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.
would cause her to girl her own daughter?
Say what?
Fascists and other statists of every stripe along with people like this writer, whose personal and tragic loss has left her bereft of some basic common sense. The mother of her brother's girl friend didn't kill the two of them because she had a gun handy. She killed them because she was a crazy deranged old woman who likely would have picked up a butcher knife or run them down with her car to do the deed.
Guns used for self-defense are rarely reported.
No, only Rich and Connected Registered Democrats would own them.
I, mean, Registered Democrats include lots of union members, felons, and welfare recipients. Can't let them have pistols.
I suppose you think the fork and knife are innocent bystanders?!
CLUE ENDING: Rosie ODonnell, in the closet, with a vat of pig fat and a ladle.
Oops. You know what I meant.
We should try banning murder first . . .
Gloria: Quoting some statistic about gun deaths
Archie: Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out windows?
Okay, I'll take the bait.
A serious problem (among many) with banning guns is that it is doomed to fail. Even if you confiscated all 60 million handguns (unlikely to be succesful, judging from efforts in NYC and DC) you would still have millions of illegal imports each year. US customs has utterly failed to stop the flow of drugs and humans across the border. How would they have any further success with easily concealed weapons?
There is also a serious moral issue. Handguns, unlike illegal narcotics, have a good purpose - to defend those who were not born with great physical strength from violent criminals who would prey upon them. Guns are an equalizer without a subsitute (i.e. knife, mace, etc.) By taking away the right to own handguns, you are depriving the individual of the right to protect his life and liberty (which the police cannot do unless they put a car in front of your house 24/7).
I find these arguments to be most persuasive on both a moral and practical level. There are other good arguments, i.e., Second Amendment, etc. but in the end you cannot implement a law that is morally and factually bankrupt.
You can have my penis when you pry it from my cold, dead hand.
Identical article (different title) from the Washington Post:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1546966/posts
WHAAAAAAAAAAT?! What on God's good green Earth is this woman smoking and can she pass it when she's done?! This is by far the most uneducated, unqualified statement I've ever read by anyone in the MSM. I pray to the Good Lord that this was an editorial and not some article founded on fact. If so, this woman should be stripped of her journalistic devices and forced to endure a few months of education on how to correctly read and cite sources for facts.
In light of the article's basis... it's ludicrous. The thought that banning handguns across the board will do away with handgun violence is folly. BANNING handguns is foolhardy, at best. Completely obliterating them and destroying every single one of them on the planet? Complete lunacy! This is a MSM article based on an emotional plea, not fact. The fact that she cites the number of "self-defense" uses in the 100's is laughable as well. Self-defense is the defense of one's life. This does NOT mean taking the life of another to defend your own. I've drawn my firearm twice in protection of my life, and I never fired a shot. The perp ran in the other direction.
Let this article be a lesson to those who want to opine on emotion: it may fall on the hearts of the sheeple, but it will never pass the sniff test of those who understand the domestic war we fight against armed criminals. I'd rather be armed than dead.
The better question to ask is the left in the US liberal in the old sense of the word or are they totalitarians.
You don't "sound" like a FReeper...
Nazis are National Socialists... that's a definition. They are bedfellows of liberal socialists and communists.
This is a good rule of thumb - base all legislation on a 1-in-300 million occurrence.
Or just in general - if one in 300 million people die of a drug's side effects, and the drug will save the lives of a few million people, ban the drug.
This approach should do wonders for the automobile industry.
Because it was originally run in the Washington Post as an OP-ED. Liberals love to give wide coverage to those on their side of the issues.
Ask the Australians.
Jeez, and I just got back from the gun shop picking up my Christmas present!
Given the ratio of handguns to kills, they are failing miserably at their “sole purpose.”
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