If guns are the problem, why is my life not steeped in violence? Even though I literally am dispatched to every call involving violence in my jurisdiction for half of every other day, I have seen very little in the way of gun violence in the last 12 years of service. I've never been shot at. I've never shot at anyone. I've never arrested anyone for intentionally shooting at another person (true story!). I've only a handful of times arrested people for pointing guns at others. This is in Texas, where private ownership of firearms is almost unrestricted: No limit to number of guns, no registration of guns, no waiting period, no state restriction on private sales, no state restriction on ammunition or magazines. If you get it federally registered, you can even own an automatic weapon.*And I mean exactly that: It is not only thought-provoking, but it is obvious that much thought went into the writing. It is full of thoughts.
Books. Bikes. Boomsticks.
“I only regret that I have but one face to palm for my country.”
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Worth reading...
My friend Matt wrote a very thoughtful post*. You should go read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:
The anti-gun side seems, from those I have talked with and many I have heard/read go on at length in various media, to be largely of two types. One is the standard big government authoritarian that claims only they are responsible/trained/qualified enough to be allowed to have a firearm. The other group seems to believe themselves so lacking in any form of self-control that they project this weakness on everyone else, which means they cannot possibly be trusted with firearms. The remainder are those that perceive firearms as some sort of evil totem or "Chuckie" figure that can deploy evil mind-control rays and make folks around them do bad things.
ReplyDeleteThose of us in the true gun culture, as illustrated quite well by the linked post, know that all that is so much hooey. Gun ownership in general, and growing up with responsible gun owners, tends to make people more polite, more careful with guns, etc. I wrote something eight years ago on that very topic: http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2004/tle282-20040801-02.html
It would be nice to have a reasoned discussion about things that might help prevent something like the Newtown shooting in the future, but it is impossible to reason with someone who reached their beliefs without recourse to reason. Arguing religion is fruitless, and that is the basis of nearly all anti-gun beliefs.
One of the things that bugs me are the outright lies told by the news. This punk Lanza DID NOT carry or use an AR-15 Rifle.In fact he didn't carry a long gun at all. If they lie about that I wonder what else about this is a lie?
ReplyDelete"This punk Lanza DID NOT carry or use an AR-15 Rifle.In fact he didn't carry a long gun at all."
ReplyDeleteYes, he did. He used a CT ban-compliant Bushhamster.
I'm going to believe the guy who pulled the bullets out of the bodies over Alex Jones, sorry.
The confusion is understandable, given the avalanche of bad, confused and mis-reporting
ReplyDeleteI wonder about the broad arc of possibilities that will be discussed on this issue now that Mr. Biden has been chosen as the Presidents point man in the search for remedies.
ReplyDeleteThis is just a fine example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, though. On both sides. "Look at all the gun violence" while ignoring peaceful interactions because they don't pull in viewers. "Look at all the peaceful interactions" while ignoring the violence because they work in a peaceful area.
ReplyDeleteWhat's more interesting is that if you look at a world map of gun violence, the countries in the lead are kleptocracies and the front lines of the drug war.
velcro8ball, don't you mean "now that Uncle Choo-choo has been chosen as the Designated Sh*t Receiver and Blame Absorber by the Issue-Dodger in Chief"?
ReplyDeleteMe, I'm just hoping Uncle Joe performs this duty with all the precision that he gives to public speaking.
rickn8or, Biden in this context is the creepy uncle that is allowed to babysit the kids overnight. Nothing good can come of it.
ReplyDeletevelcro8ball said...
ReplyDeleteI wonder about the broad arc of possibilities that will be discussed on this issue now that Mr. Biden has been chosen as the Presidents point man in the search for remedies.
Thanks, I almost choked to death on a dorito when I read that. :D
"We've got 8 votes for repealing bullshit laws and letting adults be adults, and 2 people crying in the corner demanding we try and reverse technology and undo criminal nature. Looks like the 2 in the corner win! Let's get AWB 2.0 (Bigger, Dumber, Worse!) started up!"
My guns are steeped in violence.
ReplyDeleteThey are waiting for some retard to offer me violence, at which time they will return it in spades.
Violence, by itself, is not evil. Violence can be extremely necessary.
And for those anti-self-defense folks that want to make icky guns go away .... exactly how will this be done? Will disarmed cops ask me nicely to hand my weapons over?
OK, let's have a little fact-injection here:
ReplyDeleteIf the left-wing fabulists' claim that "guns cause violence" were true, then we in Wyoming would be one of the most blood-soaked states in the nation. We're positively awash in guns. We have guns coming out every bodily orifice we are born with, and more besides. We can buy a handgun, buy the ammo, buy a holster (if we want), strap on said gun and walk down the street - all in the space of about 15 minutes (I know because I've done this) and be within the law.
You no longer need a CCW to carry in Wyoming. Many people are now availing themselves of this right to carry without license.
Increase in violence? Only due to some localized spats in Wheatland this year. The rest of the state has dogs sleeping in the middle of main streets. In 2010, our homicide rate (due to ALL causes) was 1.4/100,000 population. The UK's (I'll cite this because that pompous twat Morgan is from the UK) was at about 1.2/100,000 for all causes. In other words, "gun crazy" Wyoming is on par with the UK, and we have some of the most lax laws in the US. Want to know what the statistically valid predictor for our low rate of violence with guns is? A decided lack of blacks in our population.
Are there avoidable deaths in Wyoming? Hell yes. From guns? No, not really. From failing to use seat belts on rural roads. People in Wyoming seem to eschew seat belts, and next thing you know, they had to swerve to avoid a deer/elk/moose and then they're barrel-rolling off the road into a ditch or off an overpass and they're dead. Sometimes, the cops find the car... and have to start a pretty detailed search to find the body, which was ejected somewhat spectacularly, as is fairly normal for unrestrained occupants in a pickup truck doing 80 to 85MPH. That's what kills far too many young people in Wyoming.
But guns? Nope.
Now, in another bit of irony, we just had some fucked up kid kill his father, his father's girlfriend and himself in Casper. He did his dad with a bow and a broadhead, and the woman and himself with a large knife. This was another 'genius' kid with Asperger's Syndrome and he left a note about how much he admired the Chinese for their intolerance of people born with deformities or hereditary conditions. Those three people are just as dead as anyone killed with guns, yet the press coverage was hot and heavy for only a day - oh, they were reporting it on the national news - multiple death on a community college campus - until they got the word the next day that the twerp didn't use a gun.
Then they suddenly seemed to lose interest.
One idea that has been turning around in my head for a few years now is the repression of violence, not the glorification of it. I don't mean to say its the cause, it just might be one thread of a complicated knot.
ReplyDeleteI was bullied, severely, in my youth. I was small (5 feet tall at High School graduation and 83lbs.) and very, very shy. But. At that time, you could still ‘settle things’ outside on the playground. Men could still get in a fistfit and not get arrested. Sometimes.
Violence used to be understood as necessary sometimes, though a last resort. But not anymore. Violence is always, always bad, wrong, never necessary.
For all of the anti-bullying programs and PSAs and measures, we still don’t let the victims fight back and win (or even lose, which I believe is still better for the psyche than resignation) without penalty. Forget violence being evil. Isn't that evil? We sure preach about bullying and violence being bad, but for anyone that's been there, we all know how adept bullies are at avoiding the notice of authority. And our 'zero tolerance' of violence only hurts the victim even more. We don't just celebrate victimhood. In some we enforce victimhood. But the moral busybodies sure do feel better.
I am not defending a young psychopath. But I can't imagine the rage such evil policy begets in troubled youth.
Anon 7:59,
ReplyDelete"Want to know what the statistically valid predictor for our low rate of violence with guns is? A decided lack of blacks in our population."
Well, that certainly explains why Latvia's homicide rate is four times y'all's: All them uppity negroes in Riga... :|
"Well, that certainly explains why Latvia's homicide rate is four times y'all's: All them uppity negroes in Riga... :|"
ReplyDeleteNow I can't stop thinking about all the Latvian jokes I heard over the summer.
Yes, it's very easy to be pithy, but you're obviously not familiar with the FBI UCR.
ReplyDeleteIf you go into the FBI UCR, pull apart the tables by race, weapon, victim, etc, you will see the trend jump out at you.
About half of all homicides in the US are committed by one cohort against another - black males between 15 and 35. Most of their victims are other black males.
If you want to see a counter-indication of guns and gun policy vs. homicide rates, merely look at Chicago. Tight gun laws, horrible homicide stats that place it as one of the most violent cities in the world, with a homicide rate over 19/100,000 so far for 2012. That's worse than Mexico City, Sao Paulo or Moscow, which are all notoriously violent, crime-ridden cities.
My comment applied to the 50 states. If you pull the stats from the UCR and then demographic data from the US Census, then apply basic regression and ANOVA analysis, you will see the statistical truth come into view: If you want to live in a statistically safe area, then find someplace without the blight of urban black gang violence: Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota all have low rates of homicide (for any cause) per 100,000.
The brutal truth is that young, urban black males (ie, "Holder's people") distort our gun homicide stats. If one factors those out from the overall stats, much of the US that doesn't include young urban black violence has crime rates that are as good or better than (when robbery, rape and assault are taken into account) most of western Europe, to whom we're constantly being compared by these tedious pecksniffs. Certainly our rates of robbery, assault with knives and rapes are far lower in the US (outside the black urban areas) than the whole of the UK. The British like to harp on the homicide rates, but when we start broadening our view of "violent crime" to include something other than homicide, suddenly the UK doesn't look like such the garden spot they like to represent.
This is the inconvenient truth of US crime stats: We've allowed a policy of disregard and neglect of these blighted urban areas to warp the state and national stats for both overall crime and gun violence in the US. People can duck this issue because they want to be politically correct cowards, but the stats are quite clear, and it's something that should be drawn out in these discussions of "how violent the US is." The truth is that most of the US isn't violent and has very low rates of violent crime, including homicide, but we have urban areas that exceed crime levels of third world nations and those make our overall stats look pretty poor.
@ 12:25,
ReplyDeletethe UK stats are much worse than they admit. They fudge the numbers as much as possible, much like our official unemployment numbers have little basis in reality. They are desperate to keep the public (and the rest of the world) from finding out just how bad it has gotten there. Place is a joke, but no one is laughing.
"Yes, it's very easy to be pithy, but you're obviously not familiar with the FBI UCR."
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it or linked to it anyplace since the day before yesterday, no.
The key variable here is not "black", but "young urban poor male", ie "the manufactured dependency class".
If you keep people in zoos, they will act like animals, and the US government could not have promulgated policies to destroy families and bind people to generations of dependency, breeding litters of future gangsters, had they intended the policies to do this. Several generations, a whole culture, have been literally "helped" to death.
But if you want to see that the controlling variable is not skin color, one need not look far in Indianapolis. East and south of the area known by the IMPD as "War Zone D" is the neighborhood known as "The Swamp".
The latter is largely populated by the descendents of cracker hillbillies who fled north from Depression poverty to work in the booming wartime factories of Indianapolis. Today, the only way you can tell it apart from the neighborhood to the northwest is by the skin color of the unwed mothers and the bangers.
"and the US government could not have promulgated policies to destroy families and bind people to generations of dependency, breeding litters of future gangsters, had they intended the policies to do this."
ReplyDeleteshould read
"and the US government could not have promulgated policies better-calculated to destroy families and bind people to generations of dependency, breeding litters of future gangsters, had they intended the policies to do this."
Chris, more like "Biden in this context is the creepy uncle that is allowed to babysit the kids overnight once."
ReplyDeleteC'mon ! Do ya HAVE to pick on Latvians?
ReplyDeleteWell, we do have a large "large manufactured dependency class" (namely everyone). Oh, and Russians, lots of Russians. We are not unicultural as you think.
-Random Latvian
Thank you Tam.
ReplyDeleteIf you're going to unpack statistics to get precision you have to remember not to lose the context.
From way back in Comparative Justice Systems class I seem to recall that a deep look at the UK's demographic data (what is available and accounting for the outright lies that is) reveals much the same concentration of violent crime and homicide, just different actors due to local conditions.
We've just allowed our more enlightened Progressive elites to focus their unintended consequences on American blacks. The Latinos better watch out, they'll be next as their numbers grow.
Now, Tam, I am sure there is another indicator other than skin color to tell your War Zone D losers from other "urban" losers.
ReplyDeleteBe willing to bet the average dental care tells 'em apart, since meth is worse on teeth than crack.
At least, I'm assuming Indianapolis's loser groups map out similarly to our loser groups out here, and while there is a lot of "cross over hits" in free market pharmeceuticals, our white losers tend more heavily towards meth, while our black losers tend more heavily towards crack. Sure it's about 60/40 versus 40/60, but it results in a noticeable correlation between "mouths that look like an IED went off inside" and skin color amongst the baggy pants, hip-hop, teenagers with four kids who all have different last names, crowds.
Q: "Why do Balts pour motor oil in their gardens?"
ReplyDeleteA: "To keep their guns from rusting."
Soviet era joke. . .