Conservative Libertarian Outpost

“No amount of statistics or facts will sway either side in the gun control debate, because they are all looking for simple solutions to complex problems. The facts of those complex problems are uncomfortable and nobody really wants to come to grips with them.

“For example, we don’t really have a single America with a moderately high rate of gun deaths. Instead, we have two Americas, one of which has very high rates of gun ownership but very low murder rates, very comparable to the rest of the First World democracies such as those in western & northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, South Korea. The other America has much lower rates of gun ownership but much, much higher murder rates, akin to violent third world countries.

“The tough questions are those like, why do we have these two Americas? But that’s an uncomfortable discussion to have. So instead those on the left favor simple minded restrictions that target first world America, with its high gun ownership but very low murder rate, but don’t address the root causes of third world America’s violence at all. Meanwhile those on the right correctly feel their civil rights are constantly threatened, so they are constantly in a state of “better stock up before they finally ban it” and the guns and ammo fly off the shelves. The left’s constant gun control rhetoric is the greatest thing ever for arms manufacturers.

“Meanwhile, over the past 40 years, while the number of guns in private hands has doubled, the murder rate has dropped by half. The left are constantly prattling about “assault weapons” which are almost never used to commit murders (about 1% of gun murders; all rifles combined are around 3%). More murders are committed with baseball bats than “assault rifles”; the vast majority of gun homicides are committed with handguns, but it’s easier to sell restrictions that target “assault weapons”, even though such restrictions, even if 100% effective, would make no detectable change in the murder rate (especially because of substitution effects). They favor ridiculous measures such as bans on “high capacity magazines”, as if magazines weren’t cheap and easily swapped out in a fraction of a second.

“The uncomfortable fact is that roughly 80% of the US homicide rate is associated with the drug trade, and the drug trade is violent because the drug war reserves it for violent criminals. We have a system in place where the government subsidizes poverty in urban areas, imposes economic blight in those same areas through heavy taxes and regulations, renders the residents permanently unemployable via the “criminal justice” (sic) system, and creates a lucrative black market in drugs by restricting supply (not to mention increasing demand as people are desperate to escape their circumstances by getting high), meaning the only game in town is often entering the drug trade. The drug trade is violent because those in it have no access to courts to settle disputes. Powerful industries lobby to keep the drug war going; the top spenders are law enforcement unions, the prison industry, big alcohol, tobacco, and pharma.

“Guns are not the proximate cause of gun violence in the US. Childlike magical thinking and simple “fixes” to complex problems will not work. But it is comfortable, and self-righteousness feels so good. So I expect it to continue indefinitely.”

SOURCE

Gun Control isn’t, and never has been about anything but people control!

SOURCE and full article

The reaction after every mass shooting follows a predictable script written by progressives to serve their political agenda. No claim about the efficacy of gun control, no matter how many times repudiated by facts, can stop the Dems and their media spaniels from ritually invoking it to demonize conservatives.

Why should we be surprised? By now it should be clear that the “party of science” is interested not in truth and evidence, but in ideology and partisan advantage. Yet those with common sense and an awareness of the facts still have to restate the obvious, even though it will make no difference to partisans either ignorant of or indifferent to any reality that doesn’t serve their interests. For what is at stake is not just one right, but the foundations of our political freedom in self-evident, God-given rights.

We all know the worn-out ideas that the progressives predictably trot out after every massacre. And we know they are fallacious. More guns do not lead to more gun murder. Between 1993 and 2013, private gun ownership increased 56%, and gun homicides declined 49%. No, the point is not that more guns account for the declines, a straw-man correlation the media burns down to discredit this fact. The point is, the left’s call for more gun control after every mass shooting implies that fewer guns or more regulations would decrease murder rates. Not only is that idea false, the opposite is true: higher murder rates invariably follow more gun control.

“Common sense regulations” is another nostrum of the left. We’ve had several laboratories for testing this hypothesis––Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and most blue-state big cities have strict controls on guns, at the same time they have some of the highest rates of gun deaths. That’s because regulations on firearms are effective only for law-abiding citizens who don’t need such restraints. But for criminals they are “parchment barriers” easily ignored. If such government regulations were effective, we wouldn’t still be waging a decades-long war on drugs, which hasn’t stopped any teenager in America from getting any drug he wants. It’s unclear how the most draconian restrictions on gun ownership would be any more effective than the numerous laws that have failed to keep drugs from pouring into our country and being widely distributed.

Most important, the left is indifferent to the fact that the Constitution explicitly states that citizens have the right to “keep and bear arms.” Like all the enumerated rights, this one is not a gift of government, but an “inalienable” right, like the right of self-defense, we possess by virtue of being a human being. The bar for restricting these rights is very high, as it is for the right to free speech.

But the left has always despised the notion of natural rights and consider them a relic of our more ignorant and superstitious past, not to mention a check on their desire to concentrate and expand the government’s power. Contrary to the belief that rights are gifts of “nature and nature’s God,” the progressives argue that a benevolent government should create rights compatible with the its alleged purpose to achieve “equality” and “social justice.” Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s “new bill of rights,” which was promulgated in his 1944 State of the Union address, and included a “useful and remunerative job” and “adequate medical care”––good things to have, but not rights properly understood. But if government can invent such “rights,” the government can also modify or eliminate those it now deems have become dangerous anachronisms or impediments to social improvement.

After the Las Vegas massacre, the Daily Kos gave a typical example of this sentiment:

America needs to declare total war on guns, and that means reinterpreting or repealing the Second Amendment. The latter would be best. There is no sane reason why you or I should be granted the sacred and inviolable right to bear pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, anti-tank guns, and other “hunting and self-defense tools.”