Saturday, December 29, 2012

Very Experienced and Knowledgeable Blogger on Everything to do with Gun Control

Found this blog post An Opinion on Gun Control by a guy who obviously knows what he's talking about, Larry Correia.  It's a very lengthy article but well worth reading in my opinion.  I've been finding it too hard to single out particular statements to post here but I'm working on it and may eventually get it down to a reasonable enough size for that.

Meanwhile I'll just say that this guy has extensive knowledge and experience with guns, having owned a gun store that sold to law enforcement and having given instruction in concealed-carry, including to teachers in the state of Utah.  He's done a lot of research into all aspects of the questions people keep asking about the gun control issues and in my opinion gives the most thorough and trustworthy information and opinion on the subject I've run across so far.

OK, here's a section of the article I do want to post here, where he talks about how prevention of crime by guns doesn't get registered in the statistics:
It doesn’t really make sense to ban guns, because in reality what that means is that you are actually banning effective self-defense. Despite the constant hammering by a news media with an agenda, guns are used in America far more to stop crime than to cause crime.

I’ve seen several different sets of numbers about how many times guns are used in self-defense every year. The problem with keeping track of this stat is that the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop.

Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.

So many defensive gun uses never get tracked as such. From personal experience, I have pulled a gun exactly one time in my entire life. I was legally justified and the bad guy stopped, put his gun away, and left. (15 years later the same son of a bitch would end up murdering a local sheriff’s deputy). My defensive gun use was never recorded anywhere as far as I know. My wife has pulled a gun twice in her life. Once on somebody who was acting very rapey who suddenly found a better place to be when she stuck a Ruger in his face, and again many years later on a German Shepherd which was attacking my one year old son. (amazingly enough a dog can recognize a 9mm coming out of a fanny pack and run for its life, go figure) No police report at all on the second one, and I don’t believe the first one ever turned up as any sort of defensive use statistic, all because no shots were fired.

So how often are guns actually used in self-defense in America? http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

On the high side the estimate runs around 2.5 million defensive gun uses a year, which dwarfs our approximately 16,000 homicides in any recent year, only 10k of which are with guns.  http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Of those with guns, only a couple hundred are with rifles. So basically, the guns that the anti-gunners are the most spun up about only account for a tiny fraction of all our murders.

But let’s not go with the high estimate. Let’s go with some smaller ones instead. Let’s use the far more conservative 800,000 number which is arrived at in multiple studies. That still dwarfs the number of illegal shootings. Heck, let’s even run with the number once put out by the people who want to ban guns, the Brady Center, which was still around 108,000, which still is an awesome ratio of good vs. bad.

So even if you use the worst number provided by people who are just as biased as me but in the opposite direction, gun use is a huge net positive. Or to put it another way, the Brady Center hates guns so much that they are totally cool with the population of a decent sized city getting raped and murdered every year as collateral damage in order to get what they want.
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Dec 31:  Hey, finally a major media statement against further gun control, citing the UK and Australia as NOT good examples of positive results of strict gun control, in The Wall Street Journal


http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=684038

http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=684020

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1791/did-hitler-ban-gun-ownership

All the links from Chris Pinto's site:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6438601/Gun-crime-doubles-in-a-decade.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-153817/Gun-crime-doubled-figures-set-show.html

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/12/11/gun-crime-soars-in-england-where-guns-are-banned-n1464528

http://www.gunssavelife.com/?p=3937

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2640817.stm

http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/gun-crime

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdBxpKqUvs

http://www.military.com/video/guns/small-arms/australias-gun-ban-not-working-so-well/1775480805001/

Friday, December 28, 2012

Suzanna Gratia Hupp, Defender of Second Amendment Gun Rights

Thank You, Lord, that we are hearing from some good defenders of our gun rights in the wake of this latest horrendous murder spree. That is a mercy from God. We could be hearing nothing but the gun control mob who are trying to set us up for the final destruction of this country. Oh I'm still convinced it's coming, I don't see signs of any turning back, but thank You, Lord, for mercies along the way.

So here's Suzanna Gratia Hupp who was with her parents in a cafeteria in Texas twenty years ago when one of these crazy guys came in shooting and killed them along with over twenty others.

First an interview by a CNN reporter who gets weirdly defensive at Suzanna's attempt to explain that typical media terms like "assault weapons" are made up.

Then we see Suzanna at a congressional hearing on gun control only a couple years after her parents were gunned down.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBLWLUEnRl0

Monday, December 24, 2012

One Picture Makes the Best Argument against Banning Guns

. . Been wanting to mention Israel in connection with this gun ban talk here and today I got the picture in email that makes the point for me. . . .

Saturday, December 15, 2012

SECOND AMENDMENT AGAIN

The horrific tragedy of the school shooting that occurred today has again brought up the question of gun control.  It always comes up at these times, but if someone raises the question Where were our armed citizens when this happened, who might have stopped this rampage in its tracks?, you are likely to be accused of callously taking the opportunity to make a political point, as if that isn't what the gun control people are doing. 

As a matter of fact whenever one of these tragedies occurs it breaks my heart and that IS the first question I ask these days:  WHERE IS OUR ARMED CITIZENRY at these times.  Where was an armed teacher or an armed parent or ANYBODY who could have ended this insanity before it killed people?

And you often hear how these murders occur in an area where there is extreme gun control or at least an underarmed population.  But the obvious conclusion is not drawn, that we need MORE, not fewer, armed citizens, especially in these crazy days of murdering individuals.  

I must admit I've been wondering if there is some kind of conspiracy behind these guys, some kind of influence that picks out emotionally unstrung people and influences them in this direction -- they often kill themselves or get killed so you can't interrogate them.  I know it sounds nuts, and maybe it IS just unstable individuals getting "inspired" by similar crazy acts, but I wonder nevertheless.  There's good reason to think that the murder in the Batman movie premier not long ago involved another person who disappeared during the shooting.  It just makes me wonder. 

So as usual you immediately hear that the Second Amendment was about an organized militia, and not citizen possession of firearms.  On the face of it this seems ludicrous because it's exactly an organized militia that can become the sort of threat an armed citizenry is protection against. 

But there is a history to this that is overlooked by these gun control fanatics who want to take the amendment away from us.  The concept of an armed citizenry goes way back in England long before the second amendment was written, and it was built on that history.  The point was for individual citizens to have the means of self defense and they WERE the army that protected the nation. 

The intention of the Second Amendment was to preserve us from foreign enemies and make a standing army unnecessary, which historically easily becomes a threat to the people, but obviously an armed citizenry can coexist with a national army and be a deterrent to its becoming that sort of menace, and it should be effective for these crazy individual enemies as well who kill innocent people in schools and malls and theaters.

Here are some quotes from men of the founding era:

James Madison:
http://www.constitution.org/jm/jm_quotes.htm
The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.  
Patrick Henry:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/361839.Patrick_Henry
 “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.”
George Mason,
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Mason
Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British parliament was advised by an artful man, [Sir William Keith] who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people. That it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.  
 http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/george+mason
Who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country...? I ask, who are the militia?  They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. 
Samuel Adams
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/samuel+adams
And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress … to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms…

It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them.
Alexander Hamilton
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton
The militia is a voluntary force not associated or under the control of the States except when called out; a permanent or long standing force would be entirely different in make-up and call.
Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.  
Richard Henry Lee
 https://www.facebook.com/unorganizedmilitia/notes
A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves...and include all men capable of bearing arms...To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms...The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Henry_Lee
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."[3] Here's an interesting scholarly article on the concept:

History of the Second Amendment
David E Vandercoy
1994
http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1956&context=vulr

This study gives the history of the “citizen army” in England, which is the same thing as the “militia” intended by the Second Amendment,  that goes back centuries.  I’m just going to quote from The Conclusion:
English history made two things clear to the American revolutionaries:  force of arms was the only effective check on government, and standing armies threatened liberty. Recognition of these premises meant that the force of arms necessary to check government had to be placed in the hands of citizens. The English theorists Blackstone and Harrington advocated these tenants. [sic] Because the public purpose of the right to keep arms was to check government, the right necessarily belonged to the individual and, as a matter of theory, was thought to be absolute in that it could not be abrogated by the prevailing rulers.

These views were adopted by the framers, both Federalists and Antifederalists. Neither group trusted government. Both believed the greatest danger to the new republic was tyrannical government and that the ultimate check on tyranny was an armed population. It is beyond dispute that the second amendment right was to serve the same public purpose as advocated by the English theorists.
Seems to me I've run across discussions that include protection against criminals as well, but I didn't find them on this run.