Thursday, December 20, 2012

Just a little question before we start...

We're gonna have a 'national conversation' on gun control. Thomas Crown at Red State lays out the groundwork for the discussion, and asks a question:


So, as [Lefties] begin their ritual descent into bathing in the blood of children about whom they wouldn’t care were they just inside the birth canal, let’s have the “conversation” about pretending away the Second Amendment they want. Because they want to change the law, the burden of proof lies on them; so here is the first question they must answer: 
Why didn’t restrictive gun control laws save the victims of Newtown?
This is what the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has to say about Connectictut’s gun control regime:
Connecticut has strong gun laws that help combat the illegal gun market, prevent the sale of most guns without background checks and reduce risks to children, according to the Brady Campaign. In the organization’s 2009 state scorecards released for all 50 states, Connecticut earned 53 points out of a total of 100 and has the nation’s fourth strongest gun laws.
“Connecticut has done more than most states to combat illegal guns and has worked to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. In fact, Connecticut has a one-of-a-kind law that allows a judge to remove guns from people who have been determined to be a threat to themselves or others,” said Ron Pinciaro, President of CT Against Gun Violence.
The Washington Post — no opponent of a disarmed citizenry — agrees with this characterization. Connecticut “has among the most stringent gun control laws on the books,” the Post notes, citing three disparate groups of experts, before allowing Connecticut’s chief Democrat to explain that his state can’t enforce its own laws without adult supervision. 
I don’t believe that we should be making domestic policy based on anecdote or on a single event. No system is properly tested in a single instance. The proof of a policy is how it performs over time — after hundreds or thousands of events. But gun control proponents do not agree. Piers Morgan, Michael Moore, Rupert Murdoch, and many more seem to believe that the vicious and evil killings in Connecticut prove the need for more stringent gun control measures. They race to change the law in the wake of tragedies because they know that they long ago lost the policy debate and that cooler heads will reject any such regulation absent the immediate aftermath of a tragedy.
A lesser-noted detail of America’s current demographics is that in the midst of an awful economic downturn, violent crime is falling. Americans recognize that gun crimes have continued to trend down as more law-abiding citizens have gotten access to firearms. So having failed to fool the people into signing onto their policies, they pretend that their ideas have been ignored — rather than considered and rejected again and again — and they call for a “national conversation,” a term of art the Obama Administration has embraced since the beginning that translates into American English as “agree with me, or I’ll regulate it anyway, democracy be damned, you idiots.” 
Defenders of the Bill of Rights ought to welcome that debate, one that we’ve been having for every year of the roughly four decades I’ve drawn breath on this planet. (We keep having it because the Left, like the Roman legions, refuses to admit defeat until they win.) After all, we can and will win one more time if the sense of the American people (also known to its opponents as “the gun lobby,” “the Israel lobby,” and so on) is allowed to prevail. But if we are to discuss the value of gun restrictions, we first need an explanation from gun control advocates of why their ideas failed the victims in Newtown.
As noted above, according to the Brady Campaign, Connecticut has the nation’s fourth-strongest gun laws. The sale and possession of so-called assault weapons are banned under state law. As noted above, the state empowers judges to remove guns from those who constitute a threat. The state earns high marks for gun dealer regulation, reporting of lost or stolen guns, background checks, permit to purchase, child safety, and earns the maximum score on guns in public places. 
So here’s the challenge for gun control advocates: explain why you failed the people of Newtown. You cited Connecticut as a national example. You said its laws “reduce risks to children.” You gave no state a higher rating for keeping guns out of public places — like schools.
And a criminally insane man stole legally-owned guns (owned under Connecticut’s regime) after being denied their legal purchase, broke in through a window, and killed children and adults — adults who were not armed to shoot back, and so died unable to save the children who also died. 
You want this one event to be a national test? Fine. Why are there 20 children dead when the state of Connecticut did what you said they should to keep their people safe? 
Once you answer that question, we can get this conversation underway. [emphasis mine]
We need to strip the bark off these gun-control morons. They created the primary condition necessary for the slaughter of these kids-- the school gun-free zone. They did the bidding of the shooter, in spades. He was assured by gun control advocates of facing no opposition at all for 20 minutes. Connecticut is a gun-control utopia. The citizens of Newtown followed the rules set down by the gun-control imbeciles. 

They got 26 dead kids and teachers for it. 

Gun-control posturing is lethal. Gun-free zones are lethal. Schools need armed protection. Schools need guns in the hands of the good guys. 

This needs to be an in-your-face debate. Gun-control a**holes have blood on their hands. Their policy--- carried out aggressively in Connecticut-- failed. They have no standing in this debate.  

Gun control advocates need to answer, not ask, questions. 

15 comments:

  1. You're trying to introduce reason and logic into the "conversation" the leftists "want"?!?!?!

    You must really hate 'Teh Children!'

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    1. But you suck at logic, dear Troy. Just like the writer of this piece and just like Egnor, you seem incapable of quantitatively evaluating data.

      In this case, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the restrictive gun laws of Connecticut actually managed to reduce the probability of a massacre by 50%, compared to the situation before the laws were enacted. Then answer me this: is a single massacre inconsistent with that assumption? By how much would we have to adjust the assumption of a 50% reduced probability?

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  2. I guess we shouldn't have laws against robbery or rape either, since people break them anyway.

    Gun advocates should have to start the conversation by explaining why the U.S. is so violent compared to other Western nations that have greater gun regulation.

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    1. Leet's look at the world, not just the US.

      Why are so many low gun violence countries (Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland) in the top 10% world wide of private gun ownership?

      Why do countries with extremely strict gun control (Mexico,Russia,Brazil)have very high rates of gun violence?

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    2. Why do you still peddle the lie about Russia having strict gun control?

      Hoo

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    3. Because it does.

      Your rationalizations are amusing, but need play no role in my posts.

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    4. How about the rest of my comment-- I mentioned 6 countries besides Russia.

      How's that Mexican/Brazilian gun control workin' for ya?

      Why do such extremely high gun ownership countries like Canada, New Zealand, Sweden,and Finland have such low gun crime rates?

      Why do I have to keep pointing out the obvious--that gun control is largely irrelevant to gun crime?

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    5. I am not so familiar with Mexico and Brazil in this respect. I would suspect that corruption, quite high in Mexico, creates the same problems with law enforcement that it does in Russia. Be that as it may, you have been made aware—several times—that the argument about Russia is complete bunk. Yet you choose to repeat it, knowing full well that it is a lie.

      Liar, liar, pants on fire.

      Hoo

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    6. "Gun advocates should have to start the conversation by explaining why the U.S. is so violent compared to other Western nations that have greater gun regulation."

      We have guns because we're violent. We're not violent because we have guns. Outlawing guns would not outlaw violence.

      I think what you're doing is a engaging in wishful thinking. No one wants to see another Newtown, or Columbine, or Virginia Tech. We want a simple solution that will end it. If only we could pass a law and make it all go away! If we just made guns illegal then no one would have them and no one would ever get hurt by them. That's how the thinking goes, but it isn't that simple.

      Violence is endemic to the human condition. It's true that patterns of violence are not the same across all cultures. Some cultures seem to be able to live together without constant killing sprees like the one we just witnessed. A lot of cultures are less violent than this one but others are more violent. There are even differences in race. Although plenty of African-Americans commit violent crimes with guns, we haven't yet encountered a black spree killer, to my knowledge. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

      We've tried gun control here in America, in Washington, DC, and Chicago. I don't know if it caused the ridiculous amount of violent crime in those cities but it certainly didn't solve it. We didn't magically become Scandanavian in our violent crime rates simply by outlawing guns. If you want to know how gun control would work in America, choose an American example. Don't compare us to Japan or Norway. Ooops, forget Norway. They've got that monstrous Anders Brevik.

      Some countries, such as Switzerland, are very well armed and yet they don't have the same epidemic of gun violence. Why don't Swiss people kill each other at the same rates that we do? Here's my answer: it's not their laws, it's their culture. Changing the laws is easy, changing the culture is hard.

      It's also true that plenty of spree killers have been stopped by a person with a gun. We just don't hear about them because the planned killing spree is nipped in the bud. Ann Coulter wrote her column about that this week.

      www.anncoulter.com

      We all know Eric Harris, Dylan Kliebold, James Holmes, and Cho Seng-hui. We don't know Jesus Manuel Garcia because he was stopped by an armed citizen. We don't know Floyd Lee Corkins, the militant homosexual activist who attempted mass murder at the Family Research Council, because he was stopped by a security guard.

      TRISH

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    7. @Hoo: I don't know about gun control in Russia. Inform me.

      One reason for the absurd gun violence in Mexico is that the Obama (in)Justice Department allowed guns to "walk" to the Mexcian criminal underworld, ostensibly to track them. So the US government was arming them, or at least knowingly allowing them to be armed.

      Does Mexico have strict gun control laws? The Consulate General of the United States says so. They advise Americans not to bring guns or even knives across the border as they violate Mexico's strict gun control laws.

      http://tijuana.usconsulate.gov/tijuana/warning.html

      The website says that a person can spend thirty years in prison for possession of a firearm. I'd call that strict.

      Funny how it's always Japan or Australia that's the example gun grabbers use, not Mexico. How can this be? How can Mexico be such a hotbed of (gun) violence when guns are illegal there?

      Joey

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    8. Repeating your lie about strict gun control in Russia, Dr. Egnor?

      Hoo

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    9. an anonymouse who will not reason "I guess we shouldn't have laws against robbery or rape either, since people break them anyway.

      Gun advocates should have to start the conversation by explaining why the U.S ...
      "

      It's already against the law in most States to murder someone (*) with a gun, or without. So, either:
      1) the foolish anonymouse refuses to be satisfied that what he says he wants already obtains;
      2) the foolish anonymouse "argues" that since some persons murder other persons with guns, despite such acts being illegal in most States, that therefore it should not be illegal.

      (*) abortion being a glaring exception

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  3. Gun-control a**holes have blood on their hands.

    One has to be an incredibly huge moron to write such a sentence.

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  4. Hoo, hoo makes it abundantly clear, almost daily, that he is intellectually dishonest: "Repeating your lie about strict gun control in Russia, Dr. Egnor?"

    Apparently, in the imaginary world of Hoo's mind, stating the truths that Hoo wishes were otherwise makes one a liar.

    1) Russia has strict gun-control laws.

    2) Russia cannot enforce its strict gun-control laws.

    The truth of 2) does not obviate the truth of 1).

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    1. ... and so we see -- once again -- that the liar is not Mr Egnor, but is rather Hoo.

      One would have though that by now Hoo would have figured out that it would be far simpler for him to simply stop lying rather that constantly engaging in the fools-errand of making out Egnor to be the liar.

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