Guns & Hunting Thread (12-30-2012)

Gun Control's Self-Refuting Arguments

Damn Dirty Rino sent along a link to this great piece at PJM.

I personally believed in civilian disarmament until an acquaintance in law enforcement challenged my gun-banner’s assumptions with questions and points I could not rebut. This began a research journey limited only by my decision to exclude any data cited by the NRA. At the time, I was convinced only caring people like the Brady Campaign would present the truth.

Surprisingly (to me, at the time), I found no dataset proving civilian disarmament made anybody safer.

In response to Ezra Klein’s report titled “Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States,” below are eight fictions about gun control.

Oh, did I mention it was a nut stomping of a piece by WaPo wunderkind Juicebox Klein? No? Well that's just an added bonus, so read the whole thing.

This point really jumped out at me:

Fiction 3: “Gun Violence”

“Gun violence” is a crafted phrase to induce people into associating guns with violence. Using Ezra Klein’s logic, Brady’s “A”-graded, low-gun states should be the safest. But when collated with CDC firearms murder rates, an inconvenient correlation appears: more gun control, higher black homicide, lower Caucasian homicide.

(Crime rates = incidents per 100,000 population.)

One of the unpleasant realizations from my original research was my learning that the history of American gun control is that of racist oppression: banning sales to Indians in order to maintain dominance while grabbing land; ensuring free blacks remained as close to slaves as possible; disarming the Japanese before their internment during World War II.

Modern gun control still makes whites safer, while more blacks get murdered.

Gun control is racist. Tell all your liberal friends. Or acquaintances. Whatever. Also, somebody tell this clown.

Another good read by someone applying logic instead of emotion: A Reluctant Vote in Favor of Armed School Guards

Most Americans agree that dramatic steps must be taken to prevent the recurrence of a horrible event like that of Dec. 14, 2012. Just what steps should be taken is a matter of disagreement. After considerable thought I have sadly concluded that Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, is correct when he advocates for armed security in the country's more than 100,000 schools.

...

What happened at Sandy Hook was not the failure to plan; it was the failure of the plan. The teachers and administrative staff executed their school district's plan heroically in trying to save lives, some at the loss of their own. Police departments changed their policies after Columbine and now rush to the source of an incident inside a school building at great risk to themselves. But a major flaw in such plans persists to this day—namely that it takes just a few unguarded minutes for a catastrophe to unfold.

It's really not that hard, is it? Like LaPierre said, the only thing that'll stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

The only problem the left really has with this is that the proposal was made by the NRA. When Bill Clinton said largely the same thing after Columbine, it was the most brilliant thing ever.

Journalists and Guns

Lots of fun was had at the HQ this week in pointing out how ignorant journalists are of gun laws. You'd think they'd recognize this deficiency and seek to address it, but you'd be wrong.

@theh2 Approached a MSM bigwig 2 days ago, with suggestion to hire a firearms editor to "proof" stories. No response.

— Bob Owens (@bob_owens) December 28, 2012

I wonder, though, whether they're any more ignorant about guns than they are about any other topic in general. It's at this point that a reminder of Michael Crichton's Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is in order:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

See also: Ezra Klein.

Gun Of The Week

What's this Semiautomatic Assault Pistol?

Marksmanship Award

Hero of the Day 5 - Wyoming: Nail salon customer packs heat, gunman leaves - trib.com/news/local/cas… #NRA #ArmedCitizen (via @cstribune)

— Cam and Company (@CamAndCompany) December 13, 2012

Gun Of The Week - Answer

That picture, of course, is of the ultra-modern Borchardt C-93. And by 93, they meant 1893. To listen to the news, you'd think semiautomatic firearms were invented around the time the iPod was, not well over a century ago.

And as we all know, the semiautomatic handgun was perfected in 1911.

Christmas Guns

A great collection of ads via commenter 'RWC' on Christmas eve.

Tips

If there are topics you're interested in seeing in the gun thread, please send them to AoSHQGunThread at gmail. You can also send them to me on Twitter at @AndyM1911.

posted by Andy at 09:25 AM

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