Rolling Stone can be counted on for two things: revealing pictures of pop stars and a distinctly anti-gun bias. Why a magazine about the music industry would consistently venture into the world of politics is beyond me, and seeing how poorly their articles are researched makes me wonder how they have any credibility left whatsoever. They only succeed in proving my point at the very beginning of their recent article entitled “George Zimmerman and Weaponized Racism” by picturing a Remington 1911 handgun and labeling it as a 9mm, not taking the three seconds to Google the model number prominently etched on the slide. Trust me, it only gets worse from there . . .
The article doesn’t take long to reveal its slant, and within two paragraphs the concept underlying author Tim Dickinson’s “logic” is revealed. The novel theory is that if there hadn’t been a gun present, both Martin and Zimmerman would have walked away from the fight alive.
Trayvon Martin is not dead because George Zimmerman is a fearful little bigot. He’s dead because Zimmerman is a fearful little bigot who holstered a legal, loaded 9mm Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol in public. What, in any other civilized nation, might have been a fistfight between the two – eventually broken up by the cops – turned suddenly and legally deadly in a state that has become so firearm-friendly it’s now known as the “Gunshine State.”
So, in the orange-skied world in which Rolling Stone writers live, the police will always arrive just in time to save the day and no one ever dies from a fistfight. It’s an opinion that ignores the thousands of Americans that are strangled, beaten or bludgeoned to death by “unarmed” attackers [FBI crime data]. Or the thousands more killed by blunt objects. No, according to Dickinson, the only murders that count are the ones involving guns.
This is a common belief among those who are screaming for Zimmerman’s scalp, that “fistfights” are good clean fun in which no one could possibly die. They believe that the only reason someone was killed that night in Sanford, Florida was that Zimmerman brought a gun to a fistfight.
And yet here’s one from San Antonio last week that suffered that exact fate, being beaten to death by an “unarmed” attacker. Here’s another one from New Jersey on the 16th who was beaten to death on a public street. And what about this guy in Dallas from Sunday? I could keep going since it happens every single day in this country, but the reality is that just because someone is unarmed doesn’t mean your life isn’t in danger.
To support their opinion that fewer guns equals less crime, Rolling Stone then points to… Chicago. Really. No, Dickinson doesn’t use the Windy City to bolster a fact-based argument for how well gun control has worked there. He apparently isn’t that ill-informed. Instead, he holds the rampant Chicago gun violence up to support a tired “blood in the streets” prediction of what their newly-passed concealed carry law will do to that city.
Instead [of restricting guns], America is moving in the other direction, thanks to what Diaz [VPC Wonk] dubs “bizarre mutations of the law” generated by the National Rifle Association. Just last week, Illinois fulfilled a decades-long crusade by the gun lobby, becoming the last of 50 states to authorize the concealed carrying of loaded guns in public. The move by the state legislature, overriding a veto by the governor, promises to fuel the epidemic of warlike gun violence in Chicago – where the city’s homicide toll hit 200 this year after a bloody Fourth of July weekend in which more than 70 were shot and a dozen murdered.
One more time, with feeling: the only evidence Dickinson could dredge up to support his “more guns equals more crime” argument is his own personal predictions of what might happen in Chicago. With no facts at hand to make his case, he instead made up his own example out of thin air. An example, by the way, which has never been borne out in the real world. Despite the repeated prognostications of anti-gunners, no jurisdiction that has legalized concealed carry has experienced the Dodge City, blood-in-the-streets scenario. Ever.
Not to mention the good that’s done by armed citizens; the rapes and murders that concealed carry permit holders have prevented.
To even a semi-sentient reader, the Chicago example illustrates exactly what happens when you have a disarmed population for gangs and criminals to prey upon. Yet they choose to ignore the objective evidence and march right on with their progressive utopian view of gun control as the savior of humanity.
[I]n Florida and 20 other states, “stand your ground” remains the law of the land – upending centuries of precedent on the concept of self-defense.
Upended? Since the dawn of time, the idea that an individual is entitled to defend himself from an attacker has been crystal clear. It has only been recently that the “progressive” movement has sought to beatify victims and denounce those who defend their own lives and those of their families, attacking the concept of armed self defense.
“Stand your ground” isn’t a radical new idea — it’s fighting back against the continuous push to force citizens to become victims. That concept — the one Rolling Stone is peddling, that a dead victim is better than a living law-abiding citizen — is the one that upends self defense laws.
“We have to make a decision,” says Diaz, author most recently of The Last Gun. “Is this the new normal? That people go about armed and shoot each other in the street? We seem to have fallen to a level that we’re going to tolerate this kind of violence. And you have to ask yourself: What is this country going to look like 10 years from now?”
Diaz presents a false choice and Dickinson swallows it hook, line and sinker. Diaz wants you to believe that we can stuff the genie back in the bottle, that by banning firearms we can eliminate criminals. By enforcing still more gun bans, we can “fix” Chicago. But after decades of trying, nowhere on the face of the Earth has that proven to be true. Even in those places with the strictest gun control laws, criminals still get their hands on guns and wreak havoc on the law abiding.
Diaz naturally believes that gun owners are inherently evil and violent, that the mere presence of a gun means that you are more likely to commit a crime. But as the New York Times, no less, pointed out, people with a concealed carry permit are actually less likely to commit a crime than the average population.
The real choice is this: do we want to lay down and wait for the cops to ride to the rescue, hoping that they’ll get there in time to save us from becoming another on the long list of murder victims? Or will we recognize that every person has the right to defend themselves, no matter the color of their skin?