Do Guns Save Lives?

Saw a good post on WordPress today titled Do Guns Save Lives or Take Them? Can’t say I agree 100% with it on every minor detail, but in essence it does address the real problem. The post ends with this observation with which I do fully agree:

…it is not the gun that is the problem, but the person. Rather than addressing the means, we need to get to the source of the problem, which is the person behind the weapon.

As many have pointed out before the crime, violence, and homicide problem in the U.S. is not uniformly distributed around the country. No, it is highly centralized in certain areas where some primary features are an illegal trade in drugs and gangs of young men fighting for turf. Blacks are something like 10-13% (depending on whom your read) of the population but commit over 50% of the homicides, and this violence  is most often directed at other blacks.

A good example of this was in the news just the other day where at least 19 people were wounded at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans. From Yahoo News:

Two brothers with a history of drug arrests and suspected ties to a neighborhood gang each face 20 counts of attempted second-degree murder in a shooting spree that brought a sudden bloody end to a Mother’s Day parade in a New Orleans neighborhood. Yahoo News, May 17, 2013

You have to go to the story to see the pictures to realize the shooters were black. Or you need to know that the Seventh Ward in New Orleans where this happened is almost completely a black neighborhood. It is politically incorrect today to acknowledge the racial component of our problem with violence in America.

According to this report in Bloomberg:

[New Orleans ] had 199 murders last year, or 58 for every 100,000 residents, up from 50 for every 100,000 in 2010. The city with the next highest crime rate last year was Flint, Michigan, with 51 murders for every 100,000 residents followed by Detroit with 48 murders for every 100,000.

In comparison the overall rate for the United States as a whole for 2011 was 4.8 per 100,000, a huge difference (see these FBI statistics). The areas with the worse problems share some common characteristics:

1. Controlled for decades by Democratic politicians

2. High concentration of lower income blacks characterized by a large percentage of single head of household (dysfunctional) families

3. Gangs

4. Illegal drug trade

Here the facts are laid out succinctly:

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among African Americans today is 73%, three times higher than it was prior to the War on Poverty. Children raised in fatherless homes are far more likely to grow up poor and to eventually engage in criminal behavior, than their peers who are raised in two-parent homes. In 2010, blacks (approximately 13% of the U.S. population) accounted for 48.7% of all arrests for homicide, 31.8% of arrests for forcible rape, 33.5% of arrests for aggravated assault, and 55% of arrests for robbery. Also as of 2010, the black poverty rate was 27.4% (about 3 times higher than the white rate), meaning that 11.5 million blacks in the U.S. were living in poverty. -HOW THE WELFARE STATE HAS DEVASTATED AFRICAN AMERICANS

If we want to solve the problem we have to acknowledge it, but today too many people shy away from seeing truth because they fear being labeled a “racist” for seeing the obvious. The problem is not black people per se. Never has been. The problem is calculated political destruction of the black family by progressive policies of the Left. To many cynical politicians in Washington it is not important how many blacks kill each other, or how much drugs they sell as long as the votes are delivered on time to the Democratic machine.

Many have said, and I think accurately, that blacks traded dreams of freedom and progress in the 1960s for guaranteed benefits on the Democratic Plantation today. Too many blacks are willing to sell their vote for a free “Obamaphone” and that is the real root of the problem.

Returning to “Do Guns Save Lives or Take Them?,” the writes says that:

From the perspective of the National Rifle Association, they would say that guns save lives and claiming that a gun never killed anyone. From the political left, you will find the exact opposite response. Guns take lives, and a gun alone never saved anyone.

This is an exaggeration. Gun rights advocates acknowledge that guns are used for both good and bad purposes. However from their point of view the good uses far outweigh the bad and they acknowledge that ultimately you can’t have one without the other.

According Dr. Gary Kleck, an award winning criminologist at Florida State University, firearms are used over 2 million times a year by Americans to defend themselves. In contrast guns are used in homicides and suicides far less often. Some critics of Kleck claim that his statistics are inflated, but many studies have come up with figures above 100,000 per year of defensive firearm usage, still quite a bit larger than their use in homicide and suicide.

The truth is that it is very difficult to know how many times people legitimately use firearms for self defense. If you think about it for a minute that should not be difficult to understand. In a lot of Democratically controlled cities if you use a firearm in self defense you are more likely to be prosecuted than the criminal. In those parts of the country a sensible person doesn’t report these things to the police.

You can’t just count the official police statistics of a criminal killed in justified self defense. As Kleck showed in his research in the vast majority of cases of self defense a firearm is never fired. In most cases the intended victim displays a firearm to the attacker and that person quickly leaves the vicinity, presumably to find an unarmed victim whom it is safer to attack.

On this evidence alone I think the verdict can be reached. Guns save lives. That is essentially their primary purpose. That is what the majority of people use guns for. Based on the research of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book On Killing the majority of people can’t kill another human being on purpose. But they can threaten an attacker with one, and the evidence strongly supports the claim that that is what they most often do with a firearm.

lwk

Who Should Have Guns?

Another WordPress poster here gave an interesting quote about gun control. Unfortunately his followup argument is largely just pure emotion. You could paraphrase it something like this: “Guns are bad and I wish they didn’t exist!“

His quote from Stefan Molyneux is interesting:

If you are for gun control, then you are not against guns, because the guns will be needed to disarm people. So it’s not that you are anti-gun. You’ll need the police’s guns to take away other people’s guns. So you’ver very Pro-Gun, you jus tbelieve that Government (which is, of course, so realiable, honest, moral and virtuous …) shold be allowed to have guns. There is no such thing as gun control. There is only centralizing gun ownership in the hands of a small, political elite and their minons. -Stefan Molyneux

The WordPress poster comments on the above:

This is a common argument against gun control. Stefan Moyneux takes it a step higher though and says that gun control is very pro-gun because it centralizes guns for the state, which is not reliable, or so do right-wingers say anyway.

The problem is, nobody is taking away your guns the way right-wingers imagine. Cops aren’t suddenly going to bust from your door, threat you with their pistols and arrest you why they search up for you AK-47, movie-style …

 … it is not that suddenly some gun control law passes and the police will immediately be going from home to home looking for guns like some kind of dictatorship.

I would agree that this drastic scenario is probably unlikely for the most part. The government might use DHS or BATFE agents dressed stylishly in “assault black” for massive raids of specially selected “patriots” just to set an example.  No doubt these would be filmed by the media and broadcast on TV so that no one missed the message.

It would almost certainly be a more long, drawn out process managed by a legion of bureaucrats sending out repeated notices of delinquency in failing to turn in your arms, warnings that your driver’s license won’t be renewed, or your home insurance company being forced to cancel your policy, etc. Maybe your employer will find it convenient to terminate you if you cause too much trouble.

The problem though, contrary to this poster’s objection as to the actual scenario of gun confiscation, is that you don’t have to have government agents going door to door to have a dictatorship. What you will eventually have though is a government that is no longer afraid to break into a person’s home, is no longer afraid that people might violently object to their designs, and ultimately when people are afraid of their government what you do have is a dictatorship.

How many have heard the expression, “the banality of evil“?

Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. -Wikipedia

The real evil of the world is most often not done dramatically, but accomplished in mundane and banal fashion.

Finally the poster arrives at his conclusion:

As for the argument that the police are allowed to have guns, then that only means it is wrong for them to have them too, not that gun control is wrong. In fact, I’m all for disarming the police. Guns are bad, and the world would be much better if people stop creating them.

Like I said earlier, you could paraphrase the above as ”Guns are bad and I wish they didn’t exist!“

Guns exist. More importantly the knowledge of guns exist and you can write all the laws you want, but you cannot very easily erase knowledge that is widespread. Gunsmiths in Afghanistan and Pakistan working with primitive hand tools in huts without electricity or running water can make functional guns. These are guys that are illiterate. But they can still take the designs of guns they have seen and produce a replica that works.

So I think we can with little apology discard the poster’s “I wish they didn’t exist!” It is meaningless emotion that gives absolutely no rational guidance on how to solve a problem.

Stefan Molyneux whom the poster quoted understood the problem. There will be guns. You can bet the government will have guns. The question is whether the people who are not part of the government will have guns. The more important question though is what difference does that make?

If one looks at the history of the 20th century it is a history of governments killing millions and millions of people without guns. That happened to Armenians in Turkey. It happened to Russians in their Gulags. It happened in the death camps of the Nazis. It happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It happened in China under Chairman Mao.

Maybe you don’t think that could happen here. Maybe you don’t think a government which has all the guns won’t become tyrannical. But if you do believe those things then clearly you are not a student of history and have little to base your claim on except “it hasn’t happened here yet“and “I refuse to believe it could happen.”

History backs the claim that overall you will be safer if the government doesn’t have all the guns. Make no mistake about it. There will be guns. The only question is who will have them, and who will not.

lwk

Well Regulated Speech

Royal Farros writes about the meaning of the 2nd Amendment here:

 ”A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

“well regulated” means there are rules and order…

Actually, no, that was not exactly the meaning the Founders attached to this phrase. The Founders were not hugely in favor of the type of “regulation” we see today where some government entity decides minutiae of individual behavior. That is an idea of “regulation” more in accord with the modern world than the world the Founders knew.

To get a better understanding of how this would have been understood in the late 18th century think of a clock maker. The Founders would instantly understand you if you referred to a clock as being “well regulated,” that is, made and adjusted so as to give accurate time. A Kentucky rifle was “well regulated” if it was precisely made and would accurately place a lead ball on a target over and over again if the shooter did his part.

Lockwork on a finely made rifle contemporary to the Founders. They would have said this was “well regulated” if it was correctly made and adjusted to function as designed.

The “well regulated militia” was a milita that was well equipped, trained, and led by local officers who’s loyalty was more with their community than Washington. Madison argues at length on this in the Federalist Papers. It was an argument against the power of centralized government to subjugate a well armed and well equipped populace organized specifically to have the ability to resist centralized government that went beyonds its Constitutional bounds.

He continues to write:

“The brilliance of the way the 2nd Amendment is written is it not only allows but requires We The People to define “Arms”… and regulate accordingly.

And we could alter the definition of “free speech” such that criticizing the government was like “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” That is the principle that this writer is invoking. If you don’t like a principle then just re-define it to suit your view and claim that is what it means.

Famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes writing for the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States (1919) upheld the Espionage Act of 1917 which made it illegal to hand out flyers opposing the draft during WWI. “Shouting fire in a crowded theater” is the familiar paraphrase of Justice Holmes words in the written decision of the Supreme Court in that case.

Based on that reasoning I suppose Cindy Sheehan should have been arrested for protesting outside former President Bush’s ranch near Crawford, Texas. It would certainly have been as logical as arresting protestors in WWI.

Farros’ reasoning is a lot like that. What the heck, just redefine “arms” to mean BB guns, or black powder muzzle loaders and with a wave of the hand, hocus pocus, you gut the real meaning and intent of the 2nd Amendment.

The definition of “arms” intended by the Founders in the 2nd Amendment was weapons with “cutting edge” technology (pun intended) capable of defeating  the standing army of the Federal government if necessary. It is true they probably did not imagine how that technology would eventually evolve. Perhaps that is why we no longer exactly follow their guideline today. We have not since the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934 which regulates (in the modern sense of “regulate“) fully automatic machines guns among other things.

Gun control advocates correctly observe that today, given modern technology, a civilian militia could not stand up and fight directly against the military forces of the United States. What they fail to notice, or perhaps fail to mention, is that an armed populace could make it very difficult for a  tyrannical government to effectively rule the hinterlands distant from Washington D.C.

Its not about guns, its about control!

It is hard to rule when your agents get shot and you have to send out a company of soldiers to protect every tax collector or EPA agent. That is why tyrannical governments universally disarm a populace. As many 2nd Amendment supporters have said repeatedly, “its not about guns, its about control!“

To people like Farros I would advise that you be careful what you wish for. You might find that championing bad principles will come back and haunt you in ways you have not had sufficient imagination to foresee.

lwk

What Are We Afraid Of?

Another day, another WordPress post. shamusbishop writes in “Guns for self-defense: What are we afraid of?“:

But the fact remains that millions of us don’t own guns and we get on just fine without them. We don’t live in fear of someone breaking into our homes. We know its a possibility, but we also know that the police for the most part keep our streets safe. 

Here is another fact that shamusbishop may not be aware of. The police have no legal obligation to protect you as an individual. You can sue them if you think they are negligent but you will lose in court. Google it, or see here, or here, or here.

The police most often arrive after the fact.

As I have written before, in your own personal crime scene you are going to be the first responder, or you are going to be the victim. You may place great faith in the police but you should remember that they measure their success with statistics. There are always painful failures they cannot prevent. Presumably you would prefer to not be that statistic.

If you are relying on the police to “keep [your] streets safe” it is wise to understand the odds against you. You might want to peruse this report sometime:

Lifetime Liklihood of Victimization (U.S. Department of Justice,  Bureau of Justice Statistics)

According to this report your average American male has an 83% chance of being a victim of violent crime in a lifetime (and a women has an 73% chance). When this report was written the homicide rate was about twice what it is now. Nevertheless your chances of being a victim in your lifetime are much higher than you might imagine.

shamusbishop continues to write:

A gun advocate commenter on my blog recently wrote that in this world there are sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. … This is what this gun advocate would have me believe.

This is in reference to an article by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman called On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs. There are many copies on the Internet. One of them is here. Here is a short quote, but I recommend you read it all at the link given above:

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me:

“Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

Speaking to shamusbishop, you are the proverbial sheep. The only thing you don’t know is when someone is going to come along and shatter the image of your blissful world and shear your sheep’s ass.  Dave Grossman is right. You are wrong.

I remember reading a short story decades ago. Don’t remember the author, or title, but do remember the essential theme. A very experienced sea captain had for most of his life heard stories from other seamen about typhoons in the South China Sea. Based on his experience he thought they were wildy exaggerated. He had never actually been caught in the worst part of one.

The story is about how inexorably he is caught in this gigantic storm, the terror he feels now that he knows it is a reality, and how eventually he survives. I have been in a typhoon in the South China Sea so for me the story rings true.

You are like that captain in the story. You think your – probably affluent – and safe neighborhood can protect you and you need not concern yourself about the dangers that are around you, although mostly unseen by you except on the evening news.

For justification of his (or her?) view shamusbishop writes:

I think it comes down to faith. I have faith in my neighbors and my community.

In the world where the 2nd Amendment was originally written it was believed that individuals in the community had an obligation to arm themselves and subject themselves to discipline and training. That is the real meaning of the”well regulated militia” phrase of the 2nd Amendment. They had faith in their community because they knew their neighbors were not negligent in helping to provide for the common defense.

One of the best articles I have read on that subject is A Nation of Cowards by Jeffrey Snyder. He wrote:

Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely believed that life was a gift from God, that to not defend that life when offered violence was to hold God’s gift in contempt, to be a coward and to breach one’s duty to one’s community. 

And:

In 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh released the FBI’s annual crime statistics, he noted that it is now more likely that a person will be the victim of a violent crime than that he will be in an auto accident. Despite this, most people readily believe that the existence of the police relieves them of the responsibility to take full measures to protect themselves. The police, however, are not personal bodyguards. Rather, they act as a general deterrent to crime, both by their presence and by apprehending criminals after the fact. As numerous courts have held, they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in particular. You cannot sue them for failing to prevent you from being the victim of a crime.

Insofar as the police deter by their presence, they are very, very good. Criminals take great pains not to commit a crime in front of them. Unfortunately, the corollary is that you can pretty much bet your life (and you are) that they won’t be there at the moment you actually need them.

I highly recommend you read the complete article. It shreds any pretense of a moral high ground that people like shamusbishop assume they have. In fact just the opposite, their position by any objective standard is one of total moral cowardice clothed in a cloak of illusion.

lwk

Congressional Cowards?

The number of gun control advocates freaking out over the recent defeat of their cherished gun control schemes in the Senate grows daily. Here is a good example of how they try to turn it into a personal attack.

Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog (which explains a lot) writes today:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Republican strategist Ed Rogers late last week were also still insulting Newtown families, calling them “props” for the White House’s efforts to reduce gun violence.

This is of course nonsense. The administration was using these families as props for their gun control agenda. What is actually despicable is how Benen tries to take that truth and insinuate that Sen. Rand telling the truth was somehow an insult against these families.

This is the “politics of personal destruction” in full flower. Benen doesn’t look to be the caliber to really pull it off, just another angry voice on the Left, but you can see the principle that is practiced by the intellectual herd to which he belongs.

Senator Rand Paul. You might not agree with him, but he can speak coherently and at length without a teleprompter.

Benen continues to write:

It’s hard to even imagine a group of people more deserving of our sympathy and respect than Newtown families,…

They certainly deserve our sympathy. But respect is something you earn, not something that is just given to you because you are a victim. To the extent some of these families were allowing themselves to be used as props is not an action deserving of respect. Given the extent of their personal tragedies though I can forgive them. It is harder to forgive people who use their tragedy, as Benen does, to advance a political agenda.

lwk

The Biggest Gun In The World

A caller to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show last week had an interesting comment.

Those committed to the idea of gun control believe that if any guns are to be legal for civilian ownership then prospective owners should be vetted to the umpteenth degree. To hear some talk wannabe-gunowners should be looked at from every perspective – mental, criminal history, social studies test scores in high school – just about any thing they can imagine to limit gun ownership to as few as possible (or none, if they could achieve their Holy Grail of banning civilian ownership of guns completely). Some no doubt would advocate an anal rectal exam as mandatory before being able to purchase a BB gun.

U.S.S. Nimitz. The U.S. military is the biggest “gun” in the world.

The caller pointed out that many of these people who want draconian background checks for prospective gun owners were the same folks who objected vociferously to any suggestion that Barack Obama should be thoroughly vetted before being elected President. It was only much later that it finally came out that Obama was once a member of an openly Socialist New Party in Illinois in the 1990s. Recently Bill Ayers, once a member of the radical Weatherman organization and most likely accomplice to murder, even admitted that Obama’s political career started in his living room.

However important these things are, or however unimportant to your viewpoint, you should clearly recall the great reluctance of much of the liberal media to vet the history of Obama.

Do we need to do an indepth background check on any politician, Democrat or Republican, who will get his or her hands on the trigger of these weapons?

But guess what, and this was the caller’s main point, America just gave the biggest gun in the world to Barack Obama – the U.S. military – without a serious background check. So how’s that working out for you? How do you feel about the idea that this President claims a right to use drone strikes to kill Americans in America without any due process of law?

Do you think the President has a “license to kill” with these?

So what is the big deal with Joe Blow being able to buy a .22 rifle from his neighbor without a background check? You put nuclear weapons in the hands of one man without a real background check, and worry about some guy who wants to buy a semi-automatic rifle?

lwk

p.s. Have to add this image I just saw today:

VFW sign calling for a background check of the President.

Valdet Speaks!

On the lighter side, ran across a WordPress post from a Valdet Selimaj that seems to be about gun control and bombs, or something. Based on his picture linked on his WordPress site I would guess he is probably a lot more competent with a cell phone than any sort of firearm.

He writes:

Bombs are illegal and guns are legal… but both kill people. Guns are readily accessible and easily attainable. Bombs aren’t.

It would seem that the facts we know so far about the Boston Marathon Bombing tell a different story. The bomb was made from readily available components: a pressure cooker, nails, ball bearings, bits of metal, etc. It is true that you can’t easily go into a hardware or sporting goods store and purchase a ready made bomb with a money back guarantee, but since the publication of the Anarchist Cookbook in 1971 information about making homemade bombs or IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) is readily available. This particular type of “pressure cooker” bomb has been used extensively in the mideast by Muslim terrorists.

Pressure cooker bomb

IEDs, as proven by years of Islamic terrorism, are “easily attainable” by anyone with the motivation to search for the information. In fact they are cheaper and easier to attain than a good quality AR-15 and a couple clips of ammunition. For the terrorist the added benefit is being able to carry one into a crowded place, set the timer, and walk off before the murder and mayhem is consummated.

He continues:

We do have the 2nd Amendment right allowing us to bear arms. I do not believe that anyone has the right to take away that away from us. 

Based on a cartoon here it would appear that Valdet’s idea of the arms that one is guaranteed to be able to “bear” in the 2nd Amendment are single shot muzzle loaders which were current technology in 1776?

In fact the 2nd Amendment was written to guarantee a right to own the cutting edge weapons technology of the time. The standard smoothbore musket that typical uniformed soldiers on both sides of the Revolutionary War used was the “assault rifle” of the time. The “Kentucky Rifle” (a true rifle, not a smoothbore) of the American militia was the sniper rifle which, although slow to reload compared to the smoothbore, was much more accurate and used by their owners to frequently kill British officers at longer range than the smoothbore was capable of.

The point is that the 2nd Amendment was specifically designed to protect a right to own weapons with functional military utility. The truth is we have amended that right in practice. If we fully followed the Founders intentions then we would be talking about a right to own fully automatic assault rifles, not a semi-automatic rifle that looks like the military version (but is not).

The right to bear arms means that we can arm ourselves to protect ourselves or others. That indicates to me a gun or two. That does not mean military style weapons that civilians have no business owning.

Again, based on Valdet’s picture cuddling his smart phone, I suspect his actual knowledge of weapons, “military style,” or otherwise is limited to video games and movies. But the idea that some weapons, based on their looks, are more “military” than others is largely an illusion of those who know little or nothing about guns.

The AR-15 rifle shoots either the civilian .223 Remington or the military 5.56x45mm cartridge. This is one of the least powerful centerfire rifle cartridges in existence.

2nd cartridge from left is .223. You can clearly see that it is dwarfed by common hunting cartridges like the .308 Winchester (7.62x51mm) and 7mm Remington Magnum.

Today those who want to ban guns that shoot military cartridges that are “too powerful” will tomorrow – if they succeed in banning these guns – be telling you that common hunting cartridges and rifles are “military grade sniper rifles.” The fact is that just about any firearm has some military utility.

But cosmetics do not make a gun more dangerous. That is essentially the current argument against “assault rifles” that are not assault rifles. The M16 which the military uses is a real assault rifle. It is capable of full automatic fire. The AR-15 is not. But cosmetically the AR-15 is black, and has a flash suppressor, a pistol grip, etc. These features somehow make it more “military” than my 7mm Remington hunting rifle which would be quite capable of doing service as a sniper rifle. It is certainly capable with its much more powerful cartridge of being lethal at long range than an AR-15.

Valdet again:

Or is someone going to tell me that in order to defend their home/self from an intruder/attacker that they need an assault rifle to do it?

Yes, an AR-15 carbine with a 30 round clip is a nearly ideal weapon for home defense. I defend that proposition in my first post on this blog, Who Needs An Assault Rifle.

I would like to further propose that a Generation-X (or Y, or whatever) metrosexual is probably not qualified to tell someone what they need, or do not need to defend their home, their families, and in circumstances of disaster, their neighborhood from looters and vandals.

lwk