Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Some stand firm and some say "do it for the children"

  No, literally.  David Frum says do it for the children.  Just get rid of your guns if you have children.  I checked and he only resembles Helen Lovejoy in intellectual paucity and shrill hysterics but looks nothing like her otherwise.

 

  And then, on British television, an interviewer tries to get a nice slam dunk from one of those oppressed minorities in the US.  Except......Ice-T apparently has a functioning brain and does not care about standing his ground even when gun control hysteria is at a fervered pitch.  Ice-T points out that the Founders did not have hunting rifles in mind when they wrote the 2nd Amendment and his disdain for the interview's line of questioning is paplpable.  Bravo.

 

  To close, let's quote from the intellectual giant Thomas Sowell.  (Article).  If you aren't reading Sowell's column, let this be your wake up call.  David Frum debating Thomas Sowell would be roughly akin to a shrill Yorkshire Terrier attacking my Belgian Malinois.

Britain is a country with stronger gun control laws than the United States, and lower murder rates. But Mexico, Russia and Brazil are also countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States — and their murder rates are much higher than ours. Israel and Switzerland have even higher rates of gun ownership than the United States, and much lower murder rates than ours.

Even the British example does not stand up very well under scrutiny. The murder rate in New York has been several times that in London for more than two centuries — and, for most of that time, neither place had strong gun control laws. New York had strong gun control laws years before London did, but New York still had several times the murder rate of London.

It was in the later decades of the 20th century that the British government clamped down with severe gun control laws, disarming virtually the entire law-abiding citizenry. Gun crimes, including murder, rose as the public was disarmed.

Meanwhile, murder rates in the United States declined during the same years when murder rates in Britain were rising, which were also years when Americans were buying millions more guns per year.
The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them.



 

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