By Rob Morse
The gun-control lobby started it. Then the legacy media joined in and told us that guns and gun owners were dangerous. Their solution is to register and regulate guns and gun owners. They claim their gun control will somehow, someday, take the guns out of the hands of criminals.
If you only read the words, you might be persuaded. Let me fill in the facts that the gun prohibitionists leave out. Gun control laws do more harm than good.
Honest gun owners use a firearm to stop a violent crime about 1.7 million times a year, a little over 4500 defensive guns uses a day. That massive benefit overshadows all the other problems we have with the criminal use of firearms.
Legally justified armed self defense is dozens of times more frequent than all of the suicides and accidents we see with firearms. It’s hard to overstate the importance of armed defense. Disarming honest gun owners in the hope of somehow disarming criminals would be a disaster since firearms do so much net good.
Guns are both common and durable. Estimates put the number at over 400 million firearms legally owned by over 80 million adults in the US. I have guns that are decades old. My friends have guns that are over a century old. Guns don’t deteriorate or go away with time.
Criminals have lots of guns, too. Criminals stole over 13,000 guns from FFLs last year. One number I saw said that about 300 thousand guns were stolen from homes and cars annually. That works out to one gun stolen out of every 1300 guns we own, so I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.
Before you think ‘we can stop criminals from getting guns,’ consider that the Mexican army lost a third of the guns it bought from the US military and US manufacturers. That dwarfs the 3,000 or so guns the Obama administration sold to Mexican drug lords. The Mexican military also “lost” guns it bought from Germany, Australia, Italy, Romania, Spain, and Belgium. That’s where the drug lords get the firearms they use in Mexico. And in the US.
The marketplace for guns and ammunition is worldwide. Most countries have domestic firearms manufacturers. That means new sources of guns are only a few days away.
Guns and ammunition are easy to make. My friends reload ammunition for fun. Making your own guns is an increasingly popular pastime.
Getting a few gun and parts is easy for the drug gangs in our inner cities. Compared to transporting millions of illegal aliens and billions of dollars of drugs across the border each year, moving a few ounces of steel and plastic is simple. If you can make private submarines to transport drugs, then the narco-orgs can make all the guns they want. That means we’re simply not going to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.
Keep in mind that only about eight percent of violent crimes are committed with a firearm. Disarming violent criminals won’t stop the 92 percent of the violent crimes that are committed without knives, fists, feet, hammers, clubs, and so-on.
Gun ownership is incredibly widespread, but violence is localized. The good news is that most counties in America won’t see a single murder this year. About half of all murders happen in just two percent of our counties. Despite the localized problems of drug gangs, anti-gun activists and some politicians want to pass more gun laws that would apply to all of us, no matter where we live.
I wish it were that easy to make the world a better place. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.
In reality, regulations have to be exquisitely well-tailored so they do more good than harm. For example, we could ask for a mental health exam before anyone buys a gun in the hope of reducing suicides. If that eliminates all suicides with firearms (it won’t), but also reduces the number of successful defensive gun uses by just 1.4% — 1 in 70 — then such a law would cost more lives than it saves.
We looked, and sadly we’ve never seen gun control laws reduce the number of suicides. Gun controllers and the media forget (sure they do) that delaying a gun purchase also means that more victims of domestic abuse face their attackers unarmed.
We could demand that all guns be locked up in the hope of eliminating firearm-related accidents. If we decreased the number of armed defenders who reach their guns in time by only 0.03 percent — 1 in 3500, then, again, we’ll have cost more lives than we’ve saved.
You can’t fix a small problem by creating a larger one.
It’s easy to forget that we have over 23,000 firearms regulations on the books today. Criminals are no more likely to follow any new rules than they are to follow the current ones. Most of us already lock up our guns to keep them safe. We’re wonderfully reluctant to shoot an intruder. Because armed self-defense is so common, it is insanely hard for anh new gun regulations — no matter how well crafted — to do more good than harm.
The sad news is that we already have too much gun control. We have more assaults, robberies, rapes, and murders because many of the victims were disarmed by current gun laws. Mandatory waiting periods cost lives because they disarm the victims, not the criminals.
The cold, hard truth is that we’d save more lives if we reduced the barriers — fees and classroom hours — that are required for honest gun owners to get their carry permits in most states.
This article originally appeared at Slow Facts and is reprinted here with permission.
All good points. I would also add that even if we could wave a magic wand and remove ALL firearms and all knowledge of how to make them from the world, that would simply mean a return to strength based weapons, severely disadvantaging anyone who lacks physical strength. A gun allows a 90 pound woman to have a fighting chance against three large men intent on raping her. Without a gun? Well…
I guess so Red…I used to be very big & strong. Then I got old. I accumulated some severe injuries along the way. And now I own gats for me & mine.
Why do you bother writing articles like this using logic and reason to refute gun control?
The Only purpose of gun control is the disarm the citizens.
So they can be properly oppressed.
That is why none of these gun control measures actually target criminals.
They don’t care about criminals, terrorists, or domestic abusers at all.
It’s all about people control .
Yes, the people actually pushing gun control are cynical tyrants. But (so far) those bastards need millions of well-meaning voters to go along with them out of misinformed fear and “for the children.” It is those millions we can educate. They are for whom this great article was written.
Wouldn’t take three large men, or even one; 90% of the women on this planet could be physically overpowered by any average male. Truth is, 99.9 % of men would never hurt a woman…but even one out of a thousand still leaves plenty of violent men to go around.
Anyone who advocates against armed self-defense is promoting the violent subjugation of women.
Mental health professionals estimate that 1-4% of the US population is psychopathic.
Great, I estimate that at least 50% of mental health “professionals” are psychopaths…. this after sitting through a post-incident investigation with my former employer.
I’d guess that 99% of Congress and the Executive branch of the gubmint is psychopathic. And you can take that all the way down through the state and local level as well.
When we worked at the mental health clinic, the advice to new workers was: Staff have name badges, patients do not have name badges. Everyone at the clinic wore scrubs, so attire was not an item one could use to discriminate between staff and patients. Staff frequently exhibited “strange” personal habits that made differentiation from patients difficult. Thus the name badges vs. the no name badges to tell the difference.
Well that 90lb woman would be me and will be 71 years old in a few weeks.
What’s my chance of surviving, I live in a college town in Central Texas with low crime rate but that doesn’t mean zero crime rate.
Keep a Colt 380 semiautomatic pistol under my pillow at all times!
This. I don’t care if not a single criminal has a single gun. The average man is stronger than the average woman. Younger men are usually more fit than elderly men. Multiple assailants generally have the advantage over individuals. What the gun grabbers propose to do is revert back to the days of dog-eat-dog gladiatorial combat, where you had as much right to your life, property, and dignity as you could defend. And with a straight face they call it civilized.
Their view from lofty Mt. Olympus is somewhat distorted…no matter which country they purport to
rule…er, govern.There’s a lot of ways to murder somebody. A gun is just one way. But a gun is also an effective deterrant against most of the other ways.
Private firearm ownership prevents far more violent crime than it ever enables. We just don’t get to clearly see by how much because crimes prevented from happening don’t go into statistics.
We appear to have devolved into some sort of fantasy world where the IRS is expecting criminals to claim their stolen goods and drug sales as income on their 1040s.
With that logic why would the government not pass legislation making it a crime not to report that you didn’t shoot someone?
“We appear to have devolved into some sort of fantasy world where the IRS is expecting criminals to claim their stolen goods and drug sales as income on their 1040s.”
Cliff, taxes are what got Al Capone convicted and sentenced to Alcatraz, that’s why. It’s for selective enforcement of who the .gov wants to target…
And they didn’t want to impose the $600 banking rule to go after the rich.
Americas crime rate and suicides are high because of gunms, nothing else matters.
I just realized something, with your prehensile tail, you can fire a gunm. You don’t need opposable thumbs… 🙂
If you look at a possums front feet they look a lot like a hand. Thunmbs and all. The biggest problem would be finding a gunm small enough.
.9mm?
“Guns don’t deteriorate or go away with time.”
Exept for all those that left their arms at the bottom of the local body of water after that accident. Even cosmoline only lasts so long.
Their priorities show you what they care about.
For example, we could ask for a mental health exam before anyone buys a gun in the hope of reducing suicides.
No No Just NO. Why in the hell would we want anti gun doctors/phychiatrists put in charge of saying who can and cannot own guns, or are sane/insane for that matter.
Bad idea IMHO
Very bad idea. Leaving a right up to the decision of a nut doctor is not a good idea at all.
And just for fun, go to 5 different nut doctors and 5 of them will have a different diagnosis. They’ll all give you the same pill however, which amounts to whatever is in vogue at the time.
Also doctors/phychiatrists often overlook people that are certifiable bat crap crazy any way.
Hell there are something like 50 million+ of Biden voters that need to be in padded rooms.
Some how they are completely ignored by most doctors?!
Those that advocate for the elimination of firearms are idiots. You would first have to cure or control all mental illness. Secondly the violent tendency inherent in all humans would have to be removed. Only then would the elimination of firearms, which is impossible and nothing but a pipe dream be possible. Since the inherent violent tendencies of the human species can not be removed, gun control is a doomed exercise in futility.
When does one imagine the first murder tool place? Caveman days when someone got mad and clobbered his neighbor in the next cave over for taking a crap near his entrance to his cave?
Guns were invented to replace knives. Knives were created to replace sharp rocks. If we’re going to work backwards on weapons, where does it end?
A person would have to be a blithering idiot to think any meaningful gun control, which is ALWAYS a failure, can or will occur.
Well according to the bible it was over some sheep shit.
Something about somebody getting mad cause all they had was turnips and another guy was burning up sheep.
I never read the bible because I don’t read fiction.
Spiritually *and* creatively impoverished…and bragging about it. Figures.
You’ve read the news, yes? At least 30% fiction. Perhaps more, topic dependent.
Basically possum, we’re still chunking rocks at each other since Cain and Able. We just figured out how to do it a lot faster, repeatedly, and more accurately.
It’s what humans do.
“More inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s causes.”—von Pufendorf
Consider some one hundred million people slaughtered by dacian’s idols on the altars of communism and socialism in the past hundred years. Gulags, torture camps, killing fields, and death squads are all human constructs. Certainly we are inspired by the evil one, but we do not often enough reject his machinations.
See some of the Peterson lectures or Lewis doodles for their observations.
It is unfortunate sheltered progressive democRats cannot ask murder victims for their up close and personal view on being unarmed, helpless and murdered.
For those who understand the consequences of being unarmed and at the mercy of real evil they will tell any buffoon who promotes gun control to go pound sand.
Ok, lets look at the various gun control ideas. Registration and oversight of all gun sales, whether through a dealer or in private. Ok, how manu guns are around since the Civil war with the advent of cartridge fed, breach loading and repeating firearms up to whaen the ATF started requiring the transfer forms? The majority of which will have no paper trail beyond perhaps where the gun was shipped from the manufacturer. How many modern transfer form guns have traded hands privately in the last 50 years and again, no record exists beyond the first retail sale. Add in those stolen or misplaced and recovered by someone else. Good luck getting most of those guns registered. How many people would not comply with such an order or mandate?
Next is the back ground check foolishness. Any idea in how you get billy red neck or tyrone gheto punk to get a back ground check in the alley or behind the trailer court? Or get Fred and John out at the deer camp to drive 20 miles into town to sell or buy that shotgun or rifle? Likely not going to happen. Any plans on how you keep willie the wife beater from buying a gun he can’t legally own from bobby the burgler behind the bar? Anyone with more than 2 working brain cells knows the only people doing things as required today are not the people you need to worry about.
Next thing is the idea of the mental health exam. Again, useless. Any exam is just a snapshot of where someone is at today. No one can determine what state their mental health will be in 6 months or next year or in a decade. Anyone who claims a test will determine future stability or possible issues is lying to you and themselves.
And then there is the claim of how we must do whatever ” For the Children” Or something will somehow prevent crime or suicide or something else. Pure BS.
And lastly, prohibition or confiscation. How well did the prohibition of alcohol work out? Caused more problems than it was supposed to solve. Of course the idea was if we could get rid of ” Demon Rum” all our social ills would be cured overnight. Not quite what happened.
Prohibit some type of firearm and those who would commit crimes will just go to the next available item, or just ignore the law anyway and get their weapons from outside the country. Confiscation? Well, go for it. But, I won’t be the poor soul going out to pick up the prohibited weapons. I prefer to keep body and soul together a little longer.
And, check out how such laws are working out in Canada. A pretty fair percentage of gun owners are telling the government to stick their prohibition someplace uncomfortable.
Also, I would like the people who are crying about the “Assault Weapons, or Military Style Weapons” to define without names or model numbers, just what they are wanting to ban. And they explaine how those rifles are any more dangerous than something built in the 1940’s or 1950’s Magazine fed, semi-auto rifles have been on the market for around a century. That cat is not only out of the bag, but up the street and around the corner. Just as the scary ghost guns are never going to be eliminated. People can still build guns from scratch at home with or without polymer frames or prepackaged kits. Built several myself.
Agreed. I don’t know if I was in 6th or 7th grade when a group of us made zip guns out of a piece of 1 x 2, a car radio antenna and a door latch bolt and rubber bands. It fired .22LR. Not terribly accurately, but accurate enough to shoot at tin cans a dozen feet away. If I, not terribly mechanically inclined, could do it at 13 or 14 years old, I figure a mechanically inclined adult could do a much better job in his garage with some machining equipment than a 13 year old in the woods with whatever tools all of us were able to smuggle out of the house.
I believe the Garand M-1 semiautomatic rifle has passed its 80th birthday already. Proclaimed by General Patton as the finest battle rifle ever invented.The government is still selling stocks of them re-imported to the U.S. from NATO and other “allied countries”. They have been doing that since sometime in the 60s when they were selling brand new Garands for what they cost the government during WWII.
I know I am an Old Fudd but I would feel better armed with an M-1 than an M-16 family of rifles. Especially at anything over 300 yards.
I fantasize about a world without progressives. And I say to myself, what a wonderful world.
Several decades ago, I put together a video of various atrocities and synchronized it to the soundtrack of Lois Armstrong’s “Wonderful World”, and each time the line of “skies of blue…” played, I had a famous clip like the ‘Challenger’ explosion or the ‘1988 Ramstein Flutag disaster’, superimposed on it. What a shame, I lost that clip in a hard drive crash a number of years later… 🙁
Oooooo, Geoff is really cool and edgy.
I am cool, unlike a whimpering fuckwit like you, little boy.
(A very little boy, I bet, if you know what I mean! 🙂 )
Hey, nameless, brainless troll,
dacian the stupid says he’ll save space for you at the bottom of the cable . . . where you belong.
It’s difficult to appreciate the good without the bad.
“It’s difficult to appreciate the good without the bad.”
Damn straight.
Noted philosophers ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ once said this :
Beavis – “Why do we have things that suck (like my mentally-ill demented troll)? Why can’t everything just be cool (like Geoff PR)?
Butt-head – “We must have things that suck, how else would we know what is cool?” 🙂
Louis Armstrong, was it not..
Said in reply to Ralph, “and I say to myself, what a wonderful world”.
CRIMANALS , CRAZYS , RUIN IT ALL FOR THE REST OF US LAW ABIDEN .
JUST WAY IT IS . STAY SAFE AND ALERT BEST YA ALL CAN.
Facts,arguments, I don’t give a shit. Pro gun, anti gun, I Don’t Care..
The thing is, self defense is a Natural Instinct. We are Born to avoid being hurt and use any means to protect ourselves. It’s NATURAL. That humans have developed tools that make self protection easier doesn’t mean we don’t have a right to use them.
Thought exercise for the gun grabbers.
You wake up, you’re out in the boonies, no knowledge of where you are or how you got there. You start walking. You see a rock you can carry and maybe throw. Would you pick it up? Ohh,Lookie! A stout looking stick about three feet long! Pick it up? Yeah? But, you can’t defend yourself,, right?
Last time we had a world without guns, the homicide rate in Europe was around 40/100k. That’s comparable with the most dangerous countries in the world today (ex Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador, Lesotho)
A world without guns is a dangerous place where those quick to resort to violence dominate those who are not.
A study in South Korea revealed differences in people who planned suicide attempts compared to those who attempted suicide impulsively. About 13 percent of the sample had made a planned attempt, while nearly 87 percent had made an impulsive attempt.
https://www.sprc.org/news/planned-impulsive-suicide-attempts
A First Responder once told me “I have never been able to rescue a person who blew his brains out but I have rescued people who have attempted to drown themselves, hang themselves, overdose on drugs and even slit their rists.
Also the T Tag article claims that safe storage laws prevent people from defending themselves in case of a break in. Pure bullshit as one can access a gun from a full size safe or desk safe or trigger lock in often only 1 or 2 seconds. The person breaking in will make one hell of a racket and does not know the lay out of the house or even where you might be in it giving you even more time to access your weapon.
Also safe storage laws prevent many smash and grab thefts of guns in homes and gun stores after hours.
Also here is a Harvard Study that proves gun owners do not stop millions of times in self defense
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
Dacian: it be nice if you spoke from experience, and not just “studies” and half baked theories. I was the victim of a home invasion where I would have been definitely killed, I barely had time to grab a gun just lying on a mantle, and the psycho was nearly on top of me. It’s that quick. Guns do save lives, it did mine. Maybe you should interview successful defenses, people that used a gun to save their lives. Instead of theories that are posed to support agendas. Do you think plantation owners wanted their slaves armed? Of course not. Me and millions of people are alive due to gun ownership, regardless whether we had to actually fire it or not. Guns saves lives. I won’t be disarmed because some tom fool commits suicide with one. Learn not to try and control everyone around you and just make your own personal zone safe. My rights end at the end of my driveway, is a good motto. Peace.
“the T Tag article claims that safe storage laws prevent people from defending themselves in case of a break in”
Storage laws have literally never reduced crime anywhere in the world. The burden of proof isn’t on us to prove why we can exercise our basic human rights. The burden of proof is on you.
“Also safe storage laws prevent many smash and grab thefts of guns in homes and gun stores after hours.”
Bald faced lie.
Just when I think dacian the stupid can’t descend any deeper into self-parody, he proves me wrong. That “study” you cite is a steaming pile of horseshit. It “studies” absolutely nothing, and makes a ridiculous series of value judgements based on the “researchers” OBVIOUS anti-gun bias, and are completely debunked by all the ACTUAL studies (including several conducted by government agencies).
dacian you are a witless troll. And, by the way, “A First Responder once told me . . . “. That’s called an “anecdote”, you brainless twit. The plural of “anecdote” is NOT “data”, but you have one (that, like most stupid Internet stories, isn’t true, so quit lying). A singular anecdote, even IF true, which yours isn’t, is simply noise. Go spread it somewhere else.
to the Lamp that went out in his head
Common sense would tell even a complete fool you cannot revive a person who blew his brains out and common sense and data proves that many times first responders do indeed save people who tried to commit suicide otherwise we would have no need for first responders. But all this is too far over the head of a deranged nut case like yourself. Your rants are so bizarre even the Far Right would reject them and that is really saying something.
Gee, dacian the stupid, that would be a good story . . . if it were true.
I actually had a cousin (and YES, this is an anecdote) who tried to commit suicide with a handgun. Didn’t hold it correctly (he wasn’t a POTG), and the bullet tore up the front of his skull (kind of like a self-performed lobotomy, like you gave yourself). Lived for six months, on life support. Firearms CAN BE a more effective way to commit suicide than other means . . . but aren’t necessarily. People are inclined to take the pills and the booze and just go to sleep, rather than the act of actually putting the barrel of a gun to your head and pulling the trigger.
But, you gormless t**t, Japan has gun laws that you Leftist/fascists drool over. Now, what is the suicide rate in Japan vs. the U.S.?????
You are a stupid, lying, sack of excrement.
Again you Moron you ignore impulsive and planned suicides. Japan may have more planned suicides and the U.S. may have more impulsive suicides which by the way idiot is what is the majority of U.S. teenage suicide’s are.
Your ignorance is so profound and crass that you are arguing numbers of deaths instead of how many people in the U.S. would be saved if impulsive suicides were lowered which is made so easy by the use of a gun and so deadly as compared to other methods. You cannot see the forest for the trees nor can you even admit the fact that first responders do indeed save lives of people who did not blow their brains out.
And your pathetic attempt to speak about a botched gun suicide is about saving face rather than giving an intelligent counter point. It failed big time as just another of your moronic rants. Try again Moron you are a pathetic joke and the lowest form of naked ape.
And your basis for this startling revelation, oh brainless one?
Right, you pulled it out of you @$$, as usual. You have NO FREAKIN’ IDEA how many suicdies, in either country are “planned” vs. spontaeous. You make assumptions that suit your (pathetic, Leftist/fascist) worldview, and assume they are correct.
Nice job. Now explain the differences in ACTUAL, PER CAPITA RATES of suicide. One would think, using your “common sense” approach (sense isn’t common, and you have none), that a PLANNED suicide, inherently taking longer and requiring more thought and planning, would result in a higher percentage of people choosing NOT to off themselves. But if you completely dipshit hypothesis is true, the facts show exactly the opposite.
You really are stupid, aren’t you? WHAT are the relative suicide rates between Japan and the U.S.? The VAST majority of U.S. “gun deaths” are suicides. Do I like people committing suicide? No. But everyone has the right to go to hell their own way. I’m not here to stop you from making bad decisions (and I am TOTALLY uninterested in having a witless, so-called “educated” moron such as yourself making those decisions for me or anyone else). You decision making capability is amply demonstrated by your living in your mother’s basement, and your overdeveloped right wrist and forearm.
I always wondered why the subject of suicides was always such a trope against guns. Do as I did and research about the vast majority of suicides,. They are liberals or people mentally trapped inside liberal hells. The well adjusted seems to be conservatives while the suicides seem to be mostly liberal. When reality doesn’t match their utopian fantasy world they want to end it all. After all, almost all the leftist rioters were heavy pot smokers, pot and liberalism causes suicidal tendencies, This probably fuels much liberal aversion to guns, they fear using one to attempt suicide. The solution is not less guns but registering liberals, offering them therapy.
So, in order to save someone from Themselves, you’re happy to make Me the victim of a criminal? Seriously, there is no conversation to have. It’s just a straight up, screw You. Your Feelings for the poor suicidal soul are not exclusive to you. I also don’t want them to kill themselves, but for me to be unable to defend myself and family in order to protect Them, from Themselves, is just STEWPID. Imagine that second priority to being murdered and comforting yourself with the idea
I died,my family died, but Bah GAWD we saved a suicidal person from SHOOTING themselves!
You don’t know that a noose works? Or pills? Or any one of a thousand ways to off yourself?
Aand, aside from All of That, do you even know that American citizens were guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms in order to be able to throw off a tyrannical government? You seem to need something to be Perfect in order to agree it is Good. You Do know that people wearing seatbelts still Daahh in wrecks, rii?
You BELIEVE yourself to be a
Big Picture
Deep Thinker
kinda guy.. Let me assure you, neither of those are true.
Imagine that second PRIOR, not priority..
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