For Those Ridiculing the NRA - Page 6

Another great NRA fallacy shot down.

(CNN) -- The National Rifle Association's Friday press event has received almost uniformly negative reviews. Yet the speech by NRA chief Wayne LaPierre had this merit: It pulled into daylight for all to see the foundational assumption of modern American gun culture.

LaPierre argued that our society is stalked by unknown numbers of monsters, potential mass murders like Adam Lanza. Then he said this: Even if we could somehow identify future Adam Lanzas, "that wouldn't even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country."

David Frum


 

The "criminal class" sentence is key. In LaPierre's mind, the world is divided between law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Citizens and criminals form two separate and discrete categories. The criminals pose a threat; if the citizens do not go armed against the threat, they will be victimized by the threat.

I know people who carry handguns with them wherever they go, and for just the reason described by LaPierre.

Now let's take a look at the real world of American gun ownership. The following incident occurred in August:

"A man was shot in the face 9 p.m. Friday in an altercation with a neighbor over barking dogs on Atlas Street," Troy Police said.

"Police arrested David George Keats, 73, of Troy [Michigan] and charged him with attempted murder in the incident," according to a media release from the Troy Police Department.

"According to police, witnesses stated that the altercation began when Keats let his three dogs outside and the dogs began to bark. According to the media release, Keats' 52-year-old next door neighbor yelled at the dogs to be quiet and kicked the fence. Keats then ran up to the victim, yelled, 'Don't tell my dogs to shut up,' and began shooting at the victim.

"One bullet hit the man in the face, piercing both cheeks, and four more shots were fired at the victim as he was running away," according to the report.

The encounter between Keats and his neighbor ended nonlethally only by good luck. A shot in the face is a shot to kill.

The great divide on guns

Nor was this encounter aberrational. There's solid research to show that most so-called defensive gun uses are not really defensive at all.

In the late 1990s, teams of researchers at the Harvard school of public health interviewed dozens of people who had wielded a gun for self-defense. (In many cases, the guns were not fired, but were simply brandished.) The researchers pressed for the fullest description of exactly what happened. They then presented the descriptions to five criminal court judges from three states.

"The judges were told to assume that the respondent had a permit to own and carry the gun and had described the event honestly from his/her own perspective. The judges were then asked to give their best guess whether, based on the respondent's description of the incident, the respondent's use of the gun was very likely legal, likely legal, as likely as not legal, unlikely legal, or very unlikely legal."

Even on those two highly favorable (and not very realistic) assumptions, the judges rated the majority of the self-defensive gun uses as falling into one of the two illegal categories.

The researchers concluded:

"Guns are used to threaten and intimidate far more often than they are used in self-defense. Most self-reported self-defense gun uses may well be illegal and against the interests of society."

That certainly describes the Keats shooting. With a little Google searching, you can pull up dozens of similar incidents.

Kurtz: Will media stay focused on gun story?

Here's a story from just this past week, December 22.

"Longview, Washington -- A man shot and killed his uncle during an argument at their apartment complex late Friday night. ...'We heard a big bang,' said Ron Nelson, who lives a few apartments down...Nelson said the men were fighting over a hat and a cell phone."

Now that so many Americans carry weapons when they go out of the home, shooting incidents can occur anywhere, including very commonly the road. Another recent incident: In Pensacola, Florida, in October a man in a Jeep Cherokee cut off another car. A roadway confrontation followed, the two cars stopped, and the Jeep owner emerged to shoot the other driver in the knee. He was arrested this past week.

In these cases, and thousands like them each and every year, it is not so clear who is the "good guy" exercising responsible self-protection and who is the "bad guy" who can only be deterred by an armed citizen.

But the guns in their hands protected exactly nobody. They turned ordinary altercations into murderous exchanges of fire. They brought wounds, death and criminal prosecution where otherwise there would likely only have been angry words or at worst, black eyes.

LaPierre's offers a vision of American society as one unending replay of the worst scenes in Charles Bronson's 1974 vigilante classic, "Death Wish."

The people most victimized by this nightmare vision end up being the people who believe it -- and who carry the weapons that kill or maim their neighbors, their relatives, their spouses, and random passersby.

We heard all about your Indian heritage dying at the hands of those evil european undocumented workers.

But you just don't give a damn about the Jews, plain and simple.

6 million Jews Dead. After they took their guns.

Wrong but guess what this isn't about the Jews. You want to make it into the Jews because you enjoy deflection.

Answer the questions Ninja.

I could look at it your way and say if the Indians had had more guns maybe not so many would have been slaughtered. I like the way you bring up something hurtful from my past to try and bring me down it goes to you being a real nice guy. wow.

BTW, I have also had a relative lose their life because of some big bad guy like you carrying a gun for protection, lmao. Scared aren't you, boo.

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries-- and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference.

Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s-- after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions-- there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem-- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/12/18/invincible-ignorance-n1468784

Ninja what was an assault rifle made for? Simple question that you can't answer.

Gsdadmin, I did not take your words and twist them, nor did I put words in your mouth. I gave you something from another perspective, to help you see the fallacy of your suggestion, which was a sick suggestion.
Assault rifles are for whatever they are used for, same as a keg of dynamite.

Did you even bother to read the article?

Assault rifles were manufactured to kill people in wartime. I haven't heard any other explanation.

It is not sick it is reality of what an assault rifle will do to a 6 six old who has been shot 11 times.

It is funny how these pics would be so sick and whatever but you are defending the very guns that did the murders. wow.

BTW, the psycho in NY that ambushed the firefighters, spent only 17 Yr in prison for beating his grandmother to death with a hammer. Guess his past would not be an indication that he would kill again. The courts must have felt sorry for him so let him free to murder some more. After all, he only killed one person and didn't use an assault rifle, there for he wasn't a threat to society. It's the people who commit the crimes that are the problem, and the courts who allow them to mingle with society.

Joanro did you read the second article I posted? Or for that matter the first?

You can blame it on mental people, the courts, the police, the holocaust and any thing else you want but the one thing I see is none of you blaming the guns. A little weird considering the blame game that is being played out here.

You are right that any thing can be used as a weapon but it takes an assault rifle seconds to kill many. I guess you can try to compare an assault rifle with a hammer but I really don't see the comparision.