'March for Lives' demonstrators 4 years ago- after Parkland FL shooting. Mike, taken 6 months before dying of liver cancerThe 212th mass shooting of the year took place yesterday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, with 19 students and 2 teachers slaughtered in one classroom. When will the madness end? Who knows? Roughly 4 years ago and in the wake of the Parkland Stoneman -Douglas mass shooting (Feb. 14, 2018), my late brother Mike and I had it out in a series of online posts over gun rights in this country. These commenced with this original post of mine, right after the Stoneman Douglas horror:
The 2nd Amendment Isn't "A National Suicide Pact"
This was followed by a post of mine -
responding to his own post (on his blog), defending gun rights. Then I published Mike's post as a 'guest post' on Brane Space, e.g.
Finally, I replied again explaining why his arguments and claims were fallacious, and that response is covered in the text that follows. In the wake of this latest bloodbath in Texas, I felt a reposting of my reply to his arguments would be relevant. In this text I refer to him as "the AR-15 gun owner":
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Our AR-15 Owner writes:
First off, comparing MA with Fla or any
other large state is a smokescreen to obscure the real facts. MA has a
population of 6,811,779 compared to Fla’s population of 20,612,439!
Actually, it is precisely the
use of comparative ratios (e.g. incidents per 100,100 or
similar) that makes comparing events in two or more states legitimate. You take
every 100,000 people in FL and every 100,000 in MA and compare the respective
incidents per that block. Then since the frequencies are set to a
defined baseline (e.g. per 100,000) this corrects for any disparity in
scale say for population size Once one does that, one is
effectively comparing "apples to applies" in terms of event
frequency. So it is not a "smokescreen" at all.
Secondly, although he may be correct in the “gun death
rate” comparisons, he fails to cite the cause of
those gun deaths. Well, maybe I can help him out here....
The cause of said gun deaths is subsumed in the statistics
for "gun deaths", i.e. whether for homicide, by accident or
suicide. Since there can only be three possible causes, then the
incidence per 100,000 for gun deaths (i.e. covering all)
already takes these 3 causes into account. Whether there are 2 suicides
to every homicide and 1 accidental shooting to every 100 suicides is immaterial
once we are talking about "gun deaths" in toto. I suspect he
may be placing overt emphasis on "intent" - say for homicides- but
let us agree suicides and accidents (say a 4 -year old accidentally discharging
a loaded weapon at his mom in a Walmart as happened in Colo. three yrs. ago)
are just as tragic. This is why the role of guns in whatever scenario
must be weighed and factored in.
If he says “yes,” then I would ask him to explain how the states
that have rolled back gun regulations and have a low
number of laws on the books have also seen declines in
gun homicide rates
This is a false interpretation which has been circulated in
right wing media, e.g. The National Review, but doesn't hold
ballast. A study from 2013, led by the Boston
University School of Public Health found that homicides that didn't
involve guns didn't significantly increase as gun ownership did.
In other words, more guns meant more homicides, particularly gun
homicides.: After controlling for multiple variables, the study found that a 1
percent increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in
the firearm homicide rate at the state level. That is about as close to a
perfect Pearson product -moment correlation coefficient as one can
get. This also holds up around the world.
States with low gun-homicide rates also
tend to rank high in other quality-of-life rankings, like per-capita income and
educational attainment, while states with the most gun homicides, like
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, also rank near the bottom in such measures
This is actually a perfect example of the
"No true Scotsman" fallacy first highlighted by Antony Flew in
his book, Thinking About Thinking. Flew's No
True Scotsman Suppose A says, "No Scotsman puts sugar in
his porridge." B replies, "But my uncle Angus puts sugar in his
porridge." A then responds, "Then your Uncle Angus is no true
Scotsman!" In other words, the artificial stipulation is made that to be a
genuine Scotsman (person of Scottish descent) one must conform to the rubric
of "no sugar in the porridge".
Now we frame his answer in similar terms: "No True Gun-using
Murderer Lives In A High Life Quality state." But,
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama etc. are low life quality states and
have the most gun homicides. Conclusion: You cannot compare the former to
the latter in terms of incidence, because the only "true" gun
homicides, i.e. worth measuring from the stipulated basis, occur in
low life quality states. Of course, as Flew would point out, this
doesn't wash. He is in fact resorting to a stipulative definition
that artificially discriminates between states with high and low homicide rates
In this way he's able to argue one is disallowed from comparing the
two gun homicide rates for differing life quality index states. But
as Flew would argue 'Not so fast!' - if that was true than no strict gun
regulations would ever be able to be enacted in such states because their
low quality of life prohibits it.
This is a red herring because he introduces an irrelevant topic
in an argument to divert readers’ attention from the original issue – which
is new gun control laws as well as the AR-15’s.
Not so! Since the Journal Of Health Affairs
study bears directly on the incidence of gun homicides in different nations, it
is totally relevant, i.e it provides a crucial glimpse on how our nation is
handling these homicides compared to other rich nations. The
original issue then is not strictly gun control per se, but in
the context of how the prevalence of guns in the U.S. compared to other wealthy
nations impacts health statistics. So it is not
intended to divert at all, only to force gun aficionados to reckon in these
health factors into gun ownership and hence control
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the rate of violent
crime dropped from 79.8 to 18.6 victims per 1,000 people age 12 and older from
1993 to 2015.
These
statistics do not support the opinion that more guns lead
to more crimes!
But this is a non sequitur . The
purported decrease in violent crimes overall does not show
that more guns do not lead to more homicides.. When we
isolate homicide from the constellation of violent crimes we see nearly a 1: 1
correlation, Refer to the Boston University study cited earlier. Also, these
sort of stats disregard science, namely the CDC finding from the early 90s that
there are three times more homicides in families that own guns than those
that don't.Such stats have been suppressed since the N.R.A.-backed Dickey Amendment, was passed in 1996- named for the
man who sponsored it, former Representative Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican.
It reads: “None of the
funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun
control.”. In other
words, actual research is to be suppressed in the interest of the NRA gun lobby
and culture. Reinforcing this, reporter Sam Roberts wrote last year
in The Times, that the legislation “stripped $2.6 million from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention — the precise amount budgeted for a study
of the health effects of shootings.”
How is this being
honest in the gun debate? How is it respecting either actual statistics or
science?
The more concerning issue is that Massachusetts is
one of the worst states for submitting the names of people
deemed mentally insufficient by the state into the NICS database. While MA
legislators seek more and more gun control, they don’t follow
the laws already in place; laws that all law-abiding,
safety-conscious gun owners believe should be followed.
As I already pointed out (in my original post) the MA
law subsumes the mental health issues-problems by the
fact so many formidable barriers are incorporated into the law, e.g. having to
pass a state approved gun safety course, getting licensed and
fingerprinted. These would arguably be obstacles too insurmountable for a
mentally deranged or debilitated person, but not for a healthy, law abiding
John Q. Citisen. My point is that since the barriers to
mental cases owning are so formidable in MA it doesn't really matter if they don't
cross every t and dot every i in submit all the names of mental cases. Those
mental cases would not likely get through to gun ownership anyway!
Further research shows that since the assault weapons ban ended
in 2004, violent crime has actually decreased by 16.6 percent from
2004 to 2016, according to FBI statistics
Ahhhh...but NOT the mass shootings using
assault weapons, including school shootings - which have only
increased.
Rifles accounted for only 1.9 percent of all
murders in 2015. You were more than twice as likely to be killed from someone
kicking or punching you to death than to be shot by a rifle.
Maybe! But I'd rather take my chances against someone
coming at me with fist, "flying" feet or knife than with
an AR-15. Just sayin'.
Judging by these numbers, rifles are not the problem the
left make it out to be.
But assault rifles ARE the problem in all the mass
shootings. I guarandamn- tee you if Islamic extremists were doing these
mass shootings you'd see action taken fast enough to control access to these
weapons. How can you oppose that!
Well, yes I do. Why? Because it reeks of Nazism!
Please, this is pure hyperbole and false analogy, Nazism was a
specific political ideology predicated on National Socialism, which consciously
incorporates racial eugenics and anti-Semitism linking it to a one party,
militarized state. This is absolutely NOT the state of Massachusetts
whose laws - like other state laws - are still based on our U.S. Constitution.
Since the latter disallows Nazism, the state laws - including gun laws of
whatever form -must as well.
My friend, you are an educated man, so you must concede that the
Weimar Republic’s well-intentioned gun registry became a tool
for evil.The same arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos
of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration. Law-abiding persons complied with
the law, but the Commies and Nazis committing acts of political violence did
not.
Politifact checked similar claims when Ben Carson made them
during the 2016 campaign. It turns out that as the Nazi Party rose to power in
Germany, it inherited a 1928 gun registration law that had replaced a total ban
on gun ownership imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I. The 1928 law
created a permit system to own and sell firearms and
ammunition. According to Dagmar Ellerbrock, an expert on German gun policies at
the Dresden Technical University.:
"This
order was followed quite rarely, so that largely, only newly bought weapons
became registered. At that time, most men, and many women, still owned
the weapons they acquired before or during the first World War."
When the Nazis did come to power, they used whatever gun records they had to seize weapons from their
enemies, but Ellerbock has noted the files included very few of the
firearms in circulation. According to him:
"In my records, I found many Jews who well into the
late 1930s possessed guns,"
This was confirmed by three former Wehrmacht
troops I had occasion to speak with about the war and the Hitler era, when I
traveled to Bielefeld with Janice in 1985. Hans Borchers, the oldest of
the former German troops, affirmed he "knew many Jews who possessed
rifles and pistols long after Hitler attained the Chancellorship in 1933".
The Nazis DID adopt a new gun law in 1938. According
to an analysis by Bernard Harcourt, a professor at Columbia University
School of Law, it loosened gun ownership rules in several ways:
1) It deregulated the buying and selling of
rifles, shotguns and ammunition.
2) It made handguns easier to own by allowing
anyone with a hunting license to buy, sell or carry one at any time. (i.e. You
didn’t need to be hunting.)
3) It extended the permit period from one year
to three and gave local officials more discretion in letting people under 18
get a gun.
The regulations to implement this law, rather
than the law itself, did impose new limits on one group: Jews.
On Nov. 11, 1938, the German minister of the
interior issued the Regulations Against Jews Possession of Weapons.
Not only were Jews forbidden to own guns and ammunition, they couldn’t own
"truncheons or stabbing weapons." In addition to these
restrictions, confiscation was also present, thus the Nazis had already been
raiding Jewish homes and seizing weapons. But according to Ellerbrock, also
confirmed by Dieter - another Wehrmacht soldier I met in 1985:
"The gun policy of the Nazis can hardly be
compared to the democratic procedures of gun regulations by law. It was a
kind of special administrative practice (Sonderrecht), which treated people in
different ways according to their political opinion or according to ‘racial
identity’ in Nazi terms."
In short, Nazi-era Germany imposed greater gun
restrictions for Jews (and other perceived enemies) at the same time it loosened
gun restrictions for other groups. German citizens as a
whole were not disarmed by the Nazis. Jews and other supposed
enemies of the state were subject to having their weapons seized. But for most
German citizens, the Nazi period was one in which gun regulations were
loosened, not tightened.
Second, a lack of guns was not the
issue. If the majority of Germans had wanted to use these guns to
fight the Nazis, they could have. But they didn’t. Carson (and our AR-15
owner) ignored the fact that the Nazis enjoyed significant popular
support, or at least, broad acquiescence. Given that popular support they
had no reason at all to fear a popular revolt or uprising. As for the
Jews, the ones that had the most weapons and most likely would have fought, had
all left by Nov. 11, 1938 when the most severe weapons
regulations were enacted.
Now, what would I change if I could.....
I actually
agree with all of your proposed changes. I also acknowledge they would not be a
"panacea". We don't seek a panacea per se just some
movement on curbing access to powerful assault weapons from those
criminals and psychos - who might inflict the most harm.
Lastly, as for you stating that I should “hear the cry” of
Parkland student “Sarah”... I’d like to hear what other “gun control” laws
that she has in mind to “prevent it from happening again.”
Interesting
you mention that! There is now a movement, begun in Parkland, to march into the
FLA legislature in Tallahassee tomorrow to demand legislative
changes including: 1) firmer control on all assault- type weapons,
including licensing and fingerprinting, 2) allowing individual
communities (like Parkland) to impose their own regulations such as for
age of purchase, and limiting magazines and the sale of ammunition. These
kids are also dispatching a retinue to meet Trump on Feb. 24th and demand
federal gun law changes.
Yet, now…they do a complete 360 and blame the prez and the
NRA, etc. And, btw, I challenge my friend here – or anyone – to show me
where any member of the NRA has committed any of these
atrocities!
This is a true strawman argument given no one is
asserting the NRA committed any atrocities. What we are saying is that the NRA
was responsible for altering the original 2nd amendment interpretation
i.e. as a collective right (acknowledged by the Supreme Court in 1934)
then pushing ever more aggressive gun ownership memes and laws, state by
state - until we have the situation today when 1.5 million assault rifles
are sold each year.
Again, the proof is in the pudding. Australia
had problems with mass shootings until the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 .
The sheer magnitude of this tragedy spurred laws whereby Aussie assault weapon
owners had to turn them in. and strict licensing - registry applies..
There have been NO mass shootings since,
I know you won’t agree with me here, friend – but as I said, we
can agree to disagree.
Well, let me say I can
agree with a number of your suggestions on how things might be
changed for the better. I definitely disagree on a number of other aspects
which were discussed above.
And may I respectfully suggest that the
left stop politicizing these incidents and exploiting the victims for their own
political purposes.
Sorry, I don't see the 'left"
doing that at all. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas are
organizing mass student marches and gun control activism all on their own -
there are no lefties sneaking into their rallies and whispering in their ears
on what to do. If anyone is guilty of politicizing the latest incident it
is Trump - tying it to the Russia probe - and blaming the FBI for 'wasting too
much time on it'. (see my next post).
Meanwhile, the kids at Stoneman Douglas - who
have been most affected- are the ones who plan to head off to Tallahassee
and demand change from lawmakers, they are the ones organizing a national
student march, and THEY are the ones who plan to meet with Trump and demand
change One of their reps Emma Gonzalez - is also organizing
parents, many others and students in a number of states to vote out all NRA
backed lackeys and yes men. Granted, she and her group may not succeed
but it won't be for lack of trying! Let me also hasten to point out there
is no constitutional right to own an AR-15 or any other assault style rifle,
e.g.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/miles-mogulescu/77940/gun-control-legislation-is-constitutional
From The Washington Post lead
story yesterday:
Students at the Florida school where 17 people
died last week said Sunday they will organize nationwide marches for gun
control next month and try to create a “badge of shame” for politicians who
take money from the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups.
“We are losing our lives while the adults are
playing around,” Cameron Kasky said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Kasky, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has
been part of an outpouring of anger from students who survived the shooting,
many of whom have publicly blamed President Trump and NRA-supported politicians
for creating the conditions that led to the shooting.
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