Some time ago, a simply horrid movie entitled 'The Last Temptation of Jesus Christ' was released. So bad was this thing that your humble author, a veteran of schlock cinema, having witnessed several entire Troma films, could not suffer through the entire thing. Nevermind the lack of redeeming quality, it has become sort of a must-see film simply because there are so many people against the thing.
They protested it. People went to see it to find out why. In the Arab world, they recently started protesting some unknown Youtube video. Prior to that, the only people who had really seen the thing were the ones protesting it; after, nearly everyone saw it to find out whyfor the ruckus.
Now, liberals, including the chief liberal, are rattling their sabers against private ownership of guns. It's getting to where I can no longer watch the Daily Show. Stewart, normally a fairly well-informed and intelligent man, made a statement, "surely there's no use for hollowpoint and armor piercing ammunition outside of the military."
Of course, us gun nuts would love to point out a standard fact that the definition of 'armor piercing' very much depends on what kind of armor, as piercing the armor of a main battle tank takes a multi-stage warhead complete with high temperature gas burn prior to main payload ignition. Piercing most body armor is accomplished with literally any rifle you have. Basically, any caliber can be armor-piercing if the armor is weak enough.
However, it is the other bit that really pissed me off. John Stewart, of all people, should be well enough informed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the military is forbidden from using hollowpoint ammunition of any form by the Geneva Convention. Of course, the reason for this is that a wounded man is more of a bother for the enemy than a dead man and most militaries use sufficient armor to defeat most hollowpoints anyway, although the non-hollowpoint versions of the common rounds will defeat most common body armor employed by the military. So, which do you want to be rid of, hollowpoints or armor-piercing rounds?
Also, consider that, once fired, a hollowpoint has a far lower chance of dangerous ricochet, tending to fragment on a hard surface, and also has a much lower penetration against a soft target, meaning lower chance of killing the guy behind the guy you shot. In other words, while substantially more effective against the intended target, hollowpoints are generally safer to everyone else. As important or more important, hollowpoint rounds cause the attacker to stop attacking faster, reducing the risk to everyone of further violence as well as, quixotically, increasing the attacker's survival rate, as he will generally suffer fewer rounds due to having gone down more quickly. I'll save you the grisly science of wound channels and just state that, for defensive purposes, anyone not using a hollowpoint is a bloody idiot.
Anyway, my intent wasn't really to refute silly misconceptions by silly liberals; my intent was to point out that, thanks to Obama, the gun culture is far stronger than ever in my entire life. I've been a gun nut since '94, when I turned 21 and could go buy my first pistol, a quaint little piece of junk called a Jennings J-22. My current arm, an EAA Witness 10MM, is a far cry from that modest pistol, and is one of the evil guns that our dearly beloved liberals would do away with to protect us from, well, us. In those early days, I did not know much about guns and gun violence; I just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted a gun, and would do anything, including moving my corpus to a more gun-friendly clime, to get one. This is an attitude shared by many of the analysts here (and, yes, there are more than one).
See, these idiots, as there is no kinder word, and most of the unkinder words are unprintable, have decided to go after not only guns, but gun owners and the 'gun culture'. When they did that, people who used to be considered basically normal, reasonable people, people who have never owned a gun before, are now buying them. While it is in a way glorious that I no longer get treated as a sort of pervert outcast for owning, well, a few guns, it is also very, very annoying.
Why is it annoying? It has made it nearly impossible to buy worthwhile guns and ammunition. For instance, I sold my Sig Pro because it really didn't fit my hand, and wanted to buy a Glock 20. I was unable to find one. Seriously. So, I went with the other gun I have long wanted, the EAA Witness 10MM, but only because I could find a used one. I also paid way too much for it.
Why do I need ammunition? To practice, of course. No self-respecting gun owner would consider using a gun in self defense until he had spent quite a bit of time with it. Hitting someone three feet away is easy and within the realm of nearly any gun. Hitting a man at ten feet starts to be more difficult, and often impossible to people just starting out with a pistol. At 35 yards, the last distance I practiced with, with my new (to me) 10MM, I put in about a six inch group, which I'm not that happy with, although, by the end of the day, it was down to a more respectable two inches or so. Before I got old and my hands started to shake, I could hit a one inch target at 100 yards with a decent revolver, but I boast, er, digress. Let's just say that you need to know what you can accomplish with your gun, which means range time to find out, you need to develop muscle memory so that the gun and you become fused, as it were, and that requires ammunition down range.
How much? at least 200 rounds to get started, then shooting every six months as a minimum to keep it up. I prefer every other week, but I like to shoot and hold myself to a much higher standard with a pistol than most do. Why do I? Were some nut shooting my children 35 yards away, I have to hit him on the absolute first shot and put him down hard as fast as possible. I'd do it for your children as well. Can I live with myself if I end up in such a situation and fail? Could you? So, I practice partly because, well, it's fun, and I justify the expense because it is absolutely necessary.
So, back to the purpose of this post: idiot lefties decided to go after guns. Nothing really appreciable can come out of it because everything they're trying to do falls into one of three categories: a) unconstitutional as per decisions so recent the ink isn't dry, b) impractical in real life and c) not never gonna no way pass the House of Representatives. In other words, the political reality is that none of the gun control efforts so far put forward have any chance of actually becoming law.
The first class of proposals include most of Feinsteins astonishing miscategorization of guns, as the Feinstein taxonomy defines as 'assault weapon' any weapon that can rapidly fire more than ten rounds at a time. As per Heller and McDonald, two recent US Supreme Court decisions, the right to self defense has been incorporated, and the contributory right to the means of self defense is therefore protected, and the decisions do specifically mention handguns of high effectiveness, including high capacity magazines, as well as carbines (the true term for what everyone thinks is an assault rifle), which, of course, are protected by the far more plain reading of the second amendment, them being military purpose rifles, which are exactly what the second amendment was set to protect.
The second class of proposals, the attempt to outlaw the private sale of firearms, which may also fall in the first class, is pretty much going to be impossible to enforce. Are we going to create an Orwellian network of snitches? Seriously? It is pretty much impossible to prove that I sold a gun to someone else, nevermind when, where or for how much...
The third class includes pretty much everything except a redefinition of what a firearms dealer is and therefore who must engage in background checks, as that is pretty much the only thing the Republican controlled House is willing to do. Everything else proposed won't even pass a Dixiecrat smell test, let alone a Republican smell test, when his entire district is buying every single arm they can find. It is simply impossible to do.
Also, none of the proposals put forward so far would have had any impact on any of the recent shootings. There are acres of prose on this particular subject, so I won't dwell on it, but these lefties are trying to take away my freedom and happiness to enact laws that have no real effect other than to take away my freedom and happiness.
And, so, in the end, the final calculus, the day of reckoning, when we all have to answer for the stupid stuff we've done, where will these lefties be? They will be stuck explaining how their utter failure to in any way affect the gun laws in this country led to the single largest increase in gun ownership, as far as I know, in the history of this country. Seriously, both as a percentage and in numbers, known as 'gun penetration' and 'gun stock', this country has seen a massive, sustained increase since Obama took office, and an acceleration in the last three months or so. The number of guns owned in this country is nearing one per person, well over 300 million and counting. Gallup reports gun ownership at 47%, with a huge gain in gun ownership by women. In other words, it has backfired, outside of traditional Democratic strongholds, causing exactly the opposite reaction they wished to engender.
Also, please remember that Obama and his toady, er, vice president, promised no action on gun control prior to being elected. This change, while not unexpected, is just another example of the mendacity of politicians, which leads most of us to not really care what they say, them having been caught lying so often. Also, it plays directly into the hands of the far right, with their repeated predictions that Obama would do exactly this when elected to a 'lame duck' session, thus lending credence to the rest of what they have to say. Think about that for a bit. Not only has Obama managed to increase the size and strength of the 'gun culture' he hates, he has also managed to strengthen the nuttiest of the far right. Good job, number one president, have a cookie and please take your nap before you ruin something else.
PS: Mendacity, thy name is gun control may become a common theme on this here collection of electrons. Please do not merely accept statistics from gun-control groups, as they are either out of date, misrepresented or merely wrong. Were these people at all rational, they could look at the numbers and come to some sort of conclusion, but they have already made up their minds so the numbers must be bent to say what they want. Nevermind that real scholars such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have done manful work on the question of the effect of guns on society, the arguments from the left persist. As an example, see here:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/12/guns-in-america-statistics/60071/
The first link has Gallup's numbers on gun ownership. The second link quotes those numbers, stopping at 2010. This, of course, is on purpose, despite the article having been published in 2012, as if they kept the graph up, they would see an uptick in ownership. The graph they have shows a huge upswing in pistol ownership, a trend that has continued.
Also, consider Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
The argument is that a ban on 'assault weapons', which is defined as whatever Senator Dianne Feinstein does not like, pretty much, as the term of art 'assault weapon' commonly refers to a select-fire machine carbine, and not, as in her bill, to a raft of guns including shotguns and pistols. She is rebranding them so people won't notice that perfectly serviceable defensive weapons are being banned as well.
Anyway, the article tries to point out that most of the people who engaged in mass killings and spree killings used 'assault weapons', when, in fact, they mostly used pistols. Further, it implies with its graph that reducing magazine capacity would reduce the number of killings, which is pretty much rot. Many of the shooters, according to their own data, did just fine with 10 round clips. There is no evidence to support the idea that fewer rounds in a clip will result in fewer killings, as the worst killing spree in England that I know of was accomplished with a .22 rifle and a side-by-side shotgun.
Anyhoo, the last magazine limitation law that was passed did have an effect, although it was probably not the intended effect. Prior to that law being passed, the 9MM was gaining ground as the gun of choice, both among criminals and among law-abiding citizens. After the ban, the .40 S&W pretty much took over because 10 rounds of .40 is lots more effective than 10 rounds of 9MM. In other words, the number of bullets were reduced, but the individual effectiveness was increased. Also, we tended to see an increase in the use of the shotgun because 8 rounds of 12 ga is roughly equivalent to 72 rounds of 9MM.
It is a quaint fallacy, depended on by the Mother Jones article, that making a thing illegal will stop it from happening. All over, we have evidence to the contrary. People speed on the highways, use illicit drugs, connect cable illegally, download stuff they know they shouldn't and so on. Guns flow into this country as easily as drugs, and, just like drugs, getting a gun from a criminal simply is not that hard. If you don't believe me, consider England, a nation entirely surrounded by salt water:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-25671/Violent-crime-worse-Britain-US.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html
Both are English media articles detailing the violent crime situation in England. Interestingly enough, while violent crime has soared since guns have been outlawed (pretty much as Lott predicts in his book, 'More Guns, Less Crime', based on statistics on concealed carry laws in the US), the murder rate has been going down. The interesting bit to notice, of course, is that guns are, apparently, readily available despite there being no nearby country that has lax gun laws and there being, well, water everywhere, meaning that the guns have to come in by port or smuggler boat. In other words, were it possible to stop the influx of illicit guns, it certainly could be done in England, and it has not been done there despite both massive public will to accomplish it and some of the strictest laws about it anywhere.
The murder rate, of course, is the only statistic the lefties want us to look at when discussing England, but, remember, the murder rate has always been lower in England, and, believe it or not, the vast majority of murders in England now are not committed by gun:
http://fleshisgrass.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/us-and-uk-murder-rate-and-weapon-updated/
And England is at a 30 year low, meaning that, prior to the recent gun ban, the murder rate had been the same or lower (the tightest gun bans in England were all in the 80s and 90s, iirc):
http://glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1457228
And, besides, as per above, despite the massive recent increase in gun ownership, the US is, apparently, at a 55 year low, meaning the crime situation has improved substantially since the early 90s (the high water mark) when all those concealed carry laws started being passed. No blood in the streets as the liberals wailed, but much lower in nearly every category of crime. Yes, slight increase in petty theft, and slight increase in aggravated assault, but much, much lower murder numbers, and lower everything else.
Oh, and the mass killings? Do you really want to exchange all the rapes, murders, robberies, burglaries and general criminal activity deterred by the private ownership of guns, something like 2.5 million occurrences annually? How much misery are you willing to trade to save the lives of 20 children? This is the actual decision we must make, not the heated discussion of the moment, but the sober facing of the truth that untold human misery is prevented by the presence of a gun, specifically a pistol.
See, a 120 pound girl cannot stop a rape committed by a 250 pound fit male by herself. With a tiny little .25 auto, she may prevent it from ever happening by simply brandishing the gun, and, were it to come to it, do the entire world a service by at the very least aiding in the capture of a predator, and, ideally, saving the effort and paperwork of prosecuting him by summarily ending his life.
This is why the pistol has sometimes been called the great equalizer; it makes us all on the same level. I, at a stropping 270, am at the same level as my wife, at her (redacted) weight. She has a .40 S&W Baby Eagle, otherwise known as a Jericho. She is very good with it.
And, one thing missed by the anti-gun crowd is that guns, by their mere presence, deter crime. They don't have to be used to effect a reduction in crime. They don't even have to be shown. The criminal merely has to believe there is a gun there along with someone willing to use it, and he will go find an easier target in, say, Maryland, where he knows a law-abiding citizen must retreat in his own house in the face of armed robbery. As an example, Virginia, being a Southern state, has adopted the castle doctrine, which basically states that your house is your castle and you may defend it. Despite soaring gun purchases, Virginia is seeing a constant drop in crime:
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/local/central-virginia/gun-related-violent-crimes-drop-as-sales-soar-in-va/article_54cca13a-35ee-11e2-83f0-0019bb30f31a.html
Maryland, right next door, has strict gun laws and restricts how you can use them to defend yourself. While violence is decreasing in Maryland, it is decreasing at half the rate in Virginia:
http://www.goccp.maryland.gov/msac/crime-statistics.php
None of this, of course, proves that gun ownership lowers crime; that research is very complicated to do when trying to disentangle socio-economic factors and demographics, but it pretty much puts paid to the idea that more guns means more crime...
Anyway, as I said above, shooting guns is a great pleasure to me, so the lefties are messing with more than just my right to self defense; they are messing with my happiness and the happiness of many people in this country, and they are doing it for no good reason.
They protested it. People went to see it to find out why. In the Arab world, they recently started protesting some unknown Youtube video. Prior to that, the only people who had really seen the thing were the ones protesting it; after, nearly everyone saw it to find out whyfor the ruckus.
Now, liberals, including the chief liberal, are rattling their sabers against private ownership of guns. It's getting to where I can no longer watch the Daily Show. Stewart, normally a fairly well-informed and intelligent man, made a statement, "surely there's no use for hollowpoint and armor piercing ammunition outside of the military."
Of course, us gun nuts would love to point out a standard fact that the definition of 'armor piercing' very much depends on what kind of armor, as piercing the armor of a main battle tank takes a multi-stage warhead complete with high temperature gas burn prior to main payload ignition. Piercing most body armor is accomplished with literally any rifle you have. Basically, any caliber can be armor-piercing if the armor is weak enough.
However, it is the other bit that really pissed me off. John Stewart, of all people, should be well enough informed to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the military is forbidden from using hollowpoint ammunition of any form by the Geneva Convention. Of course, the reason for this is that a wounded man is more of a bother for the enemy than a dead man and most militaries use sufficient armor to defeat most hollowpoints anyway, although the non-hollowpoint versions of the common rounds will defeat most common body armor employed by the military. So, which do you want to be rid of, hollowpoints or armor-piercing rounds?
Also, consider that, once fired, a hollowpoint has a far lower chance of dangerous ricochet, tending to fragment on a hard surface, and also has a much lower penetration against a soft target, meaning lower chance of killing the guy behind the guy you shot. In other words, while substantially more effective against the intended target, hollowpoints are generally safer to everyone else. As important or more important, hollowpoint rounds cause the attacker to stop attacking faster, reducing the risk to everyone of further violence as well as, quixotically, increasing the attacker's survival rate, as he will generally suffer fewer rounds due to having gone down more quickly. I'll save you the grisly science of wound channels and just state that, for defensive purposes, anyone not using a hollowpoint is a bloody idiot.
Anyway, my intent wasn't really to refute silly misconceptions by silly liberals; my intent was to point out that, thanks to Obama, the gun culture is far stronger than ever in my entire life. I've been a gun nut since '94, when I turned 21 and could go buy my first pistol, a quaint little piece of junk called a Jennings J-22. My current arm, an EAA Witness 10MM, is a far cry from that modest pistol, and is one of the evil guns that our dearly beloved liberals would do away with to protect us from, well, us. In those early days, I did not know much about guns and gun violence; I just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted a gun, and would do anything, including moving my corpus to a more gun-friendly clime, to get one. This is an attitude shared by many of the analysts here (and, yes, there are more than one).
See, these idiots, as there is no kinder word, and most of the unkinder words are unprintable, have decided to go after not only guns, but gun owners and the 'gun culture'. When they did that, people who used to be considered basically normal, reasonable people, people who have never owned a gun before, are now buying them. While it is in a way glorious that I no longer get treated as a sort of pervert outcast for owning, well, a few guns, it is also very, very annoying.
Why is it annoying? It has made it nearly impossible to buy worthwhile guns and ammunition. For instance, I sold my Sig Pro because it really didn't fit my hand, and wanted to buy a Glock 20. I was unable to find one. Seriously. So, I went with the other gun I have long wanted, the EAA Witness 10MM, but only because I could find a used one. I also paid way too much for it.
Why do I need ammunition? To practice, of course. No self-respecting gun owner would consider using a gun in self defense until he had spent quite a bit of time with it. Hitting someone three feet away is easy and within the realm of nearly any gun. Hitting a man at ten feet starts to be more difficult, and often impossible to people just starting out with a pistol. At 35 yards, the last distance I practiced with, with my new (to me) 10MM, I put in about a six inch group, which I'm not that happy with, although, by the end of the day, it was down to a more respectable two inches or so. Before I got old and my hands started to shake, I could hit a one inch target at 100 yards with a decent revolver, but I boast, er, digress. Let's just say that you need to know what you can accomplish with your gun, which means range time to find out, you need to develop muscle memory so that the gun and you become fused, as it were, and that requires ammunition down range.
How much? at least 200 rounds to get started, then shooting every six months as a minimum to keep it up. I prefer every other week, but I like to shoot and hold myself to a much higher standard with a pistol than most do. Why do I? Were some nut shooting my children 35 yards away, I have to hit him on the absolute first shot and put him down hard as fast as possible. I'd do it for your children as well. Can I live with myself if I end up in such a situation and fail? Could you? So, I practice partly because, well, it's fun, and I justify the expense because it is absolutely necessary.
So, back to the purpose of this post: idiot lefties decided to go after guns. Nothing really appreciable can come out of it because everything they're trying to do falls into one of three categories: a) unconstitutional as per decisions so recent the ink isn't dry, b) impractical in real life and c) not never gonna no way pass the House of Representatives. In other words, the political reality is that none of the gun control efforts so far put forward have any chance of actually becoming law.
The first class of proposals include most of Feinsteins astonishing miscategorization of guns, as the Feinstein taxonomy defines as 'assault weapon' any weapon that can rapidly fire more than ten rounds at a time. As per Heller and McDonald, two recent US Supreme Court decisions, the right to self defense has been incorporated, and the contributory right to the means of self defense is therefore protected, and the decisions do specifically mention handguns of high effectiveness, including high capacity magazines, as well as carbines (the true term for what everyone thinks is an assault rifle), which, of course, are protected by the far more plain reading of the second amendment, them being military purpose rifles, which are exactly what the second amendment was set to protect.
The second class of proposals, the attempt to outlaw the private sale of firearms, which may also fall in the first class, is pretty much going to be impossible to enforce. Are we going to create an Orwellian network of snitches? Seriously? It is pretty much impossible to prove that I sold a gun to someone else, nevermind when, where or for how much...
The third class includes pretty much everything except a redefinition of what a firearms dealer is and therefore who must engage in background checks, as that is pretty much the only thing the Republican controlled House is willing to do. Everything else proposed won't even pass a Dixiecrat smell test, let alone a Republican smell test, when his entire district is buying every single arm they can find. It is simply impossible to do.
Also, none of the proposals put forward so far would have had any impact on any of the recent shootings. There are acres of prose on this particular subject, so I won't dwell on it, but these lefties are trying to take away my freedom and happiness to enact laws that have no real effect other than to take away my freedom and happiness.
And, so, in the end, the final calculus, the day of reckoning, when we all have to answer for the stupid stuff we've done, where will these lefties be? They will be stuck explaining how their utter failure to in any way affect the gun laws in this country led to the single largest increase in gun ownership, as far as I know, in the history of this country. Seriously, both as a percentage and in numbers, known as 'gun penetration' and 'gun stock', this country has seen a massive, sustained increase since Obama took office, and an acceleration in the last three months or so. The number of guns owned in this country is nearing one per person, well over 300 million and counting. Gallup reports gun ownership at 47%, with a huge gain in gun ownership by women. In other words, it has backfired, outside of traditional Democratic strongholds, causing exactly the opposite reaction they wished to engender.
Also, please remember that Obama and his toady, er, vice president, promised no action on gun control prior to being elected. This change, while not unexpected, is just another example of the mendacity of politicians, which leads most of us to not really care what they say, them having been caught lying so often. Also, it plays directly into the hands of the far right, with their repeated predictions that Obama would do exactly this when elected to a 'lame duck' session, thus lending credence to the rest of what they have to say. Think about that for a bit. Not only has Obama managed to increase the size and strength of the 'gun culture' he hates, he has also managed to strengthen the nuttiest of the far right. Good job, number one president, have a cookie and please take your nap before you ruin something else.
PS: Mendacity, thy name is gun control may become a common theme on this here collection of electrons. Please do not merely accept statistics from gun-control groups, as they are either out of date, misrepresented or merely wrong. Were these people at all rational, they could look at the numbers and come to some sort of conclusion, but they have already made up their minds so the numbers must be bent to say what they want. Nevermind that real scholars such as John Lott and Gary Kleck have done manful work on the question of the effect of guns on society, the arguments from the left persist. As an example, see here:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/12/guns-in-america-statistics/60071/
The first link has Gallup's numbers on gun ownership. The second link quotes those numbers, stopping at 2010. This, of course, is on purpose, despite the article having been published in 2012, as if they kept the graph up, they would see an uptick in ownership. The graph they have shows a huge upswing in pistol ownership, a trend that has continued.
Also, consider Mother Jones:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
The argument is that a ban on 'assault weapons', which is defined as whatever Senator Dianne Feinstein does not like, pretty much, as the term of art 'assault weapon' commonly refers to a select-fire machine carbine, and not, as in her bill, to a raft of guns including shotguns and pistols. She is rebranding them so people won't notice that perfectly serviceable defensive weapons are being banned as well.
Anyway, the article tries to point out that most of the people who engaged in mass killings and spree killings used 'assault weapons', when, in fact, they mostly used pistols. Further, it implies with its graph that reducing magazine capacity would reduce the number of killings, which is pretty much rot. Many of the shooters, according to their own data, did just fine with 10 round clips. There is no evidence to support the idea that fewer rounds in a clip will result in fewer killings, as the worst killing spree in England that I know of was accomplished with a .22 rifle and a side-by-side shotgun.
Anyhoo, the last magazine limitation law that was passed did have an effect, although it was probably not the intended effect. Prior to that law being passed, the 9MM was gaining ground as the gun of choice, both among criminals and among law-abiding citizens. After the ban, the .40 S&W pretty much took over because 10 rounds of .40 is lots more effective than 10 rounds of 9MM. In other words, the number of bullets were reduced, but the individual effectiveness was increased. Also, we tended to see an increase in the use of the shotgun because 8 rounds of 12 ga is roughly equivalent to 72 rounds of 9MM.
It is a quaint fallacy, depended on by the Mother Jones article, that making a thing illegal will stop it from happening. All over, we have evidence to the contrary. People speed on the highways, use illicit drugs, connect cable illegally, download stuff they know they shouldn't and so on. Guns flow into this country as easily as drugs, and, just like drugs, getting a gun from a criminal simply is not that hard. If you don't believe me, consider England, a nation entirely surrounded by salt water:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-25671/Violent-crime-worse-Britain-US.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html
Both are English media articles detailing the violent crime situation in England. Interestingly enough, while violent crime has soared since guns have been outlawed (pretty much as Lott predicts in his book, 'More Guns, Less Crime', based on statistics on concealed carry laws in the US), the murder rate has been going down. The interesting bit to notice, of course, is that guns are, apparently, readily available despite there being no nearby country that has lax gun laws and there being, well, water everywhere, meaning that the guns have to come in by port or smuggler boat. In other words, were it possible to stop the influx of illicit guns, it certainly could be done in England, and it has not been done there despite both massive public will to accomplish it and some of the strictest laws about it anywhere.
The murder rate, of course, is the only statistic the lefties want us to look at when discussing England, but, remember, the murder rate has always been lower in England, and, believe it or not, the vast majority of murders in England now are not committed by gun:
http://fleshisgrass.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/us-and-uk-murder-rate-and-weapon-updated/
And England is at a 30 year low, meaning that, prior to the recent gun ban, the murder rate had been the same or lower (the tightest gun bans in England were all in the 80s and 90s, iirc):
http://glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1457228
And, besides, as per above, despite the massive recent increase in gun ownership, the US is, apparently, at a 55 year low, meaning the crime situation has improved substantially since the early 90s (the high water mark) when all those concealed carry laws started being passed. No blood in the streets as the liberals wailed, but much lower in nearly every category of crime. Yes, slight increase in petty theft, and slight increase in aggravated assault, but much, much lower murder numbers, and lower everything else.
Oh, and the mass killings? Do you really want to exchange all the rapes, murders, robberies, burglaries and general criminal activity deterred by the private ownership of guns, something like 2.5 million occurrences annually? How much misery are you willing to trade to save the lives of 20 children? This is the actual decision we must make, not the heated discussion of the moment, but the sober facing of the truth that untold human misery is prevented by the presence of a gun, specifically a pistol.
See, a 120 pound girl cannot stop a rape committed by a 250 pound fit male by herself. With a tiny little .25 auto, she may prevent it from ever happening by simply brandishing the gun, and, were it to come to it, do the entire world a service by at the very least aiding in the capture of a predator, and, ideally, saving the effort and paperwork of prosecuting him by summarily ending his life.
This is why the pistol has sometimes been called the great equalizer; it makes us all on the same level. I, at a stropping 270, am at the same level as my wife, at her (redacted) weight. She has a .40 S&W Baby Eagle, otherwise known as a Jericho. She is very good with it.
And, one thing missed by the anti-gun crowd is that guns, by their mere presence, deter crime. They don't have to be used to effect a reduction in crime. They don't even have to be shown. The criminal merely has to believe there is a gun there along with someone willing to use it, and he will go find an easier target in, say, Maryland, where he knows a law-abiding citizen must retreat in his own house in the face of armed robbery. As an example, Virginia, being a Southern state, has adopted the castle doctrine, which basically states that your house is your castle and you may defend it. Despite soaring gun purchases, Virginia is seeing a constant drop in crime:
http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/local/central-virginia/gun-related-violent-crimes-drop-as-sales-soar-in-va/article_54cca13a-35ee-11e2-83f0-0019bb30f31a.html
Maryland, right next door, has strict gun laws and restricts how you can use them to defend yourself. While violence is decreasing in Maryland, it is decreasing at half the rate in Virginia:
http://www.goccp.maryland.gov/msac/crime-statistics.php
None of this, of course, proves that gun ownership lowers crime; that research is very complicated to do when trying to disentangle socio-economic factors and demographics, but it pretty much puts paid to the idea that more guns means more crime...
Anyway, as I said above, shooting guns is a great pleasure to me, so the lefties are messing with more than just my right to self defense; they are messing with my happiness and the happiness of many people in this country, and they are doing it for no good reason.
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