Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Debate About Gun Control vs Tyrant Control

For an interesting insight into what the proposed US gun and high capacity magazine bans are not about, take a look at this official FBI crime data page, and look at the number of people killed by rifles every year, vs. the number of people beaten to death with fists and feet, and killed with hammers and clubs.

Remember that the Rifle category includes ALL rifles, not just so-called assault rifles. You can add some from the Other/Not Stated list. Then, if you think we are well rid of violent drug dealers rather than rue their passing, mentally deduct from the total whatever guestimate you want of the drug dealers who were killed with rifles.

Violent crime is at a four decade low, even as gun ownership, especially handguns and 'assault rifles', both with high capacity magazines, has grown enormously. In-school shooting deaths are at a forty+ year low, although there are more mass killings. That doesn't change the fact that in-school killings are at the lowest level since the 1960s.

There is zero data suggesting that people licensed to carry handguns commit crimes with them at even the rate of other non-licensed people. People licensed to carry are far less likely to commit crimes with guns than the average person.

I empathize with the average person who thinks we need to "do something" to stop school shootings etc, but none of the proposals even pretend to address the problem. Not one of them would prevent an Adam Lanza from acquiring guns by murdering his mother, the legal gun owner. "Gun free zones" would not affect someone intent on murder: they are already intent on murder. All the zones do is disarm law-abiding victims. Of all the mass shootings over the last several decades, all but the Gabby Giffords shooting occurred in gun free zones, and when someone with a gun finally showed up, the shooter generally suicided. One might conclude that gun free zones attract mass murderers because they know such zones amount to Victim Disarmament Zones.

The leaders of the gun bans know all that. The leaders are professional advocates and national politicians. They do know all this, even if they don't tell their followers.

So what really motivates them to work at disarming non-violent law-abiding citizens? Ask them, for I don't know.

Now politicians are proposing outright bans, some grandfathering existing weapons and magazines, or grandfathering with confiscation at death of current owner. The proposed bans go far beyond anything seen before, at a time when law abiding gun owners are already far angrier than ever before at being demonized by anti-gun activists.

On December 29th the DesMoines Register published a column about gun control by Donald Kaul, one of their staff writers. The viewpoint which the Register saw fit to print included this:
Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal...If some people refused to give up their guns, that "prying the guns from their cold, dead hands" thing works for me.

Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner...to the back of a Chevy pick up truck and drag them...
When a formerly respectable newspaper like the DesMoines Register publishes implicit calls for murdering political leaders and killing gun owners, why should Americans see no need for assault weapons and high capacity magazines?

Here is Diane Feinstein's pdf of her proposal.

My guess is that if any major bans go through there will be meaningful violence directed at politicians and enforcement agents. Nobody is talking publicly about that as a possibility, but I cannot believe that out of perhaps 40,000,000 gun owners (the estimates vary widely) there is not one ten-thousandth of one percent who are not nuts, but are smart, organized, militarily trained, target shooters, or long time big game hunters, who will take it upon themselves to hunt down and kill politicians they regard as actively committing treason. It doesn't matter whether they are correct or not, it doesn't matter what others think of their opinion. What matters is that they believe. Forty such people acting individually or in pairs would be impossible to stop, and they could bring government to its knees with guns and bombs. Imagine if was 400 people.

This could get incredibly ugly, and everyone is ignoring that. The people who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal building were delusional idiots, but they succeeded. The DC snipers were nuts, and they succeeded. Imagine scores or a few hundred people who are not nuts, but may have training in shooting and explosives making war on a government they see as taken over by traitors on the verge of success. They see the 2nd Amendment as being all about the people having the ability to resist traitors who have taken over the government, and now that government is trying to disarm them.

Does this sound so very outlandish?:
The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.
It was written by Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of virulently anti-gun New Jersey, and published today in the Washington Times.

Put another way, some people liken resisting bans of military-style weapons and magazines to the situation of a hitchhiker picked up by a van driver who tries to persuade him/her to allow the driver to handcuff the hitchhiker to a ring bolt in the floor. "Just let me handcuff you and everything will be fine. Really. Don't force me get violent. Just let me make you helpless and you will be all right. I'm OK, and you will be too. Let me handcuff you to the ring bolt." Is that the time to let oneself be handcuffed, or is that the time to fight to the death?

Once you have allowed yourself to be handcuffed, you are 100% dependent on the continued good will of the driver and of whoever the driver may turn you over to. You have no options because you surrendered them to the driver who assured you that surrender was better than fighting.

In the case of government, you are 100% dependent on the continued good will of not only today's government but of whatever that government might evolve into over decades. So are your children and your grandchildren, and so on. In the 19th century Germany was a great Western industrial country with a major intellectual tradition. In 1913 would anyone sane have believed that within a middle aged adult's remaining lifetime the government would build death factories and murder 6 million people? Of course not. They would have risked being locked up as nuts.

But that didn't stop the Holocaust.

The anti-gun people seem to be going for broke, and I suspect there are at least 30 or forty people across the US who will refuse to be handcuffed to the ring bolt. Maybe a lot more than 40, and they are not talking to each other because they know the danger of the FBI. They will just act.

This is getting really scary, in part because no one is talking frankly about the likely unintended consequences of the proposed bans if enacted into law. How many people are the gun banners willing to see die in order to achieve their goals? How many dead gun owners? How many dead police, FBI, and Treasury agents? How many US Representatives, US Senators? The Vice President? The President?

What is an acceptable price in human lives to pretend to protect human lives? Do the banners really think that every single gun owner in America will consent to seeing their children handcuffed to the ring bolt?

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