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Posted on 08/17/2004 11:04:55 AM PDT by neverdem
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Copyright © 2004 ChronWatch. All rights reserved.
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This is its URL:
http://michnews.com/artman/publish/article_4734.shtml
It was very slow to link, linking once after multiples left clicks. For some reason, I can't copy and paste with the updated version. Does anyone understand why?
I put it to soccer moms like this: "If it is okay for bank guards to carry guns to protect someone's money, why is it wrong for me to carry a gun to protect my children's lives?"
I own guns. It's for the children.
Why do liberals like Boxer want to talk about protecting children when gun control is the topic, but not when it's abortion?
Yes boxer breath, We need to teach the Children- proper firearm safety, use and that gun control means hitting the proper target with the first shot to avoid ammo waste.
...issue files.
Excellent point!
Interesting ping.
He has one of those javascript no-right-click scripts on the page. That's why you couldn't right-click and copy it. What you can do is Edit, Select All, then Edit, Copy, then paste it into Notepad and copy the applicable text, like this:
Gun Control For the Children?
By Howard Nemerov
Aug 16, 2004
I am constantly amazed at the emotional highjacking and moral posturing of gun controllers. Gun controllers are lying when they say they have children’s interests at heart; they are merely using children to promote their goal of civilian disarmament.
As I live in California, we will examine the behavior of Senator Barbara Boxer, though you may find similar examples in your state as well. Senator Boxer sent me an email entitled “Protecting Our Children.” I have included the text, one paragraph at a time, to better understand the insanity and bigotry of a gun controller’s mind.
“An estimated 3.3 million children in the United States live in houses with guns. In most cases, those guns have so little trigger resistance they could be fired by a 3-year-old. The potential for tragedy is overwhelming, and we need to act to diminish this threat to children. Child safety locks are an easy and inexpensive way to make our children safer. I recently introduced the “Child Safety Device Act of 2004” to make these locks mandatory on manufacturer and dealer sales of handguns.”
Notice the fear-mongering, followed by the standard rant of “we need to act.” Let’s not take time to think, let’s just do something to make us feel better about ourselves as caring individuals.
“Potential for tragedy” means that there has not yet been tragedy. Should we get rid of cars because they have a potential to mow down 50 farmers market customers at a time? (1) Should we illegalize bath tubs and buckets because they kill more children each year than guns? (2)
Over 70 million additional civilian firearms have been sold since 1990 (3), yet the firearm death rate for children under 15 has dropped 60%. (4) With all those children living in homes containing firearms, if Boxer assumed correctly, the death rate should be much higher for children.
“My legislation would require gun retailers to provide locking devices with any handgun they sell, and direct the Consumer Product Safety Commission to create a consumer product safety standard for the locking devices which ensures they are sufficiently protective and prevent discharge of the handgun unless the device has been removed.”
Barbara, why do you want to make firearms more expensive and less affordable to poorer folks who live in inner cities, where there are generally higher crime rates? How are they to defend their children against violent predators? A gun lock may be “inexpensive” to you, but that is not the case for the little people you profess to care so much for.
Another one of Boxer’s “reasonable gun control” steps towards confiscation, this bill would begin to put gun regulation into the hands of three politically-appointed bureaucrats who could regulate civilian firearms out of existence.(5) Their product safety standards could make it impossible for civilians to own firearms. Ignoring the legal precedent of innocent until proven guilty, Boxer seeks to circumvent due process and legislative representation, and uses children to promote gun confiscation.
“In 2000, more than nine young people aged 19 and under were killed each day in gun homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings in the United States. 1,776 children and teenagers were murdered with guns, 1,007 committed suicide with guns, and 193 died in unintentional shootings. A recent Johns Hopkins study found that 44 percent of deaths could have been prevented with the use of safety devices.”
Let’s take square aim at the crown jewel of gun control. You will often hear the mantra “nine (up to 13) kids a day” as if it is sacred truth. It creates a vision of plaid-shirted goon squads mowing school children down like some sort of absurd horror story come to life.
Notice how she fudges and uses the phrase “children and teenagers.” Guy Smith does an excellent job debunking this myth about children and guns in his research paper entitled Gun Facts. (6) When you subtract adults, criminals, and suicides, you end up with less than one child per day dying from guns. Contrast this with 13 children a day dying in cars, or four from parental abuse and neglect. These are all horrible tragedies, but Barbara, if you truly cared about children’s lives more than your own chances for reelection, wouldn’t your energies be better spent banning cars and parents?
The vast majority of these “young people” are criminals shot while engaged in illegal activity. They illegally own guns, and any new regulation would not impact this fact, while law-abiding citizens would own fewer for personal protection. This will drive up crime, as we won’t be able to defend ourselves from predators like the ones Boxer weeps over.
Unlike Boxer’s contrived concern aimed at pandering to her anti-gun constituency, armed citizens show incredible self-discipline when attacked by teenage predators. The vast majority of armed confrontations during commission of a crime result in the armed citizen holding criminals until the police arrive. (7)
This gets to another part of the equation ignored by gun controllers: the cost of not owning a gun for self-defense. Citizens who avoid becoming crime victims often save not only their lives, but their businesses which represent significant contribution to our economy. By virtue of their age and “occupation,” teenage criminals have contributed nothing. Armed citizens have saved our country billions of dollars in health care, insurance claims, and business infrastructure. (8)
While gun ownership has risen, the suicide rate for children has dropped. (9) It is fascinating to note that the child suicide rate was lowest prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, which banned children from purchasing guns.
“As a U.S. Senator, I have worked hard to keep guns out of the hands of our children, out of our schools, and off the streets. This legislation ensures that guns that are purchased in the future can be safely secured.”
Meaning, taken away from you, thereby giving the government absolute power over your sorry lives. You are incompetent and stupid, and I don’t trust you. “Safely secured” means owned exclusively by the government.
Let us contrast this with another, extremely successful example of gun control. Between 1.2 and 1.5 million children died during the Holocaust, most of them Jews. (10,11) In 1938, Hitler, one of the world’s foremost experts on gun control, enacted gun laws that forbade Jews from owning firearms. (12) When the Nazis came to round them up, parents had no way to protect their children.
It took Hitler about six years to murder an average of 550 kids per day. (We haven’t even included all the children murdered by other world-famous gun control experts like Stalin and Mao.) Compare this with less than one per day in our free society, or even Boxer’s 9 per day, as if gang-bangers won’t kill each other without guns. At today’s death rates for the entire country, it would take over 60 years equal what Hitler did to only one segment of society, according to Boxer’s estimate. If compared to the accidental death rate for children, it would take over 1,000 years. This does not factor in the nearly tripled world population since 1940, so it may be closer to 3,000 years.
Barbara, how can you possibly consider doing again to your people what history has shown to be the road to Hitler’s Final Solution?
Footnotes
(1) Infant Dies After Santa Monica Farmers’ Market Crash. NBC4 TV News, July 17, 2003. http://www.nbc4.tv/news/2337407/detail.html
(2) Gun Facts, Version 3.3. Guy Smith, 2003, page 188. Go to http://www.gunfacts.info/ and select the format you prefer. Quoted here: statistics from CDC, 1999.
(3) Firearms Commerce in the United States 2001/2002. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
http://www.atf.gov/pub/fire-explo_pub/
firearmscommerce/firearmscommerce.pdf
(4) Table 47 (page 1 of 3). Death rates for firearm-related injuries, according to sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age: United States, selected years 1970–2001. Centers for Disease Control, 2003.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2003/03hus047.pdf
(5) Consumer Product Safety Commission settlement against Daisy Manufacturing.
http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PREREL/
prhtml04/04033stratton.pdf. This paper shows the chilling potential if Boxer’s dream comes true.
(6) Gun Facts, Version 3.3, page 14, Guy Smith, 2003. Go to http://www.gunfacts.info/ and select the format you prefer.
(7) NRA Armed Citizen Archives
http://www.nraila.org/ArmedCitizen/Default.aspx
Stories of armed citizens who halted or prevented crime.
(8) Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look, Miller, Cohen, Wiersema. National Institute of Justice Research Report, US Department of Justice, January, 1996. http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/victcost.pdf
(9) Death rates for suicide, according to sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age: United States, selected years 1950–2001. Centers for Disease Control, 2003.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2003/03hus046.pdf
(10) Butterflies a memorial to children who died in Holocaust. Tim Bullard, The New Catholic Miscellany, Copyright 1997-98.
http://www.catholic-doc.org/miscellany/1998/0498-hol.html
(11) Reunion of the One Thousand Children. Veronica Gonzalez, Chicago Tribune, Copyright 2002.
http://www.onethousandchildren.org/pages/629543/index.htm
(12) Regulations Against Jews Possession of Weapons
http://www.jpfo.org/NaziLawEnglish.htm
------
Former gun control proponent Howard Nemerov does his own research. He is now an ardent Second Amendment supporter, who wonders why gun control groups consistently lie in order to advance their agenda. He appears regularly on ChronWatch and is a frequent contributor to NRA News.
Especially in .22 cal.
Something else is going on, as we well know.
The real issue is the proliferation of the sorts of people who will use guns to commit crimes. IOW, it is a cultural issue, not a legal one. We have a culture that celebrates bad manners and provides excuses for bad, even criminal, behavior. In many ways our culture actually feeds the production of gun criminals.
We cannot win a legalistic debate with the gun grabbers until we shift the focus to the people who commit crimes. Not only will it bring sanity to the issue of guns, but it will carry over into the broader political/cultural debate as well.
Then why aren't THOUSANDS dying everyday?
You have greater worries with the family car. Why not ban everything that might hurt someone/something SOME DAY?
This scare tactic brought to you by the same people who won't let Eddie Eagle gun safety in our schools. So, tell me....what are these banners REALLY concerned with?
Since when was anyone ever injured by a bb gun that did not shoot?
Talk about a "nuisance suit"!
A gun lock can easily be the most expensive purchase in anyone's life. All you need is a home invader, like Richard Speck going after the nurses, and a gun lock that can't be removed in time to use the gun. My guns are either loaded and readily available or locked in a gun safe.
Thanks a lot as I never could figure out what was happening when those "notepads" appeared. Bookmarked. Thanks again!
I guess that's why gun control is a major part of the "culture war".
I think that Boxer lost a decimal point somewhere. Given the lack of regard that the anti-gunners have for actual facts, this is not surprising.
Let's take a closer look: If 70 million guns were sold - just since 1990, mind you - and if only every third person that bought guns had kids in the house, then they would each had to have purchased about 7.1 guns per kid if only 3.3 million kids lived in homes with guns. I have a bunch of guns, and I'm even a bit of a collector, but I still don't have 7 guns per kid (though, thinking about it, that's a worthy goal to shoot for - pun intended).
Nope, I think that we're talking about 33 million kids, minimum. Remember that there weren't 0 guns in existence before 1990 (I know this for certain, as I had 2 before then, and I know a bunch of people who had a bunch more than I did at the time), so there are considerably more than 70 million guns out there. Actually, the better figure to use is the number of gun owners, which is now probably at least 80 million, and perhaps as much as 90 million. If only 1 in 3 of them had children in the home (i.e. those between 0 and 18 years of age), then there would be 30 million households with guns. Since people tend to have an average of 2.1 kids each (or something of that magnitude), then somewhere north of 60 million kids live in homes with guns...which makes the very small numbers of deaths among children a far more remarkable fact (though, to be sure, no less of a tragedy for each family involved).
Of course, it wouldn't be convenient for Babbling Barbara to stick to the facts, because the facts show that American gun owners are quite safe and quite non-violent on average, a fact which flies in the face of the stereotype that the anti-gun scumbags like to spread around.
I'll say it YET again: Eff them, eff them all!
It is for them, but the sad truth is that it's really not a part of the battle for us. We're still focused on keeping guns for ourselves (not a bad thing, of course).
The problem is, we leave ourselves with no good way to address the occasional mass shooting, because our focus on "having guns" plays right into their claims that "not having guns" will prevent such crimes. (Yeah, we know it's a bogus claim, but it resonates with a lot of folks.)
We're not addressing the fact that there are a lot of bad guys out there who shouldn't have guns. If we don't want gun control, then we've got to focus on bad guy control. We need to shift the grounds of the debate to the bad guys vs. "law abiding citizens." Once you've done that, chunks of machined metal are a far less viable target for them.
I go along with keeping guns off the street, I wouldn't want any of mine bouncing off of asphalt or concrete.
I love it when they include suicide firearm deaths, like a sick teen couldn't find some other way to kill himself like a toaster oven hot tub, etc. In Japan teen suicide rates are higher with no access to guns.
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