Posted on 12/28/2005 12:06:11 PM PST by Final Authority
Five years ago an elderly Los Angeles woman who had agreed to move out of her daughter's apartment bought a handgun.
She cleared the background check, passed the safety test and practiced on targets at the local shooting range. Then she shot and killed her daughter and her daughter's fiance - my brother David.
As someone who has lost a member of my family to gun violence, I see the new federal legislation to limit gun manufacturers' liability as unconscionable beyond my ken. But what troubles me most is that the gun control lobby is pouring its resources into battles that probably won't save many lives - and we're losing even those.
In the past decade, states have passed law after law to require safety locks, force gun-purchase waiting periods, trace bullets back to their sources and allow victims to sue manufacturers for negligence. That such measures have produced at best slight decreases in the rate of gun deaths is hardly surprising, because only 3 percent of gun deaths are accidents, and most murderers own their handguns legally and know how to use them safely.
California has passed a raft of such laws in the past five years and is widely praised as one of the most progressive states on gun control. In that same period, the number of handgun-related homicides has fallen and then risen again, with no correlation whatever.
The real problem is not that handguns aren't safe or well-regulated enough, or that you can't sue and try to bankrupt a corrupt manufacturer after someone you love has been killed.
The problem is that 60 million people in the United States own handguns. The gun used to kill my brother was a Glock 19, a light and portable semiautomatic.
These guns are designed to kill people: That's their sole purpose. Nearly 12,000 Americans annually use guns to do just that, and the majority use handguns.
Twelve thousand: that's comparable to the number of AIDS deaths each year in the United States. (Great Britain has about 100 gun deaths each year.) And if the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which leads the gun control crusade, continues to assure us that it won't try to outlaw handguns.
Then new laws to restrict who can buy guns and where they can carry them might reduce the annual toll to 10,000. But that's optimistic. Wouldn't it make more sense to define the ultimate battle as one for a national ban on handguns - the sole gun-control measure that promises to save tens of thousands of lives' With an endgame that can actually achieve the ultimate goal, perhaps we'd acquire the logical and moral authority to win more of the smaller battles.
I can hear the gun lobby scoffing, "Guns don't kill people. People do." This ditty is familiar to all of us. Yes, and bombs and chemical weapons don't kill people either, but they're not sold over the counter to just about anyone without a criminal record who can prove that he or she can use them safely.
Of the 12,000 guns used to kill people every year, 160 are used in legitimate self-defense. Guns in the home are used seven times more often for murder than for self-defense.
I cannot say whether the woman who shot my brother was vicious or insane: I myself no longer understand the exact difference. But we all know that rage, vengefulness and deep alienation are hardly unusual in our society, and a handgun makes it horrifyingly easy for people to express them, on purpose or on impulse, by killing people.
If the National Rifle Association wants to pour its own considerable resources into creating a society ruled by absolute peace and brotherhood, I'm all for it.
But let's stop arming the populace in the meantime, which pro- and anti-gun advocates alike know for certain will create a mountainous death toll. Jenny Price is a writer in Los Angeles.
Being a liberal allows them to live a life of idle privilege while continuing to feel good about themselves. Doing anything substantive to fix things would require repudiating Utopianism and acknowledging the disastrous results of everything the left has done since FDR.
Its so much easier to just blame everything on guns. Sitting in a cottage in the Hamptons or a tony San Francisco loft they can say "I am doing something about violence!" without the pesky need to do any heavy lifting - or painful self examination.
Or:
If only her brother had had a handgun to defend his fiance...
Maybe the state should issue them.
What would happen to those millions if they didn't have those guns? Would they be victims of axe murders? Machetes? Rapists with nothing more than chloroform and duct tape?
No thanks. You try and take my guns and you'll be the next "victim" on this idiot writers list...
Fascists and communists are two branches of the same tree - they are the ultimate Marxist competitors.
The difference between the two is how they treat property.
In communism, the state owns property in order to achieve the Marxist common good.
In fascism, people own property in title only and the state tells the "owners" how to use the property to achieve the Marxist common good.
And both systems show that the left wing state murders more people than individual gun owners.
When penises are outlawed, only outlaws will have penises.
Poor Jenny Price's brother was murdered so it's only fair that the rest of us be disarmed so we can share her brother's fate.
Why dont they just say the only way to stop hand gun crime is to CONFISCATE hand guns?
In typical leftist anti-gun socialist fashion, we are probably just "taking her out of context." ;)
I also notice she doesn't give a lot of detail about this "murder," just generalities.
"These guns are designed to kill people: That's their sole purpose."
Is she RETARDED????????????
If guns kill people, then eating organic foods makes liberals stupid.
It's people who commit crimes. If they had no guns, they would use knives, planks of wood, bricks, glass bottles, etc. like they do throughout Europe.
A vote for gun control=A vote to help criminals commit crimes.
Total idiot. She blames a gun for killing her brother, yet does not even mention the criminal.
I think we should give the "Cash for Penises Turn In Program" a chance first before we go door-to-door confiscating them.
The fact is that the Nazis were socialists. Forget the nuance and the people they were supposedly a reaction to. Look at their policies, look at their methods, look at their actions and you see a totalitarian, socialist worldview which stifles the individual for the benefit of the collective hive. They may fight other socialists as our own home-bred brethren do but that is simply a fight for control. They aren't so addle-brained as to not understand that someone gets to be on top of the ponzi-scheme and if it isn't them then their view will be like all of the following dogs of the sled team.
You are not known entirely by your enemy list--socialists hate themselves and others and Muslims fight everyone. You are known for what you believe. The Nazis were socialists using fascist means of control and the Muslims follow the same model to the same end--totalitarianism.
You mean something kind of like what was done in Louisiana a few weeks ago? Right after a publicly elected official's lackey sheriff stated ONLY THE POLICE SHALL BE ARMED?
You mean something like what happened in Cuba right after Castro took power?
You mean something like happened in the USSR and in Nazi Germany and in every other freakin' police state since the dawn of time???
"Are the facts correct is one thing I would ask?"
I doubt it.
"Is gun confiscation strictly a liberal plan or mindset? "
Mainly, but not entirely. No liberal I know approves of guns, but there are a few conservatives out there who are also anti-gun.
"Who else would want to confiscate guns?"
Super law and order types with no real experience in police work.
"How would gun confiscation be administered? "
The way they are doing it now - incrementally. FIRST you start in school with young kds. You brainwash them into thinking Guns = bad. Then you pass sturpid restricting laws against "assault rifles", "Saturday Night Specials" ".50 caliber Sniper rifles", etc. Then you require registration of guns on the state level or permitting on the state level. That way, they know who has what and where to go to get it.
You also pass idiotic restrictions like trigger lock laws, and "smart-gun" bills.
Eventually, the law-abiding citizens are gradually convinced they are saer by giving up guns and gradually the criminal element becomes bolder and gets its hands on more and more illegal smuggled guns.
Then you have what exists today in England and other places which tried this nonesense.
They'd hit you in the wallet.
There is a Jenny Price reporter who has written a lot of articles in Wisconsin, most involving shootings, etc. If this is the same Jenny Price writing gun control articles in 1998, the chances are that her story was fabricated.
A search of the Los Angeles Times archives for murder + david + fiance reveals nothing. Nor does "David Price".
From the millions licensed to carry handguns the far left is able to find one whacko and uses that story, which may or may not be true, as a way to get traction for its usual aray of bankrupt agruements.
The movement began as a grab for power in Germany.
The movement utilized every strand of leftist ideology there was in 1920s Germany - Marxism (through their openly socialist program), Darwinistic scientific racism, anticlericalism, euthanasia, naturism, etc.
if it was "progressive" the Nazis embraced it.
Things the Nazis opposed: the monarchy, traditional Christianity, traditional sexual morals, free enterprise, etc.
Everything Americans in the 21st century consider conservative is directly opposed to Nazism.
An American southerner who: believes that faith in Jesus Christ is a more important of one's value than their nationality, insists of private ownership of firearms, supports free enterprise and trade, supports Israel doggedly, was enraged at the murder of Terri Schiavo, finds environmentalism weird and counterproductive, despises occultism and Darwinism, etc. is considered the archetype of the American conservative. The nazis despised such people.
A doctrinaire environmentalist who hates Israel, opposes private gun ownership, hates free enterprise, mocks American culture in favor of European and scoffs at traditional Christianity is extremely close, ideologically, to the Nazis.
The Nazi's may have been socialist but they were other things to people as well. They were "nationalists" who are often considered conservative as they intend to "conserve" the fabric of the nation. You are correct in saying that they were totalitarian, but one can be totalitarian without being socialist and socialist without being totalitarian. Therefore, it also goes to reason that one can be totalitarian under a different base system of government as well.
The answer to the question that I was attempting to elicit, not that Nazi's are socialist, liberal, or not, is that those who wish to confiscate guns are tyrannical and often totalitarian by their means, as the governed with guns makes it impossible to impose such tyranny as the totalitarians wish to enjoy.
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