GUN CONTROL

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.

"No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." "Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." "An armed man need not fight." "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one." Good intentions don't necessarily make good laws. What counts is whether the laws ultimately save lives. Unfortunately, too many gun laws primarily disarm law-abiding citizens, not criminals. People's reaction to the horrific events displayed on TV such as the Minnesota attack are understandable, but the more than two million times each year that Americans use guns defensively are never discussed — even though this is five times as often as the 450,000 times that guns are used to commit crimes over the last couple of years. Seldom do cases make the news where public shootings are stopped or mothers use guns to prevent their children from being kidnapped. Few would know that a third of the public-school shootings were stopped by citizens with guns before uniformed police could arrive.
        - John Lott Jr, "Disarming Facts", "National Review"

Not only is November 9 election day in Maryland, it also happens to be the same day the state's vaunted Saturday Night Special law takes effect. Passed by the state legislature in the spring despite a $6.7 million lobbying effort backed by the NRA, the law set up a review board to identify and prohibit the sale of cheap handguns in Maryland. Touted as a victory over gun control opponents and a counterweight to handgun violence, the law is in truth a largely meaningless exercise. Not since the 1970s have cheap handguns been responsible for more than a handful of the city's homicides; nowadays even teenagers are walking around with semiautomatics tucked into their sweatpants. Smith & Wesson, Glock, Baretta, Sig Sauer... An though Maryland's landmark gun control law is the pride of its political leaders, it has arrived about fifteen years too late.
        - David Simon, "Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets" (1998)

"They (in favour of gun control) must believe in the existence of a substantial number of persons who are willing and able to break serious laws such as those prohibiting murder, assault, and robbery, yet who are not willing or able to break gun control laws."

"Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered—one does not usually lead to the other—but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed." - Daniel D. Polsby, Washington University Law Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, Fall 1997 How do you lead a reasonable life in a world where a lot of your fellow citizens can and do walk around armed? There seem to be two possible answers: They should be disarmed, or you should be armed. A third answer, implied by some gun owners, is that they should be armed but many other categories of people should not be. They never include themselves in those categories. I am reminded of my friend McHugh, who was shown a gun by a guy in a bar. "Why do you carry that?" McHugh asked him. "I live in a dangerous neighborhood," the guy said. "It would be safer," McHugh told him, "if you moved."
        - Roger Ebert, from his "Chicago Sun Times" review of "American Gun"

"God may have made men and women, but Colt made them equal."

"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
"Wear a gun to someone else's house, you're saying, 'I'll defend this home as if it were my own.' When your guests see you carry a weapon, you're telling them, 'I'll defend you as if you were my own family.' And anyone who objects levels the deadliest insult possible: 'I don't trust you unless you're rendered harmless'!" - L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach Because drug dealers shoot each other in London, Norfolk farmers can't have guns to defend their homes. I mean, no one wants a gun - except at 4am when they hear a strange sound in the kitchen.
        - Jeremy Clarkson

"Are you armed, Lestrade?"
"As long as I have my trousers I have a hip-pocket, and as long as I have my hip-pocket I have
something in it."
"Good!  My friend and I are also ready for emergencies."
        - Sherlock Holmes and Lestrade, facing danger in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"

An inmate in a Florida prison wrote to agree with me on the availability of guns, saying that a 'criminal can and will get a stolen gun faster than you can get your car washed.' He also points out that many criminals prefer guns gotten illegally, since they will be harder to trace.

"In case we have to shoot Democrats. It happened during the Civil War, and it could happen again." - PJ O'Rourke, on why Conservatives oppose gun control "Don't think of it as 'gun control', think of it as 'victim disarmament'. If we make enough laws, we can all be criminals." "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms, history shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own fall" MASSACRES AND OUTRAGES

Would gun control in America have prevented the carnage at Virginia Tech university? Probably, yes. Does that mean that tighter controls will reduce gun crime? Almost certainly, not. That, simply put, is the dilemma that confronts us each time we listen to the grim, but all too familiar, details of a school or college massacre, the planned, methodical preparations for an apparently deranged act of revenge, the shock experienced by a small and peaceful community and the soul-searching that comes in its aftermath... The UK ban has had no discernible effect on gun crime, which has continued a steady rise dating back more than 25 years and which accounted for some 4,000 injuries in the UK last year. Immediately after the ban, the number of shootings actually went up and has stayed up, though the homicide rate, which is relatively low, has been almost unaffected. In Scotland, for instance, the rate of about eight killings a year by guns has remained the same despite the Dunblane ban... Nor does the widespread possession of arms necessarily indicate a violent society. In Switzerland, for instance, where owning a gun is mandatory and where the laws and traditions of the country require every able-bodied adult to keep a semi-automatic weapon at home, crime levels have been historically low...  Any government that wants to be seen to be taking action after a violent event can reach for legislation, but it is likely to discover that the social malaise that led to the violence is more deep-seated and intractable... What is needed is a wholesale shift in the national culture — and that will take rather longer than an arms ban.
        - Magnus Linklater, "The Times"

Being quick to make the shooter a victim rather than a moral agent would be a mistake... On Monday at Virginia Tech a young man faced a powerful temptation to do great evil. Influenced by strong emotion and a tendency to rationalize his actions, he chose evil. Does the scenario sound familiar to anybody?
        - E. Christian Brugger, "National Review"

If this is not evil, it is hard to know what is. Yet the modern reflex is to recoil from such moral categorisation and to look for supposedly deeper causes — social, psychological, even genetic — that erode and displace the doctrine of personal responsibility. The cunning of evil is to disguise itself. In such cases — depressingly commonplace in our times — it is all too easy to lose moral focus and to allow our response to become meaninglessly diffuse. No culture can long remain healthy if it surrenders the concept of moral responsibility to the modern doctrines of mitigation, determinism and collective guilt. Yet the reality of evil is mirrored in the persistence of good. The unspeakable depravity of Cho found its match in the heroism of Professor Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor, who blocked a classroom door to save his students before perishing. That, rather than the present cacophony of half-baked sociology, should be our abiding memory of the Virginia massacre.
        - Leader in "The Spectator" (Apr'07)

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality... Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody... The administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.
        - Mark Steyn, "Chicago Sun Times"

I’m sick over the Virginia Tech story. But I’m sickened of the Virginia Tech 'story'. That is, it’s at moments like this — the “aftermath” stage of some horrible event — when the press, particularly television news networks, are most proud of themselves that I find them the most repellent. To be sure, it’s difficult to see the line between enough and too much when journalists go wild, “flooding the zone,” competing with each other like starving dogs for the slightest new morsel of information they can then put on a permanent loop on cable TV, until the next fragmentary detail is pried loose by a reporter desperate to be first, for 15 minutes. Because there isn’t enough new information to fill the infinite void allotted to these stories, the press quickly succumbs to a kind of emotional vampirism, feeding off the grief, fear, and anguish of victims clearly incapable of understanding their own feelings or of finding meaning in events that defy either understanding or meaning... Tragedy becomes feeding time for the press.
        - Jonah Goldberg, "Emotional Vampirism", "National Review"

Last week, a Finnish teenager shot eight people dead in a Finnish school. It was interesting that the coverage of this horror was rather perfunctory. Whenever similar killings take place in the United States, huge stories run for days, with BBC reporters saying things like, ‘Just another example of America’s love affair with the gun.’ ‘Finland’s love affair with the gun’ doesn’t have the same ring. Besides, gun laws are strict in Finland, so there was no cheap point to be made. But the eight people are just as dead.
        - Charles Moore, "The Spectator" (Nov'07)

STATISTICS

"Allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths. If those states that did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders; 4,177 rapes; and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly."

An American child has a "one in a million-plus" chance of being shot dead, versus a one in 11,000 chance of drowning in a pool.
        - Stephanie Flanders, reviewing "Freakonomics" in "The Telegraph"

About a decade ago, Bill Clinton developed a favourite statistic--that every day in America 12 children died from gun violence. When one delved a little deeper into this, it turned out that 11.569 persons under the age of 20 died each day from gun violence, and five-sixths of those 11.569 alleged kindergartners turned out to be aged between 15 and 19. Many of them had the misfortune to become involved in gangs, convenience-store holdups, drive-by shootings, and drug deals, which, alas, don't always go as smoothly as one had planned. If more crack deals passed off peacefully, that "child" death rate could be reduced by three-quarters.
        - Mark Steyn, "Western Standard"

"HCI claims one child per day killed by handgun accidents; the figure from the National Safety Council is an average of 256 per year for ALL ages, 10-15 a year for kids under age 5, and 50-55 per year for kids under age 15. For comparison, 381 kids under five drowned in pools in 1980, while 13 were killed by handgun accidents. 432 were killed by fires caused by adults falling asleep while smoking. Car accidents take 190 times as many lives as handgun accidents. HCI cooks the books by picking a particularly violent year and taking anyone under 25 to be a child', thus approaching 365 per year. It still falls short, though."

"While handguns are used in vast numbers of crimes annually, they are used more often by good citizens to repel crime - approximately 581,000 crimes vs. about 645,000 defense uses annually."

"Most murders are not 'acquaintance murders', committed by normally law abiding citizens who murder because of the accessibility of a gun in a moment of anger. Most murderers are highly disturbed aberrant individuals, characterized by felony records, alcohol and/or drug dependence, and life histories of irrational violence against people around them. 74.4 percent of arrested murderers nationally had prior arrests for violent felony or burglary and, on average an adult record of a six year criminal career with four major felony arrests."

"Differentials in international crime rates are a function of socio-cultural and economic factors, not the percentage of gun ownership. In fact, there is an *inverse* correlation between violence rates and the percentage of gun ownership in many foreign countries, the most noteworthy being Switzerland and Israel."

"A handgun ban is not realistically enforceable. Confiscating guns would require house-to-house searches and alienate the very individuals whose compliance is essential to the success of any regulation. If gun ownership were prohibited, organized crime would step in to provide the firearms that will continue to be procured with criminal intent."

According to the 'Statistical Abstract of the United States', 1987 edition, there were only 1,695 firearms accidents that led to deaths in 1983. Over 99.9% of all households with a handgun did not experience a fatal firearms accident during 1983, there were also over 44,000 deaths caused by car accidents; over 12,000 deaths caused by accidental falls; over 5,000 deaths caused by fires; over 4,500 deaths due to accidental poisonings; 5,254 deaths from drowning.
The rate of accidental gun deaths has also been decreasing. In 1970, it was 1.2 per 100,000; in 1983, it was 0.7 per 100,000 - remember that about 40% of firearms accidents are hunting accidents. This means that the already-low accidental gun death rate is reduced even further when one considers just gun accidents in the home. In 1945, for every million Americans there were 350,000 firearms and 18 fatal gun accidents. By 1995, there were 850,000 firearms per million, and fatal gun accidents had fallen to six. Countries having successful gun-control laws in the 20th Century - and the results of those laws:

1915-1917 : Ottoman Turkey, 1.5 million Armenians murdered
1929-1953 : Soviet Union, 20 million people who opposed Stalin murdered 1933-1945 : Nazi-occupied Europe, 13 million Jews, Gypsies, and others who opposed Hitler murdered
1948-1952 : China, 20 million anti-communists or communist reformers murdered
1960-1981 : Guatemala, 100,000 Maya Indians murdered
1971-1979 : Uganda, 300,000 Christians and political rivals of Idi Amin murdered
1975-1979 : Cambodia, 1 million educated persons murdered

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SLOGANS

"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the prosperity of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed."

Do you conclude from this that only voters may own books?
Do you believe that all "inflammatory" books should be stored in libraries, since no honest person needs such a book at home where a child might read it? Does this statement make you want to register books, or ban some of them, or prevent them from being read in public?
Should there be a waiting period for the purchase of "dangerous" books, magazines, and newspapers?
Should speed reading courses be restricted to police and military to prevent "assault reading" by citizens?
Do you think that banning legal possession of easily-concealed novels will stop criminals from reading?
Should we stop teaching children to read, since what they might read could be harmful to them?

I support car ownership although cars can be used to drive drunk.
I support pharmaceutical manufacture although drugs can be abused.
I support swimming pool ownership although kids can drown in them.
I support steak-knife ownership although they can be used in stabbings.
I support free speech although people say things I don't like to hear.
I support freedom of religion although cults do the damnedest things.
I support parenthood although parents can abuse their children.
I support pregnancy although abortion couldn't happen without it.
I support penis ownership although they are used in rapes.
I support gun ownership although guns can be used in crime.
I support open elections although a moron became President. Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.

Trigger locks are not parents.

Reality: "If we can sue the gun manufacturers for human actions, does this mean we can sue the car manufacturers for being hit by a drunk driver?"

Guns Don't Kill People, Kids On Welfare Do.

FIGHT CRIME... SHOOT BACK!

"DRIVER CARRIES NO MORE THAN $20.00 .... worth of ammunition"

"Gun Control Is Being Able To Hit Your Target"

Genocide is only possible with Gun Control.

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