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.
When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
What in the world has happened to the "Union-Leader"? Have they been purchased recently by new left-leaning owners?
As a gun owner, and a gun rights advocate, I hate that logic. I carry a gun because it is a much better equalizer than a baseball bat or a knife. Rather than refute the deadliness of handguns, we need to laud the deadliness of handguns. A baseball bat isn't a great tool in the hands of a small, frail person, as in this case, an elderly woman.
Firearms would be useless if they didn't provide a level of force to the wielder that transcends the shooters physical abilities. The fact that a .45 slug from my pistol hits just as hard when fired from my hand as it would if a monster of a man like the Rock had fired it, is exactly what makes it useful to me.
Ah, but that's the point. Guns stand in the way of the strong preying upon the weak. A pistol is deadly in any hands, which is exactly what makes it useful.
The offical name of the Nazi party is: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party).
So the Nazis were/are left-wing, in spite of today's leftists insisting otherwise.
"Just ask the Britons how well a handgun ban has worked for them."
And then ask the Aussies.
(1) We don't know if the author's "brother David" had threatened the woman who shot him.
(2) The author uses bogus statistics: "most murderers own their handguns legally" - an obvious falsehood.
(3) If indeed her "brother David" was murdered by this woman, if the woman had been unable to obtain a handgun, she would have come up with another method.
If she wanted to kill "brother David" so badly that she carefully premeditated the crime over a period of weeks or months, she would have found some other means to carry out her plans.
If we follow Jenny's thinking and mindset to its conclusion, it would go something like this:
"And after guns were banned the clouds rolled back and all the evil handguns were floated up to heaven where they were melted down and made into harps."
"Then rainbows appeared everywhere and the happy citizens, free from the dread of being killed by handguns, danced in the streets, and all the children sang."
"And everyone lived happily and safely ever after, and only Democrats were elected to office from that point on."
Hmmmm...just imagine; 10's of thousands, no, back that 100's of thousands of criminals lining up to turn-in their hand cannons and assault weapons - NOT!
2 words:
MOLAN LABE!
Semper Fidelis
Exactly.
Ignoring for a moment the utter imbecility of trying to confiscate handguns at bazillions of dollars of taxpayer expense from the millions of people who use them legitimately FOR SELF-DEFENSE FROM EVIL CRIMINALS, if this woman was so determined to commit murder that she went through all of the trouble she is alleged to have gone through, the simple lack of a handgun would NEVER have deterred her.
She would have simply turned either to use of a car, a hammer applied to the back of the head (just as easy for an old lady to use as a handgun), or rat poison.
The proposed "solution" has PRECISELY ZERO chance of achieving the desired effect, and has a 100% PERCENT chance of preventing honest, law-abiding elderly grandfathers from defending themselves against being beaten to death by thugs; and a 100% PERCENT chance of keeping kind middle-aged women from defending themselves against being raped and strangled with pantyhose.
Extract: "Research by award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz reveals Americans use guns for self-defense as often as 2.5 million times a year--that's three to five times more often than they are misused by criminals."
back that... = make that...
Oh, have I got a story for you. Yesterday, while getting the kids' (teens, btw) check ups our brand new soon to be *EX* doctor started playing the liberal game. One question was if there were guns in the house which was immediately followed a long lecture on the dangers of guns, blah, blah, swiftly notes it in the file, blah, blah, safety, blah, blah, locks, blah, blah, ammo, blah, blah. Somewhere in there I completely zoned out no thanks to a 101 temperature and the "good" cough syrup as the kids' jaws were hanging open in total shock at the doctor. Sadly, it wasn't until after getting home and coming out of the fog from missing a dose of the "good" cough syrup that I told the kids to next time some idiot starts in on gun control to announce proudly that they are tops in their rifle class. Never mind that Mr. M is LE but most importantly WHAT THE HECK BUSINESS IS IT OF THE DOCTOR'S???
Yes, in fact you bring up a salient point which should not be ignored or conceded:
Handgun bans and confiscation are an unconstitutional denial of the rights of law-abiding citizens. It is as simple as that.
See my reply #76
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