Posted on 08/30/2015 7:49:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
Bernie Sanders' record skews way to the left on one issue after another: health care, taxes, campaign finance, international trade, abortion and the Iraq war. Gun control? Not so much.
"Bernie Sanders, Gun Nut" was the headline in the liberal online publication Slate. After the Sandy Hook massacre, other progressives called for tough new restrictions on firearms, but Sanders disagreed. "If you passed the strongest gun control legislation tomorrow, I don't think it will have a profound effect on the tragedies we have seen," he said.
The obvious explanation for this anomaly is that he comes from Vermont, a state that is 95 percent white and 61 percent rural, with a lot of hunters. But it could also be because Sanders has actually bothered to learn from his unusual state's unusual experience.
Vermont has some of the loosest gun laws in America. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives it an "F." The state requires no background checks for private gun sales, permits the sale and possession of "assault weapons," and allows concealed guns to be carried in public -- without a license.
After the fatal on-air shooting of a TV reporter and her cameraman in Roanoke, Va., on Wednesday, blame was heaped on America's permissive firearms policy. "There are too many guns, and too little national will to do anything about them," asserted an editorial in The New York Times. Democratic politicians and commentators said the murders proved the need for more restrictions on guns.
But did they? Vermont isn't much different from a lot of states in the regulation of these weapons. But it's very different in the volume of bloodshed. In 2013, it had the third-lowest homicide rate in the country -- less than one-sixth that of Louisiana.
Utah, which also got an "F" on its laws from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, had the fourth-lowest homicide rate. These places refute the belief that loose gun rules and high ownership are bound to produce frenzies of carnage.
It's true that many states have a lot of guns and a lot of killings. But that doesn't mean the former causes the latter. It's just as plausible that high murder rates lead more residents to buy guns, in self-defense. Likewise, maybe some people are violent because they have guns. Or maybe they have guns because they're violent.
More guns equals more murders? That's not quite how it works. A 2004 report by a National Academy of Sciences panel said the evidence does "not credibly demonstrate a causal relationship between the ownership of firearms and the causes or prevention of criminal violence or suicide."
Commentators regularly remind us, of course, that America stands out among advanced nations for its permissive gun laws and its abundant gun violence. But the international data doesn't prove what they think it does.
Britain is often cited for having few guns and -- therefore -- few gun murders. As Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck noted in his 1997 book, "Targeting Guns," Britain also has a lower rate of murders with hands and feet. But "no one is foolish enough to infer from these facts that the lower violence rates were due to the British having fewer hands and feet." Homicide is rare in Israel and Switzerland despite widespread public access to lethal weaponry.
Many of the comparisons with other countries rely on sketchy data about the prevalence of guns. In a forthcoming paper, Kleck and Tomislav Kovandzic of the University of Texas at Dallas looked at 55 countries more rigorously and found that if you account for "other factors that affect homicide, including some cultural differences, there is no significant association between gun levels and homicide rates."
Cultural differences? Turns out they make all the difference. A lot of factors go into how often people attack each other. Where citizens are sober and peaceable, they rarely kill each other -- with guns or anything else.
Where citizens prefer to settle disputes with force, of course, guns are exceptionally effective for killing. In a society with some 300 million of them in private hands, though, getting rid of guns is a fantasy. It makes sense to bar people with criminal records or mental illness from buying firearms legally. But keeping guns away from nonviolent people achieves nothing.
The left-wing magazine Mother Jones has compiled a database of all the shootings that have killed four people or more, going back to 1982. Sanders can probably tell you how many of them occurred in Vermont: zero.
Is the entire state of Vermont a gated community?
—further comment on Chapman’s article from a different source—
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3330594/posts
You got that right
Testimony Senate Bills 347 and 699
A World Magazine article listed the supposed worst mass shootings in the United States since 1999. This article chronicled 25 instances with 220 dead, 242 injured, and 17 predator suicides. The shootings occurred at schools, churches, retail malls, and businesses, and in 19 to 24 cases at locations that would have prohibited firearms. In every case the police arrived for body counts and paperwork. In every case no one except the assailant had a gun.
The most recent citation involved Adam Lanza who stole his mother’s guns (which was against the law), and then killed her with them (which was against the law). Next he transported these loaded guns onto school property and inside the building (which was against the law). He discharged the weapons within the city limits (which was against the law), and murdered 26 people (which was against the law). Finally, Mr. Lanza committed suicide (which was against the law).
Evidently psychopaths follow this pattern of lawlessness and gun control legislation has no effect. The Clinton Administration commissioned a National Science Foundation (NSF) study that could not find a positive correlation between gun control laws and other measures for controlling murders after consulting 400 sources and doing its own research. The only dissent was detailed in Appendix A saying John Lott’s conclusion from his studies that concealed carry laws do drive down murder rates in public places had survived all attempts at reanalysis.
Here the dissenter referred to a twenty-year study by John Lott and William Landes from the University of Chicago Law School. That and subsequent Lott studies the NSF reviewed correlated passage of concealed carry laws with large decreases in multiple victim shootings, and reduced harm from shootings when they did occur.
Yet Senate Bills 347 and 699 can rely upon emotion to preclude consideration of such information. The passionate, contra-factual, asymmetrical marketing of the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy and other events provides the emotional cover necessary for driving these bills forward.
Legislation excluding permitted concealed carry firearms from school campuses and public buildings targets a cohort of people vitally concerned with handgun safety, and the legal restrictions on use of deadly force. They have taken a course to confirm their safe handling of firearms, and received sobering instructions on when it is improper to use a handgun in a violent situation. They have also opened themselves to a continuous scrutiny by law enforcement agencies from which most are exempt. We could expect them to obey the law, because undergoing the permit process demonstrates their serious attitude.
I wonder about the rationality of focusing on this group of law abiding individuals, when the safety of school campuses and public buildings would not be enhanced, but would be degraded? In all the gun control statistics, where is the citation for the overwhelming numbers of psychopaths who routinely cower before administrative rules and laws forbidding the presence of guns? How about the statistics proving concealed carry permit holders promiscuously kill innocent bystanders while defending their own lives? What advantage accrues from touting the protocols of a “gun free zone” for evacuating, witnessing, communicating, containing, coordinating, notifying, and counseling? What is the rationality for criminalizing certified capable people from acting for their own self-protection?
If there is armed security for these various sites, why would these individuals routinely eclipse the five to ten minute police response that time guarantees psychopaths ample time to play out their malevolent fantasies? For them the few moments to relish the screams and explosions from innocent slaughter creates intimate, visual stimuli of human terror, bloody mists, and broken bodies culminating in splendid, convulsive suicides.
Senate Bills 347 and 699 have the effect of not only confiscating an individual’s inherent right of self-defense and creating islands of contentment for lethal predators, but promises felony prosecution to those individuals for actions certified to be responsible by county sheriffs.
Respectfully Submitted,
Nolan Nelson
3497 Westward Ho
Eugene, OR 97401
541-344-7853
Senate Bill 699
http://www.leg.state.or.us/13reg/measpdf/sb0600.dir/sb0699.intro.pdf
Senate Bill 347
http://www.leg.state.or.us/13reg/measpdf/sb0300.dir/sb0347.intro.pdf
A Town Clothed in Misery
http://www.worldmag.com/2012/12/a_town_clothed_in_misery/page3
National Science Foundation: Firearms and Violence, A Critical Review
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309091241
Study by John Lott and William Landes from the University of Chicago Law School
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=272929
Harvard Law School Gun Study
http://illinoiscarry.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6297
Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pd
The problem is the insane aren't insane ALL THE TIME. There are days, even weeks that go by and you'd never know they were nuts. Then the crazy kicks in and look out.
I was hoping I could read the readers replies from the Chicago Tribune, (if there are any) but it wouldn’t let me and I am not interested in subscribing to that rag
Liberals love to try to solve specific problems by taking away everyone's rights.
—the ones I saw were largely on the pro-gun side as usual—same as when the Milwaukee J-S does one of its standard “anti” propaganda pieces-—
If you eliminate murders committed by blacks, the US goes toward the bottom of the list of violent crimes.
The other leading indicator of firearms abuse is leftism, which is directly correlated with mass murders going back to the 1980's and before. Patrick Purdy, the infamous schoolyard killer in California who shot a number of school children on a school playground and in a McDonald's, was a lefty-trendy drifter and bum. Jared Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford was similar stuff.
Note: Wikipedia's article attempts to disguise his liberalism and only tangentially records his fulminations at George W. Bush; the ADL vetted his writings for antisemitism but cleared him of same, noting only a "general" dislike of religious belief (but somehow failing to note what others saw, which was his online postings strongly critical of Christianity -- when was the last time you heard about a conservative who was strongly anti-Christian?).
The latest Virginia gunner would appear to fall into this general critique.
And I don't think we've learned the last few nuggets about South Carolina mass murderer Dylann Roof. </off gratuitous commentary>
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