For some reason, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King put this item in his Monday NFL roundup column:
My heart goes out to the victims of the Fort Hood and Orlando shootings and their loved ones. Senseless, senseless incidents. I will not go quietly into the night on this one.
America needs to do something about idiots with handguns. How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?
This is an especially outrageous statement given that gun control was directly responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood. As Michael Gaddy explained at LewRockwell.com:
Throughout my career, no soldier, regardless of rank or position, was allowed to have in his/her private possession any firearm. When I was on the rifle/pistol team I had to go to the armory to pick up my weapons for any practice or competition and return them immediately upon completion. That always struck me as unusual. While I had 24/7 access to firearms and explosives while in the combat zone, I was not allowed to possess any such item even on a military installation unless it was for training or competition. Slaves should never be allowed the means to resist.
Another reader wrote Lew Rockwell:
Contrary to what many people may perceive, we are not all walking around with firearms 24/7. Our weapons (i.e., firearms) were kept in a locked and guarded armory, totally inaccessible. The only time we could check out our rifle from the armory was not upon our own discretion, but if we had to go to the rifle range that week, or we were doing field training, and so forth. Unless we were doing a live-fire exercise, we were using blanks with the rifles for the training.
If somebody owned a personal firearm and they lived on base – rather than off base – they were NOT allowed to keep it in the barracks. That, too, had to be checked into the armory. Lew, Army gun control is a good way to describe. Every single one of those victims was most likely unarmed.
It is indisputable that forcibly disarming a population gives rise to the types of massacres seen at Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, etc. Given this, Mr. King’s position that the state should redouble its efforts to disarm the population — removing any possibility of self-defense — is in fact an endorsement of said massacres. He is publicly advocating a state action that we know, with 100% certainty, will result in the death of more innocent people.
Accordingly, I wonder if Sports Illustrated’s editors have the guts to severely restrict Peter King’s access to a mass audience — by firing him for his callous endorsement of mass murder.
UPDATE: Lest you think Peter King’s outburst was an isolated incident, consider my previous posts regarding King here, here, here, and here. Obviously, Mr. King is vying for the title of “the Paul Krugman of sportswriters.”
{ 31 comments }
Why is it always that sports journalists are the biggest totalitarians?
I mean, now it’s just getting ridiculous.
“”How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?”"
^And how many bans on peaceful free activity, following SINGLE-INCIDENT freak tragedies, will there have to be before people realize that there will always be such tragedies and if we tried to ban/regulate/etc every such good that could “cause” such harm we’d be in a totalitarian society?
-9/11 resulted in the Patriot Act, two murderous wars of aggression, expanded powers of basically every federal bureau, etc.
-Columbine resulted in attempts to control guns and insane parents blaming the laughably non-violent PC game DOOM for the shooting and attempting to get stores to ban such games
-Shay’s Rebellion resulted in people wanting a constitution to “prevent things like this from happening anymore” — that did us a lot of good, didn’t it?
In other words, it is Peter King who needs to learn from history, NOT us.
Peter King knows very little about football, and even less about freedom.
Perfect example of the elitist Northeast corridor limousine liberal.
Sports columnists and talk show hosts today are some of the most thick headed people around.
Just look at the way a lot of them threw Plexico Burress under the bus without asking whether or not NY’s draconian gun laws were rational.
Another case is Barry Bonds. The investigation of Bonds has been a mess from the beginning… an IRS agent investigating alleged steroid use (why IRS?), money confiscated then disappearing, serious allegations of entrapment at the grand jury, the steroids in question weren’t illegal at the time, etc., all going without much discussion in the sports press. Instead, the consensus among incompetents like King is “guilty” or “let’s move on”. Why? Well, just because.
I’m not sure why the sports press is like this.
That said, has anyone noticed how nationalistic baseball has become? Eight years after 9/11, six years since the start of the Iraq War, and MLB still insists on asking everyone to stand for “God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch like it is the national anthem. They say it is to honor “men and woman serving abroad” when it’s really just imperial propaganda. You’ll hear few players or sports writers ask, “why are so many men and women serving abroad anyway?”
Sports, like religion, is often used to stroke nationalist sentiments and to alienate those who do not conform to a statist agenda… drugs, guns, players with unique personality, etc., all are usually blasted by sports talking heads or writers without much thought regarding the mitigating circumstances of the case or the person involved. Individuality is not tolerated very well in sports. So it’s no surprise a sports writer like King is advocating the banning of self-defense.
“How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?”
Yes, only trained military personnel should have access to firearms!!
No, wait…
This article by Bernard Lagan, an Australian journalist living in New York sums up the way this subject is seen outside the US.
We think there is some psychological problem involving US people and guns. We simply do not understand. As your commentary shows, you can stand logic on its head. But the numbers speak, louder than twisted logic. Why else is Canberra’s death rate from guns so much lower?
“By now you will have heard of Major Nidal Malak Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot 13 of his colleagues dead and wounded 31 inside the army’s largest base, Fort Hood in Texas, last Thursday.
Taryale Petter, John Herman, Jason Rodriques and Marcus Gonzalez are names you may not know.
Taryale was only 15 years old. Early on Friday morning, aboard his Philadelphia school bus, he pulled a handgun from his bag and shot another child.
On average guns kill or wound 276 people every day in America.
Hermann, a Minnesota cop, on Tuesday shot dead a man who ran over a plastic traffic cone in a car park.
On Friday morning, Rodriquez, 40, walked into the Florida engineering consultancy from which he had been sacked and opened fire, killing a young father and wounding five others.
Gonzalez, 29, who was jilted in love, shot dead four people on Wednesday in the North Carolina town that inspired fictitious Mayberry – the almost crime-free, one-traffic-light town, inspired by the 1960s Andy Griffith Show.
There are more, a lot more, from the past week. Such as Robert Appointee who, on Sunday, the opening day of the Maine deer-hunting season, attached a rope to his rifle and tried to haul it up to his treetop hideaway. He shot himself.
Or poor Michelle Valentine of Rhode Island who, this week, distraught over a broken love affair, held a gun to her head. When she wouldn’t put it down, the police shot her.
Or New York policeman James Pileggi, who, on Thursday night, was showing his new laser-guided pistol to his best friend. It went off. His best friend died.
I could go on, of course. Another week of guns and blood across America and before a public and polity so astonishingly impervious to the carnage that it is treated almost as if it were measles.
After 15-year-old Alex Bolar was shot and killed while playing in a park near his Memphis school on Wednesday, the Reverend Joe Hunter, who helps teens in the neighbourhood, railed against the deafness.
“Give me a break,†Hunter said. “If we can’t get in an uproar about that, what can we get in an uproar about?”
On average, guns kill or wound 276 people every day in America. Of those shot, about 75 adults and nine children die.
That adds up to just over 100,000 victims of gun violence a year. The rate of firearm murders in the United States is about 16 times that in Australia and 26 times that in Britain.
In 2000, Britain’s Home Office published a study that compared murder rates in the world’s capital cities. Canberra had 0.64 homicides per 100,000 people. London had three times that rate. Washington, DC’s, murder rate was 93 times that of Canberra’s.
Martin Bryant was the Tasmanian misfit who, on an April afternoon in 1996, used two military-style assault rifles to take the lives of 35 people in eight, dreadful minutes.
To his lasting credit, the then newly elected prime minister, John Howard, seized the moment and stared down the gun lobby to give Australia one of the tightest sets of gun ownership laws in the world. He declared at the time: ”I hate guns. One of the things I don’t admire about America is their slavish love of guns … We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.”
Australia endured 11 mass shootings in the decade leading to the day Bryant ran amok. There have been none since.
It is, of course, wishful thinking to expect that an American president could, or would want, to intervene in the way Howard did to curtail gun ownership.
Emboldened by the Second Amendment which, they contend, still protects their right to bear arms, many Americans, in the words of one of their greater jurists, Joseph Story, consider gun ownership to be the palladium of the liberties of the republic.
Nevertheless, past presidents and the Congress have certainly tried to reduce the insanely high level of gun violence; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King led to bans on mail order guns; the 1981 shootings of Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady spawned the criminal background check and cooling-off period for handgun buyers and, when Bill Clinton became president, 20 types of assault rifles were banned.
Given the red-necked rage of the National Rifle Association whenever somebody tries to block the sieve of US gun law – and the many politicians beholden to the association’s millions of dollars in funding – the changes achieved in the past are no small thing.
Just last Thursday, as the deranged Hasan pulled out his gun in Fort Hood, the leadership of America’s biggest anti-gun lobby, The Brady Campaign, happened to be meeting in Washington to work how to counter the gun lobby’s latest campaign to overturn a law that bans mentally incompetent and incapacitated military veterans from owning guns. There are 116,000 of them. Hasan will be one more.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the very few leading politicians who has stood up to the National Rifle Association. He may be hated for it, but Bloomberg has made it very hard to own a handgun legally in New York.
New York police frisk hundreds of thousands of people annually to enforce his law. In September, Bloomberg sent out undercover investigators with hidden cameras, to prove how easy it was for people who would fail a background check for gun ownership to simply roll up to weekend gun shows in other states and buy whatever weapon they wanted.
When the undercover agents warned they wouldn’t pass a background check, 19 out of 30 gun sellers took their money anyway and handed over the guns. One thing the National Rifle Association can’t explain is why New York’s murder rate is on track this year to dip below 500 – the lowest since 1963, when reliable figures became available. In 1990, the bloodiest year in the city’s history, there were 2245 murders.
However Bloomberg can’t change America’s relationship with guns by himself. Will President Barack Obama help?
The likelihood, for now, is not much. Consumed by two wars, recession, and health care, there is no stomach within the Obama Administration to open up a new front with opponents as rabid as the US gun lobby.
During his campaign for the presidency, Obama promised to restore a federal ban on several of the most lethal semi-automatic assault rifles. A bill to close the gun-show loophole is stalled in Congress.
When Newsweek put questions to the White House in April about what had happened to gun law reform, it was told by White House spokesman Ben LaBolt: “There isn’t support in Congress for such a ban at this time.”
LaBolt said: “The President supports the Second Amendment, respects the tradition of gun ownership in this country, and he believes we can take commonsense steps to keep our streets safe.”
He pointed to $US2 billion in new funding for state and local law enforcement in the stimulus package.
It doesn’t help that Hasan simply walked into the Guns Galore shop in Killeen, Texas, and bought the gun he used, an FN Herstal Five-seveN, quite legally. According to the website, they sell for about $US1000 and are about the most murderous handgun it is possible to buy, designed to shred body armour and favoured by the Mexican drug cartels.
The US anti-gun lobby has been vocal for several years about why these weapons – marketed by the gun industry as elevating the power of a handgun to a high-powered rifle – should be banned.
The national anti-gun Violence Policy Centre was the most vocal and began a long report it published last year into why the weapons should be stopped, with a quote from San Jose gun dealer Jim Reed: “These new guns generate the incentive for the consumer to be the first among his buddies to own the ‘biggest and the baddest’ handgun on the market, which computes into sales … The consumer who buys the big boomers will continue to purchase the new big calibres as long as manufacturers keep building them. This is good for business!”
Bernard Lagan is an Australian journalist living in New York.
to saildog:
you don’t need to look far for possible explanantions for nyc’s drop in crime – the start of the great financial bubble II. rich people displacing poor people, harlem gentrified etc.
poor people left town. simple selection bias.
Take those 75 deaths. Multiply it by 365.25 days, then by 50 years, ~1.4 million people have died by the hands of the people in the last 50 years. That is a very small amount compared to what other Gov’ts have done to their own people in the last 50 years.
Lets use one of the White House’s favorite political philosopher, Chairman Mao’s Quote:
“Political Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”
And I’d rather that power be with the people. If the people are armed then they will have the power. Logically if you want people to have the power, and you think highly of Mao’s philosophy, then logically this administration should be pro individual gun rights.
And the death toll is far smaller at the hands of the people than at the hands of the Gov’t
To Saildog: This is not surprising.
This article is symptomatic of typical leftist paternalism, and the rest of the industrialized world is much more paternalistic than we are.
Let’s see…where to start the refutation.
Let’s begin with the various stories of people dying from gunfire. First I would like to point out that all of these instances are NOT used to actually make an argument, but to prey on my emotions and somehow show that guns are “evil”.
Second, the incidences where people accidentally misfired their firearms and killed someone are do to human stupidity, they could have just as easily been power tools or caustic chemicals or any myriad number of dangerous things that people use on a daily basis.
Third, as to the shooting sprees it is not at all apriori true that if there were no guns then they would not use some other method to wreak their destruction. For example, they could have used their vehicles to drive through the front entrances of these businesses or homes; or they could have tried to burn down these establishments and lock the people inside. To assert that the deaths would not have occurred at all had there been no firearms is to assert the ability to look into the future. They were pissed, so they acted on it.
4th, the crime stats he uses show nothing once we look deeper into the actual numbers. For one thing, the method for tallying crimes differ between countries (some methodologies will report more crimes than others) so strict comparisons between countries becomes problematic, and even then this is assuming that the law enforcement bodies are actually being honest in their tallies (the London murder rate listed in the argument is laughable, that is either a misquote or the author is lying. Independent surveyors of crime have shown that London now has the highest violent crime rate in the industrialized world).
As to bans supposedly actually dropping crime, there is much better evidence to show that they increase it. The author of this article fails to mention the fact that US states with the highest levels of concealed firearms carry also had the lowest drops in crime rates after the laws were established to legalize this practice.
As to Hasan buying a gun used, what’s your point? Hasan was a ranked military officer. Is the author implying that even military officers, who are trusted to use guns in foreign countries and to defend their own countries should NOT be trusted to have guns themselves? Does that not seem a bit contradictory? or Illogical?
I will end by noting that if it were the case that high gunownership rates actually cause violence, then why is it that the Swiss, who have the highest gunownership per capita rates on earth, also have the lowest crime rates. It astounds me how well known this is and yet intelligent people will still try to make the case that gunownership causes violence.
This article is fairly typical of the left side of the gun debate. It starts by first neglecting reason and trying to prey directly on the emotions so as to avoid rational argument, it selectively preens through very superficial facts which tell us nothing about the actual people in question, and it totally vilifies anyone who may disagree with their point of view as if the person were insane.
A slight edit.
To the concealed firearms point, I meant to say that higher concealed carry states produced the lowest crime rates after the laws were established, not that they produced the lowest DROPS in crime rates.
Also, an important note that I did not point out earlier. Most of the gun crime and violent crime is directly linked with the drug trade. If you were to drop the folks who died during the performance of this trade from the stats the rate would be much much lower. Also it is important to point out that the government is directly responsible for those murders. The only reason they occur is because the free exchange of drugs is legally prohibited and very very heavily penalized. because legal justice and legal avenues of supply cannot be found, criminals fill the void to provide the drugs; naturally crime will increase in this due to the subset of the populaiton which becomes wealthy from this dynamic.
http://www.gunfacts.info/
I figured I would post this since many may not be aware of it.
“America needs to do something about idiots with handguns. How many more Fort Hoods and Orlandos do there have to be before our political leaders have the guts to severely restrict access to murderous weapons?”
It’s like the question that arises when jobs are claimed to have been saved by government stimulus; what jobs were lost or never came into existence because of it? Banning handguns would prevent people from dying at the barrel of a handgun legally owned by someone. But what about the lives lost becuase there wasn’t someone around with a handgun?
If we’re going to cherry pick European countries to follow, lets cherry pick the Swiss!
**A well-armed militia, All fit males go to boot camp, most have AUTOMATIC weapons at home.
**A long history of neutrality,
**One of the richest countries in the world by per capita GDP,
** overwhelmingly private sector economy
** overall taxation is one of the smallest of developed countries.
**Switzerland ranks 16th of 178 countries in the Ease of Doing Business Index.
(most were quotes from wikipedia)
Culture of Violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade by James Slack for Mail Online (UK) October 27th, 2009 :
“The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year – a rise of 89 per cent.
In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold.
In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled.
The statistic will fuel fears that the police are struggling to contain gang-related violence, in which the carrying of a firearm has become increasingly common place….
The number of people injured or killed by guns, excluding air weapons, has increased from 864 in 1998/99 to a provisional figure of 1,760 in 2008/09, an increase of 104 per cent.”
So the UK government’s own stastics show that the ban isn’t helping but instead has made things worse.
The total number of casualties in World War I, both military and civilian, were about 37 million: 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded. Estimates of the total World War II dead range from 50 million to over 70 million,
It is simply amazing how much smarter and more civilized all those peace loving gun control European and Asian states are.
Do Austrian economists outside the US feel that they should be unarmed slaves to the state?
http://books.google.com/books?id=3CEKPvzFeHsC&pg=PA101&dq=kleck+guns+and+self+defense&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q=kleck%20guns%20and%20self%20defense&f=false
“-Columbine resulted in attempts to control guns and insane parents blaming the laughably non-violent PC game DOOM for the shooting and attempting to get stores to ban such games”
I wouldn’t blame Columbine on DOOM, but to say that DOOM is “laughably non-violent” is laughably idiotic.
“Second, the incidences where people accidentally misfired their firearms and killed someone are do to human stupidity, they could have just as easily been power tools or caustic chemicals or any myriad number of dangerous things that people use on a daily basis.”
Second, the incidences where people accidentally misfired their nuclear bazookas and killed many people are due to human stupidity; they could have just as easily been power tools or caustic chemicals or any myriad number of dangerous things that people use on a daily basis.
See? I can replace “gun’ with anything but it doesn’t make your argument any less absurd.
”
Third, as to the shooting sprees it is not at all apriori true that if there were no guns then they would not use some other method to wreak their destruction. For example, they could have used their vehicles to drive through the front entrances of these businesses or homes; or they could have tried to burn down these establishments and lock the people inside.”
It’s just so much easier to do it when you have a gun, though.
“I will end by noting that if it were the case that high gunownership rates actually cause violence, then why is it that the Swiss, who have the highest gunownership per capita rates on earth, also have the lowest crime rates. It astounds me how well known this is and yet intelligent people will still try to make the case that gunownership causes violence.”
In Switzerland, ammunition is sealed and is inspected regularly to ensure that no unauthorized use takes place. There are also many other restrictions on gun usage and carrying in public.
It astounds me how well known this is and yet intelligent people will still try to make the case that the gun situation in Switzerland is a valid comparison to the United States.
Does anyone here actually even bother to do their research, or do you all just spout lines that you’ve heard from other people?
Talking about gun violence in America without talking about race is about as pointless an exercise as I can imagine. You could also ask what role the Army’s aggressive affirmative action policies played in keeping around an obvious malcontent/incompetent who eventually blew his top. Obviously liberals won’t talk about these things, but why must libertarians hamstring themselves? Surely they don’t believe liberal nonsense as well?
“See? I can replace “gun’ with anything but it doesn’t make your argument any less absurd.”
You see, replacing the word “gun” with “nuclear bazooka” does absolutely nothing to my argument at all. If you are going to automatically assert that it makes my argument absurd you may want to explain exactly HOW it does so. All it proves is that YOU have to think of absurd situations in order to make it LOOK silly.
The argument is totally true. people operate electrical equipment and dangerous tooling all the time and hurt or even kill themselves but I never hear any of this hauranging when that occurs, even when it occurs with great frequency.
“It astounds me how well known this is and yet intelligent people will still try to make the case that the gun situation in Switzerland is a valid comparison to the United States.
Does anyone here actually even bother to do their research, or do you all just spout lines that you’ve heard from other people?”
Are you positive that YOUR research is correct? I know full well that the Swiss military ammo (which was subsidized by the government and still may be at this point, not sure if that is still the truth or not) is indeed sealed and not permitted to be used outside of authorized uses (war and the target range). It is indeed also true that privately purchased munitions must be registered at the time of sale. This however NOT true with munitions bought at a shooting range, which is where most ammo is bought if I am not mistaken. I am also aware that range ammo is supposed to be used solely at the range, and that may be the case now, but it is my understanding that law has never been strictly enforced. That may not be the case now, since it seems that Swiss firearms ownership is starting to come under fire from with from the more socialistic elements of Swiss society especially within the last few years.
That does not matter for my argument. My whole point in mentioning Switzerland was to debunk the simplistic notion that simply having guns in society somehow magically makes people more irrational and prone to violence. Simply having guns around in society does nothing to change the underlying cultural and societal issues which lead to violent crime. You bringing up the fact that the swiss government doesn’t permit people to open the sealed ammunition they provide them at cost does nothing to alter this argument.
The whole basis of your argument rests on the idea that legally purchased firearms are the vast majority of the ones used in crime.
“It’s just so much easier to do it when you have a gun, though.”
I am not convinced that is the case, and no one has proven that it is. Think about, most mass shootings are done by folks who logically choose to go about killing their fellow man. So we have established that he has already chosen his ends; if you restrict guns you are only changing his means (of which there are a myriad he can choose from, such as bombs, or poison, or any number of things he can figure out how to make relatively easily) and in fact are making it more difficult for the law abiding to protect themselves because you are limiting their available means for self-defense.
There is a reason mass shootings in the US overwhelmingly occur in schools and universities, they have explicit policies in place that ban the LAW-ABIDING from having guns on the property. So if you are looking to kill a large number of people wth minimal resistance, naturally this is the sort of place you will go to if your chosen means to kill people is with a gun.
You are correct in pointing out that as far as guns go, Switzerland is not America. But this is not solely due to the regulations. Even if America did have the kind of controls the Swiss have, our violent crime rates would still be higher due to other policies we have (like the moronic drug war, or our idiotic prison/judicial establishment) and simple geographical facts (America is the largest trader on earth, with numerous entry points for smuggling which would effectively countermand any sort of registration schemes for ammunition). The biggest reason there is such a difference is because of our wildly different CULTURES which produces significantly kinds of human beings.
I will end with this:
http://www.gunlaws.com/NationalAcademyStudy.htm
The NAS looked at over 300 studies on the effects of gun restrictions in American and found that none of them did anything, and even THAT was a conservative estimate because they selectively left out studies which would have showed their counterproductivity.
One could look at Canada for perspective, and “pig farmer Picton” (try google), the biggest serial murderer in North America of all times.
He apparently said he killed 49 prostitutes. Adjusted for population size, that would be several hundred murders by a single US resident. OR 10 people murdering 49 women each in the US -your choice…
But, oh this was Kanada: no firearm weapons were much used… Mostly seringes, knives for quartering and butchering, a wood chipper for processing into feed for his pigs… Some of the meat is said to have been mixed with pork to sell to the neighbors… Etc
But eh, this is Kanada, they are progressives up there: if you don’t use a firearm for a weapon, you get discounted sentences. Multiple murders get a complete “volume discount” of a single sentence…
Adjusted for population, the canadian gubernment recently spent 20 billions trying to register every farmers legal long guns.
Didn’t spent a cent on controlling butcher knives or wood chipper, windshield washer fluid, etc, tho…
Also the Big Media never gave too much details, like if the wood chipper was used “a la Sadam”, on live bodies etc… All of these murders not being done “American-style”, (ie with firearms) the horror was muted… Canadians think a slow death with a knife is better than instant death by a firearm. Knifings are common…
Such is firearm paranoia…
Wiki’s article on the Swiss and guns doesn’t inspire confidence – it seems if you’re not in some justified occupation you can’t carry guns around. If this is true then gun ownership is rather similar as non-U.S. countries you can only guns if you have a reason to do so and you can only use guns at certain venues. After all, what good are militia weapons if they almost always in a safe?
Point being is this:
Having guns and Ammo is not the sole cause of mass murders, nor the sole cause of any murders.
The many Swiss HAVE automatic guns, and HAVE ammo, and COULD go around murdering people, but on average they don’t.
Guns and murder are not strongly ‘correlated’ some nations (South Africa) have high murder and strong gun laws, other places have low murder and strong gun laws,
Their firearms restrictions are actually much greater than American gun-rights groups will openly admit, on the other hand there are areas where they are substantially more liberal. They’re allowed to own anti-aircraft guns in that country for God’s sakes.
My point was that the simplistic “more guns, more crime” narrative is nonsensical. It pays no attention to the fact that actions are cause first and foremost by one’s own ideas, and thus ideas and behaviors are higher on the totem pole. Even worse, it asserts that inanimate objects are the cause of crime and it places importance only on the fact that certain things are used in crime instead of that crime is occurring, which is the much more important fact.
Gun control opponents should indeed exercise caution when appealing to the example of Switzerland. Plainly the legal presumption there (as in all of Europe) is that the burden of proof is on the citizenry, not the government.
bobobberson makes an interesting (if perhaps inadvertant) point in comparing the crime rates of Switzerland and South Africa. We could similarly compare the crime rates of Zurich to, say, Detroit.
let’s not forget how effective the machete can be in the modern genocide – rwanda.
here in australia, there is an unshakeable, metropolitan, progressive mindset that demonizes guns, linking all gun events to the violence of some mythical american wild west. this flies in the face of our own early colonial past, where i believe gun ownership was even higher per capita than in the united states. our gun-toting past has been completely air-brushed out of our history books.
shooting an home-invader will likely result in the victim facing serious criminal charges, unless the assailant is similarly armed.
we’re going down the british route, where youths are increasingly using knives in fights. a pro-active, caring government should promptly prepare a national knife ban strategy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225280/James-Bond-pen-gun-sparks-police-fear-disguised-weapons.html
People working their way around regulations and import controls. More evidence that the regs are worse than useless.
as it happens, the peacetime massacre capitals of the world on a per-capita basis are 1. New Zealand and 2. Australia
and and and in NZ the useless police/judiciary/jury system this year freed David Bain, who killed five family members, and is now overseas somewhere serving as an embarrassing cultural export
Slim934
Excellent points!
Yea, this guy was the commencement speaker at my graduation (Ohio U, June ’08). His biggest encouragement was for us to go out and vote in order for us to “make a difference”. Sigh…
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