Read this as know the enemy. Useful idiot and stupid people will treat this as gospel (aka journalists and reporters)
They throw in all manner of red herrings to create a big lie news story. This article is damage control to convince NYC and DC mental midgets they are right to ridicule fly over country.
Evan DeFilippis writes on public health and gun violence at the Atlantic, Huffington Post, Boston Review, and ArmedWithReason. He manages the evaluation of poverty-reduction projects in Nairobi, Kenya.
I don't know about anyone else, but I just love reading stories like this in Slate. Gun control is one of the few areas where Conservatives are not only winning, but routing Liberals. So we see stories like this where some Lib Slate reporter weeps and wails about the tragedy of Americans believing that guns keep us safe. The writing careens from mocking disdain to weepy depression. The message is simply that Libs are losing and have no idea how to change that dynamic.
From another thread, this is an excellent rebuttal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pELwCqz2JfE
BS. Been to UK lately?
Only if you assert a criminal has more right to stay alive than an innocent has to use deadly force in defense of their life.
There is no middle ground.
It’s no myth. Right now I am a good guy with a gun. Keep pushing though, keep pushing.
The problem is that they didn't consider the overall effects of gun ownership in their assessment of "unequivocal", including crime, and I'm not sure I believe their statistics on gun-related deaths (i.e., were they selective in their use of the stats?).
And, they didn't consider the fact that gun ownership is a Constitutional right.
The author is conciously lying and manipulating data to support his preconceived world view.
BIG GOVERNMENT IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH
Because they have no respect for individual freedom or responsibility, they have no way of looking at a question except through statistics which cover a large group. They must always think of people as a collection, because they believe in the collective.
My gun makes me safer. I don't do stupid things with it. I don't leave it lying around loaded. I don't put it in my mouth and pull the trigger. I don't forget that it is loaded, because I always treat it like it is loaded. I follow the Four Rules.
This means the danger to me from my gun is much less than the national average, so all of these statistics are meaningless to my individual case.
As the Progs and Statists lose more and more battles, mark this: they will become increasingly hostile to the idea that ANYONE except the enforcers of the federal government should own arms. They will openly advocate for the disarmament of local police, and even of state police forces.
At the end, they they will use what power they retain to attempt to consummate their position, and therefore start a hot civil war, or they will fade into the twilight, mad as rabid dogs and twice as mean. Only time will tell which.
This author is apparently unfamiliar with the research of John Lott, and reality. Any moron knows that a personal firearm makes you safer from criminals. The 40% who don’t believe it have been brainwashed by propaganda like this story.
If you’re enough of a wacko to kill someone (i.e. spouse, ex-spouse, employer, etc.) then it stands to reason that you’ll use the most effect tool possible. What this article can’t say is that many, if not all, of those killed by guns would be killed by some other means.
The gun control think tanks are working hard to figure out ways to reduce that huge number of firearms. UN treaties, requiring all firearm to have biometric smart triggers (the old ones that would be destroyed by the conversion, well destroy them for the public safety), making certain features illegal and subject to confiscation (too large a magazine or capable of being fitted with a large magazine), etc. Making people fear firearms and give them up or confiscating and destroying firearms for people deemed a threat to themselves (when it is legal to do medically assisted suicide in some states) is all part of the plan.
One huge flaw in this analysis is that they are comparing stats for law abiding gun owners and law abiding non-gun owners, while completely ignoring those who don’t obey the law.
Most of us know that the good guy with a gun does not necessarily equate to the nice guy with a gun.
If guns don’t make you safer, let’s do cops a favor and disarm them.
Can’t have people protecting themselves from the “private” wing of the “progressive” movement.
That's just a bald faced lie.
“Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.” -Cesare Beccaria
Gun control is an idea that falls squarely against logic. As Beccaria notes in in the latter part of this passage, not having a weapon is worse than having one. .00001 chance of defending yourself is still better than .000000... The fact is that the arguments for gun control largely rest on fabrications and the motive of those who advocate for it is nothing less than treason, regardless of the lies they spew to cover that up.
Used to be I’d actually try and reason with people like this. Then I realized facts were the last thing they were interested in.
So now I simply say, “If you think I shouldn’t have guns, feel free to put your life where your mouth is at anytime.”