Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Our opponents are currently going hog wild over a blog post appearing Art on the Issues, by Dr. Art Kamm. I suspect they like it because Dr. Kamm runs some numbers which make gun ownership look weak, but I find his methodology suspect:

In examining the crude firearm homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in countries that have a population exceeding 3.8 million and a GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, in excess of $20,000 (World Health Organization, 2002), the US rate dwarfs that of any other industrialized country(ref).  The firearm homocide rate in the US was 5.5 times higher than Italy (the next highest) and several European Union countries reported insignificant levels of firearm homicides: only 45 were reported in the UK, 15 in Denmark, 10 in Norway, and 7 in Ireland.  Whereas the US reported a total of 10,801 firearm homicides in 2000, the European Union, having a population of over 376 million (exceeding that of the US) reported only 1,260 firearm homicides.  And in Japan, where less than 50 handguns were present (they are reserved to athletes participating in international shooting competitions), only 22 firearm homicides were reported.

Why is it legitimate to only examine homicide by firearm? Isn’t a better measure overall violent crime, or perhaps homicide in general? I’ve done some calculations on homicide rates as to whether there’s correlation to levels of gun ownership in industrialized countries (defines as GDP > 14,000) and there was none. I even threw out countries that would have made my numbers better, because they were highly undemocratic, or unstable.

What Dr. Kamm is doing here is essentially proving, to take this to another context, that countries that have a higher ownership of automobiles per capita have a higher rate of fatal accidents. That is hardly startling, given it takes owning an automobile to have a fatality with one, but it would tell us little overall about the dangers of automobiles compared to other forms of transportation. The question is whether firearms ownership has any effect on violent crime overall. I’ve found you can get correlation, but only by reducing the size of the sample set by choosing an arbitrarily high number for GDP, which excludes virtually all of Eastern Europe (some of which have high gun ownership rates, but low murder rates, and some which have very low gun ownership rates, and very high murder rates.) Barron Barnett has done some excellent work in this area as well on the domestic front.

I also note Dr. Kamm mixing firearms homicides (which does not include suicide) and firearm deaths (which does). As I’ve mentioned before, treating firearm suicide as a reason for restricting the rights and freedom of others is inappropriate in a free society. Research also bears out that internationally there is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide rates.

Dr. Kamm’s research on NRA’s funding sources is also very poor. A quick analysis of their publicly available form 990s (some of which I’ve done here, in a different context) show that NRA gets the vast majority of its funding from its individual members, rather than from corporations or large donors. While NRA’s recent efforts in seeking larger donors are paying off, its bread and butter is still fundraising from its membership base, much to the chagrin of many of its members. Dr. Kamm also fails to note that MidwayUSA, the largest corporate donor to NRA, raises that money through a “round up” program, that asks customers to round up to the nearest dollar to support NRA. This money may have a corporate source, but its a grassroots effort. It is not something easily matched by our opponents, because there’s no anti-gun shop, where you could source “round up” donations from.

Our opponents are far more reliant on donations from large foundations than NRA is. That they don’t come close to matching our grassroots muscle is probably the reason may of them are angry, bitter, and lashing out.

CSGV took something I said out of context, and then we get a great example of how they don’t want to take our guns. In truth, I don’t worry that they will. They quite frankly don’t have the political power. I haven’t really been able to figure out if the folks at CSGV are genuinely mad and offended, or they are just poking their foaming at the mouth followers with a stick in hopes of making something happen.

Unfortunately this is what leads our country down the path to nasty discourse, and where we can no longer have reasonable people agreeing to disagree. How can you agree to disagree with someone who wants your friends and fellow citizens in jail and ruined, as we can see in the example here and here? These aren’t people who are just concerned citizens. They are hate filled people out to destroy lives. How are these people different from a bigot who would enjoy the idea if a black man got an ass beating because he was visiting Mississippi in 1954, and didn’t know certain fountains weren’t for his kind? I posit they are no different in terms of their corrupt character, only in the form of bigotry they have chosen.

I’ve noticed the Brady folks keep touting the picture of their vigil from Conowingo, MD. My guess is because it’s their biggest crowd at any of the events, and it photographed well. The rest of the pictures features your prototypical close ups, or one-off snapshots, probably to conceal the fact that there was very low turnout at most events. I mean, the Pittsburgh event featuring CeaseFirePA looks like a pretty decent house party. It’s no surprise that Heeding God’s Call turned out the usual suspects in Philadelphia. Reading wasn’t too bad a crowd.

I count about 33 people in the headlining event crowd in Conowingo. The unescapable fact for the Brady Campaign and other groups is these are pathetic turnouts. Dennis wants to know whether politicians are listening. They are not. They should not. At my club, we get a better turnout for air gun matches when Larry is making his famous New England clam chowder than the Brady’s got at Conowingo. My club this summer had a picnic that turned out four hundred, and that’s only because we capped it. The area gun shows on any given weekend draw thousands.

Whether the antis want to accept it or not, this is why we’re listened to, and they are ignored. There are simply a lot more of us than there are of you. Time to start facing facts.

From our favorite Brady Board member, in her own comments:

Should we just not do anything? That is not what this country does. When there is a national public health and safety problem, people get to work. They pass laws, they educated, they do something. Seatbelt laws, no smoking laws, breast cancer and colon cancer screenings- all national efforts to get people to take better care of themselves or to mandate things that will make people safer and cut costs to health care, etc. We haven’t even tried with guns so how would we know?

Sometimes nothing is exactly the right thing to do. I don’t get this “We have to do something,” mentality. Especially when something generally involves restricting people’s liberty in the cases of smoking bans and seatbelt laws. I think this is really what probably separates our two sides; we value freedom and they want to be relieved of the burdens of it. I think this more now that we have interacted with them more.

Note the comparison to breast cancer screening and colon cancer screening. Would Joan Peterson favor mandating these? With long prison sentences for failing to show up to your scheduled screening? Because that’s what using gun control to solve the problem of violence means. Maybe she would. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. But to borrow some of their lingo in a different context, as a cancer victim and survivor myself, having lost my mother to it, I would never advocate mandating such things. Freedom is more important than saving the lives which would be saved by mandatory screening with stiff penalties for non-compliance. I think most other folks would agree.

But there’s one difference here. There’s reliable scientific evidence that early screening greatly increases cancer survival rates. There’s absolutely no evidence at all that gun control reduces violence crime or murder.

These stories are almost getting old, but then again, so is the ink being spilled by our opponents in regards to the gun sales data not meaning what it means.

The gun lobby doesn’t actually provide any gun sales data to the media. The NSSF (the trade association for the gun industry) and the NRA have this data–because gun manufacturers have to understand what their dealers are selling in order to produce the proper amount of product and maximize profits. But the gun lobby has blocked public access to this information for decades. Instead, they offer reporters data on background checks run through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

This kind of rhetoric goes to show that Horwitz is either an ignoramus or is deliberately deceptive. No one is blocking manufacturing data. It is there plain for everyone to see (scroll down to Annual Firearms Manufacturers And Export Report), which the ATF compiles every year, with a one year delay, in order to comply with the Trade Secrets Act, which is not a “gun lobby” piece of legislation.

Also, the only body that offers reports on NICS checks are the FBI. Anyone else is just relaying the FBI statistics. This is what the gun control groups wanted. I’m sure in a million years they never believed it would be used to chart their painful slide into irrelevance.

Well, it would seem some folks have touched a nerve with CSGV, that now they’ve taken to outing and libeling people on their blog. By now we’ve gotten used to it, of course if they had paid attention carefully they would realize those words are not mine (Sebastian) but those of my co-blogger Bitter.

Let me be clear here, what Congresswoman Giffords attended in Tucson was a memorial gesture in honor of the victims of that mass shooting.

Suzi Hileman, who took her young friend and neighbor, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, to meet Giffords that day, took the stage at the vigil and hugged Giffords, walking to the candle area, lighting one of 19 candles for all those killed and wounded, and mouthing “thank you” to the crowd.

I don’t bemoan anyone there doing whatever makes them assuage the loss, and to help heal their community. But what the anti-gun groups like CSGV and Brady are doing is not that. What they are doing is a publicity stunt. In fact, I’ve wondered if their candle event was intended to draw media attention to themselves, in the hopes that reporters would believe that perhaps their candle lighting event was somehow related to the true memorial service in Tucson. We don’t mock anyone’s suffering. We do mock a group of busybodies trying to draw attention to themselves by taking away from the true event in Tucson, in an attempt to get media attention to their cause of taking other people’s freedoms away.

UPDATE: It would seem CSGV has corrected their oversight, and added a few more items for which I don’t apologize. Once your grief crosses over into trying to remove my freedoms and shred part of the Bill of Rights you can no longer claim the right to be left alone.

That’s how Bloomberg Business Week is describing the gun control movement, in what is a very balanced article, considering the source. The article speaks of record low crime rates as a primary reason that support for gun control among the populace has dropped, but I think that’s only one factor. Violence in the ‘burbs, where most of the political elite live was never that high, even in the 1980s. Additionally, while violence in cities has dropped, city dwellers are still more likely to support gun control over the general population.

I think a big factor in the disappearance of support for gun control is generational, namely that subsequent generations don’t harbor as many racial and xenophobic anxieties as previous generations. Whether our opponents want to admit it or not, much of the nations gun control was prompted by these anxieties among political elites. These days, the idea that rights belong to all Americans, and even in many cases to all persons, is considerably better understood by the baby boomers, than it was understood by previous generations, and is even more engrained in subsequent generations. I think without those anxieties tugging at the subconscious of the elites, gun control finds considerably less reception, except among the fringe, who largely associate with the peace movement, or those who are misplacing grief over loved ones lost in gun related crime or suicides. That’s a very small pool of people, and not enough to build a movement on.

Apparently authorities in the UK are freaking out because a licensed gun owner killed his family with guns he was licensed for. It’s making Irish newspapers too. You hear our insufferably dimwitted opponents, who aren’t looking to ban guns, by the way, constantly making hay out of incidents like this as well.

In any pool of people, you’re going to have some who, despite the best efforts of the powers that be, defy the odds and act out spectacularly. It’s going to be rare, but it’s going to happen. There is no way to allow legal gun ownership and stop every misuse of legally owned guns, absolutely 100%. This inevitably leads to slippery slope where, unless someone steps up and accept that this is part of the cost of freedom, guns will eventually just be eventually outlawed for everyone.

Our opponents deride us for believing in the slippery slope. But I’m here to tell you now they are dimwitted people. I have run out of patience for them. In the past I have been more diplomatic, but I think now, we’re at a position where we can start calling spades spades. That’s not to say that every person who believe in some gun control is a thoughtless fool; I think reasonable people can disagree on some measures. But now that the reasonable folks have been swept out of the gun control movement, that leaves only the zealots, and I’ve been spectacularly unimpressed with them. I feel absolutely confident in calling them dimwits who we should not take seriously, and can successfully convince others not too either. Mockery, I think, should now be the order of the day, rather than serious engagement and persuasion.