Posted on 11/29/2006 6:56:15 AM PST by RWB Patriot
I have a PowerPoint exam due next week and the assignment is to prepare an on-screen slide presentation to inform an audience about a topic of interest to me. I was thinking about doing one that shows gun control isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Information that would be appreciated; crime rates in cities with strict gun control laws vs. cities with lax GC laws, quotes (pro-gun control that give gun control a bad image, plus anti-gun control quotes), satistics of criminals who fear guns, effects of gun control in other countries, and anything else that might be useful. The presentation has to be ten slides long.
I never miss an oppurtunity to use my school assignments to push for my beliefs, and this seems like a perfect oppurtunity.
Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.
www.google.com -- ask it a lot of questions. Use the advanced search to ask for only pdf and xls files. You'll find more stats and articles than you'll know what to do with. You're on your own from there.
I think this fella is writing his turn page paper on chocolate chip cookies.
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
Sorry, got ahead of myself and put this in the wrong area. Please move it to the Bloggers & Personal area. Thank you.
ML/NJ
In order to make that leap, you need to assert that the very ownership of guns is a detriment to public welfare and thats a tough connection to make, especially when there are so few other examples of it. Hammers are not illegal even though they make it easy to bludgeon someone, knives are not illegal even if they make it easy to slash or stab someone.
The point is, the fact that an object can be used for an illegal act does not necessarily make the object itself the appropriate subject of legislation...the only thing that would make it so, is the emotions of the people making law, and THAT is a bad basis for public policy. It should not be about how people feel about things, but about their actual effect on society.
Let's stop giving citizenship to legal immigrants to stop the illegal immigrants...
Let's stop giving welfare checks to the downtrodden to stop the welfare fraud...
How's this for an outline (rough draft):
Title
What is Gun Control
Arguments in favor of gun control
Arguments against gun control
Gun control laws (to show how vague they are; will proabably use two of the most known, Brady bill and Assault Weapons ban)
can't think of a title (will talk about how both of those bills were shot down and the reasons why)
Effects of Gun control in America (will compare crime rates of cities with strong GC vs. cities with lax GC)
Effects of Gun control in other countries (talk about Holocaust and UN GC actions in Rwanda)
Gun owners (what jobs they have, their backgrounds, etc; to show that they aren't criminals or loose cannons)
Statistics of guns used in self-defense vs. guns used in crime
What the Founding Fathers say (will put in quotes of our Founding Fathers' view on gun control).
Well, how does it look? Please don't hesitate to suggest corrections.
Here's an interesting resource for you. It's from the Federal Govt, so you'll have to come up with your own conclusions and not take their word for it 100%.
The CDC compiles information on violent deaths. You can run a query to determine how many deaths were caused by guns and what ages of children and/or adults were killed.
Typically one may hear about all the children killed by guns. That information comes from the CDC. What they don't tell you is that their definition of a child encompases children from birth up through their teenage years and that the majority of those killed were teenagers.
You can also separate the statistics by age, race, gender, and geo location.
It's a good site for researching the topic.
It may help if I include the link. :)
Sorry about that!
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/
"Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms." -- Aristotle, "Politics"
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor, November 11, 1755 <>
"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion." --Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), quoted by James Burgh (1714-1775), in "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses," (London, 1774-1775)
"No freeman shall [ever] be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]" --Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), proposed Virginia Constitution, June 1776, in Thomas Jefferson's_Papers,_J. Boyd, ed., vol.1 p.344 (Putnam, 1896)
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." --attributed to Samuel Adams (1722-1803), August 1, 1776
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the_real_object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" --Patrick Henry (1736-1799), June 9, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_ Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.168 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." --George Mason (1725-1792), June 14, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_ Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.380 (Philadelphia, 1836) <>
"The great object is, that every man be armed. [...] Every one who is able may have a gun." --Patrick Henry (1736-1799), in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 14, 1788, in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_ Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.386 (Philadelphia, 1836)
"I ask, Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except for a few public officers." --George Mason (1725-1792), in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 16, 1788, in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_ Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.425 (Philadelphia, 1836) <>
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms..." --Samuel Adams (1722-1803), in_Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,_ pp.86-87, (Pierce & Hale, Boston, 1850), also in Philadelphia_Independent Gazetteer,_ August 20, 1789
"I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand." --Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), speech in San Franscisco, July 1871
"Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' Our principle is that the [Communist] Party commands the gun and the gun will never be allowed to command the Party." --Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976), "Problems of War and Strategy," November 6, 1938, in_Selected Works of Mao Zedong_(1965)
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms," says this well-known 20th century statesman and head of state. "History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty." Thus spake Adolf Hitler, in his edict of March 18, 1938, as quoted by Briton H.R. Trevor-Roper in his book "Hitler's Table Talks 1941-1944" (London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1953, pp. 425-426).
"In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis." --Stephen P. Halbrook, _That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right,_University of New Mexico Press [reprinted by the Independent Institute] (1984), p.83
"When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." --President Bill Clinton, MTV's "Enough is Enough", April 19, 1994 <>
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an_out_right_ban, picking up every one of them... 'Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in,' I would have done it. I_could_not do that. The votes weren't here." --U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," February 5, 1995 <>
"No civilian is to have a firearm without a permit and permits shall not be issued to persons suspected of acting against the state. For Jews, this permission will not be granted. Those people who do not require permission to carry weapons include the whole of the SS, and the SA - including the Deaths Head group, and the officers of the Hitler youth." - The German Firearms Act of 1937
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA-- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State." --Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon ...must be regarded as an enemy of the national government." --SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933
"...the rifle? Wouldn't go out naked without a rifle. When shoes and clothes and food, when even hope is gone, we'll have the rifle." --John Steinbeck (1902-1968),_The Grapes of Wrath_
"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like." --Alan Dershowitz
Sammy ''The Bull'' Gravano has, by his own admission, sent 19 men to their graves. So it's safe to say that the former underboss of the Gambino crime family knows a thing or two (or 19) about guns and violence.
That's why his recent remarks about gun control, published in Vanity Fair, have resonance.
"Gun Control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins." -- VANITY FAIR 9/99 page 165 Sammy “the Bull” Gavano
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!" The Gulag Archipelago, A. Solzhenitsyn. Chapter 1 "Arrest", fn. 5.
"A gun in the hands of a free man frightens and angers the autocrat, not because he fears the power of the gun, but, rather, the spirit of the man who holds it." Author unknown
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).
"One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers [read communist party] and the disarming of the bourgeoisie." ~~V.I. Lenin, Collected Works
"I don't think everybody has a right to a weapon which can be used to kill innocent people and maybe threaten the life of a president of the United States." ~~Henry Waxman
"We are going to hammer guns on the anvil of relentless legislative strategy! We are going to beat guns into submission!" ~~Chuck Schumer
"I stand in support of this common sense legislation to license everyone who wishes to purchase a gun. I also believe that every new handgun sale or or transfer should be listed in a national registry, such as Chuck [Senator Schumer] is proposing." ~~Hillary Clinton, 2000
On arming citizens, he says that by arming them, "you make their arms your own.....from subjects they are transformed into [your] partisans....When you disarm your citizens, however, you offend them by showing that, either from cowardliness or from lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you." Having the confidence of the people is a leader's greatest strength, and a prince will keep this confidence so long as he respects his people's property and their traditions and customs....and holds himself subject to the same laws to which they are held. -- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Translated, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Donno
"...one of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers and the disarming of the bourgeoisie." -- From Lenin's "Collected Works" - "The Basic Tasks of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Russia, Moscow" Progress Publishers, 1965. Vol 29, p.108. US Library of Congress Reference English DK254.L3A2323.
"Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms." -- From Lenin's "Collected Works" - Vol. 35, 4th edition, p 286. Congressional Record, April 28, 1970 p. H3601
"Only the Soviets can effectively arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie. Unless this is done, the victory of socialism is impossible" -- From Lenin's "Collected Works" - "Theses and Report on Bourgeoisie Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" March 4, 1919. Vol 28, p.466. U.S. Library of Congress Reference: English DK254.L3A2323
To ensure a quick communist victory in civil warfare, there "arises the necessity of disarming the bourgeoisie and arming the workers, of creating a communist army..." -- From "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletariat of the Entire World" in a "Documentary History of Communism" ed. by Robert V. Daniels, New York, Random House, 1960, Vol 2, p. 90 US Library of Congress Reference: HX40.D3
"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves." -- J. V. Stalin, "Reply to the discussions on the Political Reports of the Central Committee," Dec 7, 1927. Stalin's "Works" Vol 10, p. 378. U.S. Library of Congress Reference: English, DK268.S75A-267.
Also - see my homepage for a good essay
Gun Bill Shot Down
There's a headline right out of the NYT.
I did the same thing in Grad school for Public Administration. I wrote several papers on gun control. One on the Assault Weapon Ban, one on the Virginia Gun-a-Month program, one on the Washington DC Police anti-gun squad.
I hope you have sympathetic, or at least objective, professors or a high tolerance for low grades.
My favorite book on the subject is:
"That Every Man Be Armed" by Halbrook. You can get it at the link below used for six bucks plus shipping.
http://www.amazon.com/That-Every-Man-Armed-Constitutional/dp/0945999380/ref=pd_sim_b_3/102-8259648-6286556
Get Wayne LaPierre's book
IT's excellently done.
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