Only one criminal out of six uses a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. Criminals use firearms about a quarter million times each year and they violate our “gun-control” laws millions more times. That means that gun control is and has been a failure.In contrast, we defend ourselves with a firearm about 2.8 million times every year. Mass murderers take about 600 lives a year. We protected hundreds of thousands of our children with armed school volunteers every school day. If you haven’t heard it before then I’m telling you now…armed self-defense is far more common than the criminal use of a firearm.Politicians who push for more gun control say their laws will disarm criminals. In fact, their 23,000 gun-control regulations — already on the books — disarm far more honest citizens than they do criminals. Mass murderers deliberately attack us in gun-free zones where we are disarmed by law.
Emphasis added. The thing is, I think that almost no one who advocates for gun control actually knows those numbers, nor even just the orders of magnitude. I think they mostly really believe that "common sense" conveys that fewer guns will mean fewer gun crimes, and that the solution is just so obvious that there's no need for further inquiry. I have never succeeded in interesting any of them in the actual numbers, and when I've quoted them I've only encountered stark disbelief that the numbers could be real.
Another one they absolutely don't believe is that accidental gun deaths involving children are vanishingly small -- some years a single digit figure in a nation of hundreds of millions of people with hundreds of millions of guns. Mostly the statistics you'll see in the press blur this by including everyone under 18 in the category of "children," and blurring how many shootings were really accidents versus how many were gang-involved. If you really get down to brass tacks on actual children and actual accidents, though, it's a very small number. Every one is a tragedy, of course; it's important not to forget that fact, even as we recognize that it's statistical noise.
5 comments:
I don't think their opponents are all liars -- not strictly.
But too many Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their supporters hold themselves out as oh so much smarter than the rest of us, so much more moral, so much...Better. I take them at their word.
Thus, if a poor dumb Texan like me, or like any of the rest of the Hall, or anyone to the right of those Wondrous Ones, knows these things, then of course those politicians and their supporters know those things especially well. When they deny their knowledge, of course they're lying.
Full stop.
Eric Hines
Ask them about child slave labor to mine cobalt, and widespread environmental damage of lithium mining, all for their "clean green" electric cars and oh, the coal burning plants outside of nimbyland that supply the power to charge them, or maybe the distribution of white/black crime rates and you will get the same astonished disbelief.
And it is all party line, and they will flip in a femtosecond if the line changes.
I have known a lot of conservatives with differing opinions on sundry subjects, but with the left, it is a Official Litany and no alterations or exceptions are allowed- until the party line changes. No cracks in the thought dam. Covid was a great illustrator of this.
I had an argument once with Greg Cochrane about whether it is different when you should know information, it is your job to know the information. Isn't it lying in some sense then? I take his point, though I still stick to your formulation of knowledge and intent. I am not certain CS Lewis would agree, though. He believed that intellectual sins, failures of thinking that were in our reach, are indeed sins, not just mistakes.
So most people you meet who don't know the numbers aren't lying. But a Congressman? Maybe we call that lying.
I think we need to distinguish expressions of belief from those of fact. It is not entirely unreasonable to believe that eliminating guns would eliminate gun crimes, that's almost tautological. Establishing that eliminating guns would not reduce *crime* involves several inferences and clarifications that might be logical but are not established to the degree of the existence of gravity or the location of the sunrise. People are, for good or ill, free to be wrong.
This does provide a little more evidence for the claim that non-liberals tend to assume those with differing views are ignorant rather than evil.
“It is not entirely unreasonable to believe that eliminating guns would eliminate gun crimes, that's almost tautological.”
Indeed it is strictly tautological if we were in fact talking about ‘eliminating guns.’ What is under discussion is not that; that isn’t within the power of the state, which has also not been able to eliminate cocaine or murder.
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