Posted on 12/17/2012 11:28:55 AM PST by jazusamo
Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?
The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.
Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.
When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.
But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries— and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
How do you feel about gun control? That's the key question.
Also, since you can't actually stop people from doing something as terrible as shooting up the Newtown school, you need to control guns so you can feel like you're doing something to help. Just telling yourself that evil happens isn't good enough.
And don't start with your suggestions about arming school staff. We all know where that would lead, don't we.
Anyways... BTTT!!!
Same here. I have the greated respect and admiration for Professors Sowell & Williams.
I love the pic someone posted the other day of Israeli school children with their female teacher and she had a rifle slung on her back.
Amen to that.
One of the better, and more logical arguments I have read about gun control.
Thanks for the ping, jaz
More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John Lott that says violent crime rates go down when states pass “shall issue” concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 11 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies.[1] Lott also examines the effects of gun control laws, including the Brady Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime
Anyone know which study Sowell references, conducted by a university professor who was subsequenly discredited?
Have you noticed that whenever anyone calls for “reasonable” or “common sense” gun control, they never actually define “reasonable” or “common sense”.
What constitutes a “reasonable” meal to me, is probably quite different from what a vegan or a cannibal would consider “reasonable”.
If you want to discuss reasonable, common sense gun control with me, begin by defining the terms reasonable and common sense.
I have a brain freeze right now and can’t remember the prof’s name but there was one at Emory University who published a scientific study based on gun ownership back in the 1700’s or maybe it was 1800’s.
He was caught simply making up facts and had to recant his remarks and I think may have even lost his job.
Actually, for Gun Grabbers is all about the Power. They NEED to strip the public of its last resort against tyranny.
*
Thanks, Jaz! Dr. Sowell’s articles are always a welcome dose of sanity amidst all the madness and tyranny that is inundating us...
The book was “Arming America.” The author was Michael A. Bellesiles. His Bancroft Prize was rescinded and “resigned” his professorship at Emory.
From wikipedia (yeah, I know):
In two scholarly articles,[15][16] law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had
purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire;
reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible;
misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis;
miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth, MA.
Critics also identified problems with Bellesiles’s methods of citation. Cramer noted that Bellesiles had misrepresented a passage by George Washington about the quality of three poorly prepared militia units as if his criticism applied to the militia in general. (Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.)[17] Cramer wrote, “It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiles’s citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications.”[4]
“Michael A. Bellesiles teaches history at Central Connecticut State University. The author of numerous books, including 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, he lives in Connecticut.”
I’m not positive but after some looking it could be Dr. Arthur Kellerman refered to in this article, I didn’t read it all , just glanced.
http://www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=717
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