from getting that gun, it makes the existence of a gun after a background check superfluous and pointless. Of course, this is their argument in a nutshell, that there is no reason for any lawful person to own a gun anyway. The very premises of the "logic" that says that there is a gun show loophole require that a person accept that guns are made for criminals to use, and have no other purpose.

In other words, if you recognize that guns have uses other than to arm criminals, there can be no such thing as a "gun show loophole."

The law in all states is that a federally licensed gun dealer (in other words, anyone that sells guns as a source of income) must perform a background check on anyone to whom it sells a gun. That is true whether that dealer operates from a gun shop, from a gun show, or from his kitchen table. If you make money selling guns, you have to have a federal license; if you have a federal license, you must do a background check.

Everyday folks like you and me, though, don't have to do background checks before selling any lawfully-owned property to another everyday person. Let's imagine that you have a gun that you do not want anymore, so you decide to sell it. Your friend expresses an interest in your gun, and he decides to buy it from you.

In most states, you may sell the gun to your friend without performing a background check. This makes a lot of sense. For one thing, as a regular person who is not licensed to sell firearms, you do not have the ability to give someone a background check. The whole background check system is set up for gun dealers. There would be no effective way for you to give a background check to your friend, nor to prove that you did so if the government were to ask you to show proof that you did.

Once you buy a gun, it is your property. You can sell it to someone else if you wish. That is the right of anyone that owns something. I own the computer I am using to write this article; if I wanted, and if you were willing, I could sell it to you if I wanted. Anything I own can be sold to someone else, should be both agree to the transaction... my car, my house, or anything else.

I do not have to perform a background check on you if I want to sell you my car, even though cars are involved in more than 40,000 deaths in the US each year. You are entitled to buy a car, even if you have a long record of causing car accidents, drunken driving convictions, or any other crimes involving a car.

You see, we generally blame the person for things like driving drunk, not the car.

The so-called "gun show loophole" comes into play when private citizens like you or me go to a gun show to sell off, say, a gun collection that they no longer want. Just because that person has rented a table at a gun show, it does not mean that he has any ability to do a background check on anyone.

Imagine this. You are not a gun owner, and you don't plan on obtaining any guns. Your uncle, though, has a large gun collection, though, and when he dies, he wills the collection to you. Now you have all of these guns you do not want. They're worth quite a bit of money, so you decide to go to a gun show to sell them off.

You see a billboard advertising a gun show next weekend. You call the number and rent a table at the gun show. You show up the day of the gun show, and the show promoter brings you to your table.

There you go, your table. What you do beyond that point is up to you.

The show starts, and you have your guns laid out on the table for all to see. A person arrives at your table and shows interest in a shotgun you have for sale.

How would you do a background check on this person? You're just a guy with some guns to sell. You're not in the business; you're not selling the guns for a source of income. If you did, you would need a license. You're just looking to get rid of some guns, a one-time deal.

You, according to the rhetoric of those people that want to "close the gun show loophole," are now an "unlicensed dealer." Yes, you, the guy that never wanted any guns, are now a gun dealer.

Isn't it stupid to call you a dealer just because you are selling something? If you had a car to sell, would that make you a car dealer? Let's be realistic here.

This is the problem of trying to close the alleged loophole. There is no such thing as an unlicensed dealer-- not legally, anyway. A "dealer" of an item is someone that is engaged in commerce, in selling things as a business or as a job. And while such illegal gun dealers exist, they don't go to gun shows and subject themselves to the paper trail of having rented a table from the gun show promoter, and to the undercover BATF agents that attend every gun show.

Yes, gun shows are fairly crawling with undercover government agents. A criminal that sells illegal guns (generally those that have been stolen) is not stupid enough to sell his illegal wares at a gun show, where he will be subjected to scrutiny... it would be like a drug dealer renting a table at a flea market or rummage sale.

This is why criminals almost never get their guns at gun shows. A 1997 Department of Justice-National Institute of Justice study reported that "less than two percent [of criminals] reported obtaining [firearms] from a gun show." In 2oo1, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report indicated that less than one percent of firearm offenders obtained their guns at gun shows.

There is no gun show loophole.

The people that hate guns really ought to realize that there is a big difference in the ways that lawful people obtain guns and the way that criminals obtain guns.

Criminals buy guns from other criminals. Just as there are criminal drug dealers to sell illegal drugs to anyone who wants them, there are criminal gun dealers to sell illegal guns. They get these guns any way they can-- most notably from illegal gun traffickers.

We've never been able to stop the flow of illegal drugs. Cocaine, for example, is illegal in every state in the country, yet it is available everywhere. Banning it has forced its suppliers underground, but it has not made illegal cocaine unavailable. It's plentiful, and as much as the government tries to eliminate it, it will always be available.

Banning cocaine has not worked. By hook or by crook, criminals will get it, and they will sell it.

The same applies to illegal guns. They will always get them, no matter how much we don't want them to. They will get them by stealing them from lawful gun owners. They will get them from stealing them from cops (in some other countries, it is common for criminals to kill cops to get their guns). They will import them from other countries (like they do with cocaine and other drugs). They will even make them themselves (like they do with methamphetamines) if they have to.

Just imagine that you are a budding young criminal who wants to begin a life of armed robbery. You need a gun. Are you going to go to a gun shop, where you have to fill out paperwork and be subjected to a background check, and then pay $500 for a gun?

Are you going to go to a gun show, crowded with police, BATF, and thousands of potential witnesses in the form of other show attendees, in the hopes of finding a private individual selling guns without a background check (which is actually quite rare at gun shows, by the way)... and if you find such an individual, pay $400 for the gun that still has the serial number, and that is still fully traceable?

Or, are you going to ask other criminals (like the drug dealer on the corner) where you can get a gun cheap, and pay $150 for a gun that conveniently already has the serial number filed off?

The choice should be obvious. It is to criminals, who overwhelmingly get them from the illegal gun trafficker selling his wares from the trunk of his car.

Trying to prevent criminals from getting guns by further regulating gun shows won't work. Criminals don't get their guns at shows.

Is there a "right to feel safe?"

2005-05-27T23:55:00.000-07:00

I've seen a lot of anti-gun editorials lately that counter our right to keep and bear arms with a supposed "right to feel safe." Since they don't "feel safe" with regular people carrying arms, they surmise, that means that their right to feel safe opposes or trumps our right to keep and bear arms.

Is there such a thing as a right to feel safe?

I can't find such a right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, but I do see the right to keep and bear arms mentioned.

There has been a movement in the left to frame various desires as "rights," and once they do that, it is supposed to make the "right" unassailable. No one wants to be seen as taking away another person's "rights," after all.

This one is really a red herring-- there is no "right to feel safe." Different people require different things to feel safe, and since "feeling safe" is a feeling, it can often be quite irrational. Some people do not "feel safe" if there are black people around. Should we prohibit black people from showing themselves in public, lest we make certain phobic people feel unsafe?

The fear of ordinary people with concealed guns is no more rational than fearing a person based on his race, and it should be treated with no more respect.

Concealed-weapon permit holders are more peaceable, more responsible, and more law-abiding than the general populace. This is fact-- it has been shown over and over again in each of the states that has followed Florida's lead in making it easier to get concealed-carry permits. Incidents involving CCW permit holders, whether you are talking about violent assaults or gun accidents, have been so rare as to be remarkable in themselves (which is not the case when you are talking about the police, which anti-gun people somehow think are better able to handle guns than the rest of us).

You have less to fear from an armed CCW permit holder than you do from any random, non-CCW-holding person that you may see. The fear of CCW permit holders is, thus, quite irrational. Fear of the criminals that victimize people for fun and profit, though, is very rational-- with more than five million incidents of violent crime in the US per year (that statistic is from the FBI Universal Crime Reports). Realistically, it is significantly higher than five million, since that figure only counts the crimes that are reported to the police.

Even with that in mind, though, some people continue to fear the armed citizens, and to support laws that limit their rights to protect themselves, but do nothing to stop violent criminals.

This editorial from the Arizona Republic is one good example. The author starts off with an unfortunate and defamatory characterization of NRA activists, and goes on to bleat about how she wants to "feel safe" when she is out in public. Laws that limit the right of responsible, law-abiding, safety-conscious people to carry their guns in public, she says, promote safety. The law in question in this editorial is the ban on carrying guns into places that serve alcohol, although you would think the debate was about concealed-carry as a whole by reading this editorial.

Does anyone believe that criminals obey laws like those that say they can't carry their guns into places that serve alcohol? I don't believe that even the author of the Republic editorial thinks that, and it is notable that she doesn't even mention criminals in the piece. It is quite clear that she is talking about the good guys with guns in this editorial.

She's not afraid of the individuals (known as "criminals") that make victims of more than five million people in the US each year. She's afraid of people that have permits to carry guns, who have been given FBI background checks to ensure that they are NOT criminals.

Feeling safe, you see, is very different from being safe.

Being safe (relatively, of course; there is no absolute safety) means that you have to take actual steps to reduce your exposure to risk. One of the best things you can do in that way is to obtain a concealed-weapon permit and a reliable, concealable gun, and become adept at shooting that gun. The US Department of Justice's Crime Victimization survey shows that resistance with a gun is the most effective response to a violent attack, and it is the one that results in the lowest risk of harm to the victim.

Taking steps to ensure one's safety is what makes a rational person "feel safe." Unfortunately, not everyone is a rational person, and there are people out there that feel safe, ironically, when the only people with guns are those that are willing to ignore the law that says they can't be carried. They only feel safe when they're in places where the criminals know that their victims are defenseless. They may think they are taking actual steps to reduce their exposure to risk, but a quick look at the facts shows that's not the case.

Personally, I don't feel safe when I am in a place where criminals are armed and I am not. I do not feel safe in a place where those criminals know that I, and the other law-abiding citizens, are defenseless. In that circumstance, the criminal can do as he wishes-- whether he will victimize me or not is his choice alone. I don't feel safe when I rely solely on the choices of a criminal as to whether I will be a victim or not. I like to have some say in what will be done to me.

Hauling out the same false arguments against concealed carry

2005-05-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me that even though the same sad arguments against concealed-carry have been proven to be completely false, they're being hauled out again and again by the antis.

The most recent example I saw was an editorial in a newspaper in Nebraska, one of only four states which trusts its own citizens so little that it refuses to issue concealed-carry permits at all.

Every time I see someone write about how they don't want concealed-carry in their state, I have to wonder why they think so little of their fellow state citizens. As I write this, there are 37 states that allow any non-criminal citizen to carry a concealed handgun. Each one of them that followed Florida's example in 1987 has had to put up with the frenzied cries (from opposition politicians, the press, and members of the general populace) predicting the gunfights that were certain to break out on every street corner.

In each of those states, the critics have been proven wrong. The arguments about the dangers of concealed carry for ordinary people have fallen, one by one, like dominoes, but it somehow does not stop pundits and politicians in other states from making the same tired arguments.

The editorial linked above is one of those. This one differs in that it at least acknowledges that other states have experience with non-discretionary concealed carry (meaning that the state does not get to pick and choose which applicants are approved-- if the person meets the requirements set in law, he shall be issued a permit), but it fails to note that the experience of these other states has fully vindicated the concept of concealed carry reform.

If I were a Nebraskan, I would be pretty annoyed that my local paper thought that I, as a Nebraskan, would be less able to handle the responsibility of a concealed gun than people in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

One of the funniest things about this editorial has got to be the justification made for the statement that carrying a concealed gun is unnecessary. Surely, they say, if guns were being used for defense, we'd be hearing about it.

Here we have a liberal, anti-gun, anti-self-defense newspaper using the lack of news stories (in liberal, anti-gun, anti-self-defense newspapers) describing successful self-defense with a handgun as proof that such things do not happen. Does anyone else see the inherent problem in that? Do they really think their readers are so foolish as to believe that if it wasn't in the paper, it didn't happen?

And how about where it says that they can't imagine a criminal being deterred by the thought of his victim being armed? Even if whomever wrote this byline-free piece has such a limited imagination, it should not be so hard to do just a little bit of research and find that criminals interviewed (as reported in the 1985 U.S. Department of Justice/ National Institute of Justice report entitled "The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons") DO fear armed citizens-- more than half of them saying that they fear armed citizens more than they fear the police, and 60% agreeing that they wouldn't "mess around with" a person armed with a gun.

Perhaps that's the problem with the antis-- they're using their imaginations rather than sticking with facts and reality, and they rely upon their own selective news reporting to determine what happened and what did not.

For them, the estimated 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year never happened, because they didn't see them in the paper. Never mind that most of these incidents involved no shooting, no injuries, and therefore nothing to report in light of their "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality... and never mind that many self-defense uses of guns are reported and aggregated at sites like Operation Self-Defense.

This "it's not in the news, so it must not be happening" mentality, and the deliberate choice not to put much emphasis on defensive gun uses, is not mere ignorance on the part of the media. It is a deliberate effort to fool people into thinking that such things don't happen very often. Rarely do we see that in as blatant a manner as we do with this editorial, where the editorial comes right out and says that it can't be happening, since we don't hear about it.

The conventional (old) news media is still virulently anti-gun, and the amount of ink used describing illegal and inappropriate uses of guns far exceeds that of the most common usages, all of which are lawful and just (but not supportive of the gun prohibition that most liberals want). This has been well-documented in John Lott's book The Bias Against Guns.

You're going to have to face the facts eventually, antis: Guns are used very often to defend innocent life, and that is a role in which they excel (which is why the cops carry them). Concealed carry has not caused random shootouts or other problems in any of the politicians running the states that trust the citizens who elected them, and the argument has now shifted from whether concealed carry increases crime to how much concealed carry cuts crime.

Thanks to the internet, the old media can no longer hide the facts about guns and self-defense.

If you hate violence, carry a gun

2005-05-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Although I do lawfully carry a concealed handgun everywhere I go here in Arizona, I am not violent-- as a matter of fact, I hate violence. I always have.

I detest this notion that many people have that there are times when you can hit someone over what he said-- the kind of thing you see in John Wayne movies. I've described things that people have said to me, and I have had people tell me that I should have hit him, that they would have hit him. This disgusts me-- the only valid use of violence is in defense. When someone insults you and you hit him, you are the violent aggressor, even if he's the one that started the nasty comments. Sticks and stones.

I dislike violence so much that I refuse to allow myself to be a victim of it. Defensive violence is an unfortunate necessity, but it is also a noble and just thing (as contradictory as that may sound). Aggressive violence is wrong, and since I don't have a way of telling when aggression against me may be initiated, I have to be equipped to handle it at all times.

Simply put, I only carry a gun at times that I value my life enough to equip myself with the finest defensive tool available. It's not my main defensive tool-- that's my brain. It is my intent that by being aware of my surroundings, by not taking unnecessary risks, and by running away if I can do so, that I avoid the need to ever use lethal force to defend myself. If I do everything right, and if my luck holds out, it will have been a waste of time and effort for me to have hauled my sidearm around for all these years-- but that would be a very good thing.

My defensive sidearm (usually a Glock 17 9mm) doesn't make me bold, nor does it mean that I am inclined to go look for trouble. I've heard that canard from the antis all too often, and it's just bunk. That two pound weight is a constant reminder that I am not immortal, that I live in a world that can sometimes be dangerous. That makes me even less likely to "start something" than I was before.

It is true that I look for trouble in the places I happen to be going to anyway-- because that is the only way that I can avoid that trouble. It's not about being macho, not about being a "badass," not about the idea that you don't have to take crap from anyone. It's about saving my life. Most people don't think about their mortality until violence finds them, and they're usually taken by surprise. In essence, they rely on the law of averages (that the odds of being a victim at any given moment are relatively slim) and, if that fails, on the goodwill of violent criminals, for their survival.

That's a very passive approach. It's like relying on the relatively slim risk that you'll get into a car accident on any given day. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't rely only on that-- I actively try to avoid accidents as I drive. I look to identify potential threats. And, should that fail, I wear my seat belt.

The fact that I wear my seat belt (which has nothing to do with the law requiring that I do so) is not a sign that I am looking to get in a car accident. While I know that a seat belt greatly reduces my risk of serious injury in a car accident, it's no guarantee; I can still be hurt or killed. In addition, the emotional, legal, and logistical aftermath of a car accident is not something that any rational person would want to experience.

It is no more rational to presume that a peaceable person who carries a gun is out to find someone to shoot than it is to presume that someone that wears a seat belt wants to get into a car accident. While the antis may have fits at that suggestion, I can tell you that it is a perfect analogy-- and that my reasoning for wearing my seat belt and carrying my Glock is the same. I can also tell you, as one that knows a lot of everyday people that carry concealed guns, that most of us feel the same way.

Breaking the stereotype, again

2005-05-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

The anti-gun people (hereafter known as 'antis') like to characterize gun owners, gun rights supporters, NRA members, et cetera, as uneducated, unsophisticated rednecks with violent tendencies. As with most things the antis say, this characterization is false. I've met and known many gun owners by now (something the antis generally refuse to do), and in terms of the things I am about to describe, I'm not at all unusual among gun owners.

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, one of the "blue states" that antis love; certainly, it's not a place that is big on gun rights. I was not raised around guns. I never even saw a real gun outside of a cop's holster until I was in college. Guns were not an issue in our house, and I don't remember the issue of gun control ever coming up when I was a child, either "pro" or "con."

I spent six years in college, undergoing attempted liberal indoctrination (some of it covert, some of it over-the-top in how obvious it was. "Gender and race in a cross-cultural perspetive" was one general-ed course title, and of course there's the old favorite "Perspectives on gender," known on campus as "Male-Bashing 101." The latter was the only class that fulfulled two separate general ed requirement categories with one class; opting to avoid this class meant you'd have to take two three-unit classes rather than just one).

On top of that, my first car was a foreign compact, I'm somewhere between agnostic and atheistic, I'm in favor of gay rights, I'm pro-choice, I dislike violence (see my next post), and I've never chewed tobacco.

So much for the stereotype.

The first step...

2005-05-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

...in restoring our gun rights and other essential liberties. Welcome.

I have to presume that I will, in fact, successfully counter all of the ridiculous statements and other wholly unfounded premises that make up every piece of gun control ever conceived. I have to think that eventually, logic and facts will beat the hysteria, the hoplophobia, and the statist delusions of every person that supports gun control. I don't harbor any illusions about singlehandedly changing the face of the gun debate, but I will do what I can.

Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams once said. Those who abhor guns (rather than the criminals that misuse them) can obfuscate, lie, pretend they're only in favor of "reasonable" measures and not total prohibition, or claim to be the voice of "common sense," but eventually, the total failure of gun control to do anything other than leave people vulnerable to the depredations of despots, tyrants, and violent criminals must come out . No matter how hard the anti-gun folks want it to be otherwise, gun control has failed to produce any kind of reduction in violent crime, and has, in fact, made the problem worse.

I have to admit that I was reluctant to join in the blogging fad. I'm pretty well out of the loop with regards to fads or trends, and once I discover such things, I am more likely to be repulsed than intrigued.

Even so, I have to admit that the effect that blogging has had on the flow of information has been intriguing. The mainstream media have long had a virtual monopoly in that area, but the internet is changing that, and that is a cause for hope. With regard to gun rights, of course, the mainstream media have long been hostile enemies.

The fall of the old media can only be seen as a good thing for those of us that value individual liberty and the ideals for which our American Founding Fathers stood. If I can be a part of the movement that replaces fiction with fact, lies with truth, and statism with liberty, then I shall do what I can, even if it does involve using a medium that has become rather trendy.