Reasoned Discourse.

I know this is a late hit, but what the heck... I'm always up for some reasoned discourse with the... er, "developmentally challenged".

I didn't waste my time with him yesterday afternoon, and he's taken his ball and left in a snit since then, but let's go over his hackneyed talking points, shall we? For practice. Using him as a tackling dummy, as it were...

Sworn police officers are professionals, trained in the law and crisis management, and know when and how to apply measures up to and including deadly force. They are also required to constantly prove their marksmanship on the range and are more likely to hit what they aim at than most civilian handgun owners.

This is a mixture of truth, falsehoods, and irrelevance. Most big departments do attempt to offer training, but it's debatable how much of it takes. Use-of-force law usually gets drilled in pretty well, but it's not terrifically complicated.

As far as "constantly prove their marksmanship on the range"... well... The better departments qualify twice a year, but many (if not most) only have to qualify annually. The qualification courses aren't tough; it's certainly possible to fail, but if you possess the hand-eye coordination required to tie your shoes and can aim at the ground and hit, you'll pass. Certainly anyone who shoots a pistol competitively would probably find them a little simplistic, if not actually remedial.

The fact of the matter is, Skippy, that cops aren't gun experts. I wouldn't go to a police officer for gun advice because he carried a Glock any more than I'd go to him for radio advice because he carried a Motorola. He drives a Crown Vic every day, but that doesn't make him a race car driver.

As the son of a police officer, I am unconvinced by the vigilante rhetoric. The handful of “righteous” (i.e., legally-justifiable) handgun shootings by civilians is statistically insignificant.

We'll skip the argument from authority, as who his daddy is has no bearing on the facts...

Anyhow, this is a tired old tactic whereby "defensive handgun use" is made to equal "justifiable homicide". Never mind that in the vast, vast majority of DGU's, no shot is even fired, with the perpetrator aborting the crime upon realizing his intended victim is armed. Even when shots are fired, the perpetrator is hit somewhere between half and three quarters of the time (depending on which set of statistics you buy into), and then only a small minority are fatal. Mikey only counts them if they result in a toe tag on the goblin; the rest didn't happen.

So, yeah, "lies, damn lies, and statistics."

And Chicago citizens are being killed — at an alarming rate — with Indiana handguns.

You can substitute "Los Angeles" or "New York City" for "Chicago" and "Arizona" or "Virginia" for Indiana, but the lack of reaoning behind the statement is still just as funny. I mean, obviously it's not the guns themselves that cause the crime, else Arizona, Virginia, and Indiana would be knee deep in the dead, and the murder rate would lessen the further you got from the source of the guns. Instead it's practically an inverse correlation. I wonder how Mike would explain that. Probably by telling me his daddy was a cop, and then throwing in some unrelated ad hominem...

Why 15? Why not 18, 21, or 25, key ages in legal codes? Why do you omit kid-on-kid handgun violence (including homicides) and youth gun suicides? That pile of cold young bodies is much bigger than you pretend.

Apart from his sick fixation with "cold, young bodies"... Okay, I won't go there. (Not that I'm above a spot of ad hominem myself. Especially if it's funny.)

Anyhow, he refuses to separate out the statistics because when you do, you find that the number of kids who accidentally get "killed with mommy and daddy’s handgun “protection” every year" is lower than the number of tots who drown in mommy and daddy's five gallon buckets every year.

See, if you use the total number of gunshot victims under the age of twenty, well, that includes Ice Dog and Ray-Ray whacking each other over a sales district boundary dispute, and all the emo teens who listen to too much... well, whatever emo kids listen to these days... and off themselves because mom won't let them wear black nail polish to grandma's for Thanksgiving. Curmudgeonly middle aged voting types don't feel much sympathy for those classes of "childhood gun deaths" so it's better to make them all sound like accidental toddler tragedies.

Why do handgun advocates omit inclusion of handgun suicides from gunshot death totals?

Because removing handguns from the picture wouldn't stop those suicides. See, someone who rides the bullet is pretty serious about checking out of the net. That's not a "cry for help" or a ploy for attention, it's "Good Bye."

If you take that person's handgun away, they'll just go chug a frosty Drain-O margarita, do a half-gainer off the nearest multi-story building, or play Stop-The-Locomotive. Do you really want to take their handgun away? Yeah, me neither. I just hope they'll have the decency to nip off into the woods and not involve any unwilling bystanders in their personal drama, like they would if they didn't have a handgun and decided to plant a kiss on the front end of the 5:15 Amtrak out of Cleveland.


I could go on, but there's a whole big internet out there to make fun of this morning, and I've got other typing to do. Feel free to continue putting the boot in on Mikey-Mike in the comments section.