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wikipedia.org defines an idée fixe as “a preoccupation of mind held so firmly as to resist any attempt to modify it.” That’s as good a description of the civilian disarmament mindset as you’re gonna get. For an example, check out the comment made by Mr. William Wesling Nagel above. He’s responding to a post on the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Facebook page which suggests that supporters . . .

Ask the Pennsylvania and national media covering this story: Where did Richard Plotts get the gun he used to kill caseworker Barbara Hunt, 53, at this hospital? Plotts had been committed three times before; had a lengthy criminal history involving gun, assault and drug charges; and had been moved out of at least one residence because of a history of violence. Where Did He Get the Gun?

Anti-gunners like the post’s author, Elliot Fineman, blow past the fact that Plotts shouldn’t have been on the street like a NASCAR driver passing a wreck at the bottom of the track. The fact that no law can stop a criminal or crazy from getting a gun – that bad guys can get guns in jail – is simply not acceptable to their world view and, so, invisible. For them, it’s all about the gun (to the point of Germanic capitalization).

Now clock Mr. Nagel’s inability to separate statistics – well, the idea of statistics – from his feelings. A defensive gun use “sure seems to be the exception than the rule.” “Seems” as in “I have no factual evidence upon which to base my conclusion but I’m making a conclusion that fits my preconceived ideas on the subject.”

“Statistically Speaking a Good Guy with a Gun turns into a Bad Guy with a Gun and uses it on the rest of us,” Nagel continues. Statistically speaking, anti-gunners turn their backs on statistics. This despite the large number of [heavily biased and scientifically flawed] studies supporting their cause (e.g., the work produced by anti-gunner and Harvard Health prof David Hemenway). The reason? If the antis are forced to argue facts, they lose.

How many “assault rifles” are used in crimes? Where’s the evidence that outlawing “high capacity” ammunition magazines, A) eliminates criminal access to these magazines, or B) reduces the number of people shot in spree killings? What quantifiable effect does a “one gun a month” law have on illegal gun use? The antis use the phrases “common sense gun control” and “if it saves only one child” a lot because fuzzy logic is all they’ve got.

Mr. Nagel’s comment also betrays a common belief amongst anti-gunners: that anyone with a gun is a potential murderer. The assertion that “A Good Guy with a Gun turns into a Bad Guy with a Gun and uses it on the rest of us” reveals a profound misunderstanding of American society. The vast majority of gun owners, the vast majority of Americans, are not now, and will never be, “bad guys.” A gun is no more transformative of their basic nature than owning a barbecue grill.

The phrase “rest of us” shows Mr. Nagel’s alienation from his nation. He divides people into gun owners and non-gun owners – as if gun owners are a homogenous group of proto-killers. As TTAG’s “I am a gun owner” Facebook gallery reveals, nothing could be further from the truth. American gun owners cross every social, political, sexual and demographic boundary. The only thing they have in common: they all cherish their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.

Like all anti-gunners. Nagel reckons that guns are too dangerous for Good Guys. Guns turn the Good Guys into Bad Guys (or at least they make their Bad Guy thing worse when they do). Good Guys with guns let their firearm(s) fall into “unqualified hands.” And Good Guys use their guns to blow their own brains out. All of these things are possible; none of these things are probable. It’s a distinction the anti-gunners can’t and won’t make, for it completely undermines their crusade.

There’s an even a bigger blind spot, though: Nagel and his anti-ballistic BFFs can’t see the positive side to gun ownership. They refuse to acknowledge the estimated 800k yearly defensive gun uses – even when the stats come from researchers who favor their position. So when Dr. Silverman stopped Mr. Plotts from killing more people at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital there was no way the antis could celebrate the victory. No matter what.

They say no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Unless it does. In which case, the plan is the enemy. Which makes those who adhere to it nothing more than dangerous fools.

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72 COMMENTS

    • I have to agree. Random capitalization is an immediate red flag to me, signaling either a lack of education, or a mind operating at less than proper efficiency.

        • I’m far more disturbed about the fact that Nagel can’t see the most obvious problem with his claim.

          When some deranged person starts shooting-up the place, who do you call? Who do the lefties/progs TELL us to call? The police, of course.

          Otherwise known as: good guys with guns.

          A sane person can’t seriously argue that guns are useless for defense, and that if you need defending you should just call someone ELSE with a gun, who won’t get there in time to do anything useful. When anyone makes this argument, they should be ridiculed remorselessly. And don’t let then give you all that “cops get specialized gun training” crap; most of that training is how not to die and how to separate the good guy from the bad guy when you arrive late to the scene. The folks who are there during the incident need no good/bad guy explanation; they KNOW who the good and bad guys are.

        • You’re forgetting. Cops are different. They have magic suits. You put on the magic suit and none of that stuff applies. You will definitely be good with a gun. So really we need to just get cop uniforms for all the gun owners. That’ll keep us good!

        • No way.

          If you get too many people in cop uniforms who aren’t cops, people will get confused. The cops won’t know who to arrest, and who to lie and cover for. Next thing you know, they’ll be beating other cops and shooting their dogs. A “thick blue line” just won’t work.

    • Or maybe they prefer the Franklin method–Benjamin Franklin wanted all nouns capitalized for easier reading but lost out to Noah Webster, who didn’t.

      See Franklin’s letter to Webster, dated Dec. 26, 1789.

    • Or a native German speaker/writer. In modern-day written German, all nouns get capitalized (not just proper nous). Written English was like this not long ago (1600s? 1700s?) look at old famous English documents and you will notice the proliferation of capitalization.

      • Yes! Even the longest word in the German language has only one capital letter – the first. So it’s Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesselschaftskapitan. Very efficient, those Germans! Most of us don’t have a quota to fill when it comes to capital letters. It seems more a way to indicate emphasis on a point that can’t be made using real-world data.

  1. The antis always seem to forget about target shooting as a valid purpose for gun ownership (recreation), and they forget about pest control: there are millions of white tailed deer, and more than a billion squirrels. EDIT: in the US. This is a HUGE positive to gun ownership even if one wishes to disregard DGU stats.

  2. You can’t fix stupid. A good guy doesn’t turn into a bad guy on a whim. And why all the preoccupation with suicide now? If people want to kill themselves they’ll find a way-with or without a gun. Aren’t you on vacation RF?

    • Correction. They don’t give one flying F about suicide. They only care about suicide by gun. The fact that Japan, Greenland, Korea, France, and myriad other countries have higher or much higher suicide rates than the U.S. does not matter. The fact that we have a high “gun suicide” rate shows that we have a massive “gun violence” problem and banning firearms would be beneficial.

      Likewise, they are never, ever concerned with murder rates or violent crime rates. They are only concerned with murders by gun and “gun crime.” Showing that the U.S. has more of this is a “win” even if our murder rate and violent crime rates are half of the other example country’s. The answer is BAN GUNS to make us more like these other countries that have low gun violence rates (*cough* nevermind that they have more murder and way more violent crime, rape, burglary, assaults, etc than us *cough*)

      • Expanding on this, why the national headlines when a child is accidently shot by an unsecured firearm? Why the calls for criminal penalties in these cases? Why the call for banning of firearms because of these accidents? Well… actually I understand why in those cases but I don’t understand why there’s NONE of this when hundreds to thousands of times as many kids die from ingesting unsecured household chemicals or from drowning in pools and tubs, etc. Where’s the outrage? The calls for bans? The demands for criminal prosecutions?

        If a kid in my relatively small city died from drinking household cleaning products or drowned in the neighbor’s pool I’m not sure it would even make local news. Maybe a single mention on the day it happened. If a kid found a firearm laying around and died or killed another on accident because of it, you’d be damned sure it’s playing nationally on all of the networks and inciting protests and tweets, etc.

        What kills the most people? Accidental causes are color-coded in this chart: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_highlighting_unintentional_injury_2011-a.pdf

        • Because pools, cleaning chemicals, etc. aren’t “Designed to do only one thing – KILL PEOPLE! (And assorted hysteria).

          Yeah, it makes my brain hurt as well…

        • Because as far as these people are concerned, others can die by the thousands and they won’t care. All that matters to them is picking and choosing the deaths that involve a gun and using them as a reason to try to ban guns. More people in the US die of the flu annually (approx. 36,000 per year according to the CDC) than die by misuse of firearms, but you don’t see the anti’s crusading for hand-washing and use of Lysol, do you?

        • All that matters to them is confiscation. They have to scare all the low-information voters into voting for things that are ultimately not in the best interest of honest citizens who wish to hunt or protect themselves.

        • Re: CDC chart
          An awful lot of this is “undetermined,” but it is clear that
          unintentional poison, traffic and falls should all be outlawed. Also
          suicide and suffocation. Eliminate those and almost nobody would die.
          Prohibit old age and pneumonia, and almost everyone would live forever.
          The gun control people are pikers.

        • Given all the people who leave their kids in hot cars, you’d think these nuts would be trying to outlaw cars, but apparently only guns are actually demon-possessed. And they call the right superstitious.

  3. These idiots… Gun owners don’t want their guns stolen, and it very rarely happens. Besides, the only way to justify reduced stolen guns is to either catch the criminals or try to make all guns illegal.

  4. “…Good Guy with Gun turns into Bad Guy with Gun and uses it on the rest of us…”
    Once again, The Grabbers religion of Totemism (the belief that spirits inhabit inanimate objects) rears it’s ugly head. The belief that the gun magically curses a good man to go bad.
    Only one thing left can prevent tragedy, I’m flying immediately to Steyr’s new facility in Bessemer and crop dust it with ground up bats’ wings and monkey blood! THAT’LL stop those evil, cursed, tools of Satan!

    • “…and crop dust it with ground up bats’ wings and monkey blood! THAT’LL stop those evil, cursed, tools of Satan! …”

      Eye of newt. For gosh sake you forgot the eye of newt!

  5. There is an interesting article in Forbes today:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2014/07/28/gun-violence-is-not-a-public-health-issue/

    A Dr saying why Gun Violence is not a medical issue. Interestingly he points out the Philly Dr that used a gun to defend others and then cites another example. The article that he links to

    http://pjmedia.com/blog/media-underplays-successful-defensive-gun-use/?singlepage=true

    actually shows how liberal media omits the facts when a Good Guy with a Gun intercedes. No wonder they all believe it is so rare.

    In fact, if you read the recent articles on the Philly shooting, many of them discount the Dr’s efforts and state that he was subdued by hospital employees when leaving the Dr’s office, conveniently making it unclear that the Dr was one of the two employees that followed the injured but still armed criminal into the hall to disarm him as I understand it. They also omit the Police crediting the Dr. with stopping the criminal.

    • Well, thanks for that. I did in fact see one report that one man came to his assistance (the guy who previously opened and then closed the door) and another which said that 2 employees tackled the bad guy, I did NOT figure out that he was one of the two. And yes, most articles I have seen (other than coverage on Fox) have wished to focus on the Doc’s punishment for his naughty carrying, rather than his good sense, successful defense, and heroic protection of others. We live in a sick world, we need more doctors like these.

  6. While I agree it is emotional denial, it is also his pay check. In order to earn his keep and have access to the Bloomberg gold, he needs an enemy.

    He is simply talking to the crowd, no different than Alex Jones — they are both nut in their own special way

  7. I really do wonder about some people. People like the person who wrote this Facebook post. When they make these grand statements about how people will inevitably ‘go crazy’. Are these people on the edge so much that they have nothing to hold themselves together with? I recall an article on this subject some days back.

    But really beyond that this person just doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Specifically in regards to the issue of just how often us ‘Good Guys’ use our weapons for defense. Even the most conservative data points that it far out numbers the number of people that are killed with weapons.

    • To your first paragraph, yes. They don’t even trust themselves, and they are the most capable person they know, so how can they EVER trust someone else with a gun?

      Projection. Pure and simple.

      Once you start looking for it in anti-gun/anti-gun-rights people, you’ll see it in everything they say and write.

      • Agreed. Projection. He is taking “HIS” fears… and spreading them on like the “I can’t believe its not butter” guy. His spread likely covers both his fabricated scenarios and possibly past/prior events he found scary that he saw on the news somewhere or in some hollywood movie.. His whole post is zero logic and big pile of fear.

        Statistically speaking a good guy with a gun turns into a bad guy with a gun and uses it on the rest of us.”
        Sweet Jesus. What do we do about all those cops roaming the street?

        • Perhaps he doesn’t recognize cops as “good guys” already. More to the point, perhaps his panic is due to the fact he knows there are over 100 million good guys with guns, how will the planet survive when we all “go bad”? But I doubt he actually knows much of anything that is true.

  8. I usually post as GoodGuyWithAGun, that is, until i picked one up today, and it began whispering in my ear…

    • Well, now, don’t go listening to those cranky guns and their ugly nonsense. Maybe all it needs is a good scrubbing and some fresh oil. If that doesn’t adjust its attitude it may be time to schedule an appointment with the gunsmith for a thorough examination.

  9. If every “Good Guy with a gun” is just waiting to turn into a “Bad guy with a gun,” then what does that make a “Good guy” without a gun? Then it must mean every “Good Guy” is just waiting to transform into a Bad Guy, is that it??? Every. Single. good. person…… just waiting to turn into a bad person. Yeah, I’m reaaaally seeing that.

    • “If every “Good Guy with a gun” is just waiting to turn into a “Bad guy with a gun,” then what does that make a “Good guy” without a gun? ”

      Potentially worm food.

  10. “American gun owners cross every social, political sexual and demographic boundary. The only thing they have in common: they all cherish their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms.”

    I must admit that invoking RKBA in its full form does tend to annoy me, and make me want to stop listening.

    I don’t care that you want guns, or believe that you have the ‘right’ to them.

    “American gun owners cross every social, political, sexual and demographic boundary. The only thing they have in common: they all cherish their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to practical and equal SELF-PROTECTION.”

    This sounds far better in my opinion, because guns are the most “equal” thing to protect yourselves from crime and physical harm.

    You don’t “need” a handgun to hunt or pop vermin, in fact trying to shoot a whitetail or a squirrel with a Glock looks outrageous.

    But a handgun is the most practical way to defend yourself, particularly while out and about.

    Just a thought, moving forward in the campaign for gun rights.

    • “I must admit that invoking RKBA in its full form does tend to annoy me, and make me want to stop listening.”

      I’d say you are missing the whole “Right” part of “Right to Keep and Bear Arms” thing.

      It means you don’t have to have any specified reason to keep and bear arms…it is it’s own end point.

      By wording it as “right to self defense,” you are indeed eliminating all other reasons to own firearms as a “right,” including killing animals. Feeding oneself is, indeed a natural right just as much is self defense…as is protecting livestock, etc, etc.

      And, it’s just as much a natural right to choose what personal private property you are going to own without any further explanation necessary.

      YOU don’t have to approve of WHY anyone else owns a gun. It is the fundamental RIGHT that IS at the very existence of the argument. To throw that out is to concede to the Statist world view.

      • This!

        Though self protection through equalization of force is a very important talking point in a debate, and unfortunately debates are necessary. Standing up to the antis and saying over and over: “It’s a right, I don’t have to explain it!” won’t get us far. Plus, people think if you won’t explain every detail of every motivation for every action in your life that you must be up to some shady shit because people don’t respect people’s privacy anymore and don’t know how to mind their own business.

    • Here’s a thought for you, Piet. I have a friend who’s a retired PA LEO, and owns a small farm now. While working on his property, he carries a Ruger LCR in .22 Mag, and swears it is absolutely perfect for popping varmints from rabbits to groundhogs, while being convenient and comfortable to carry and shoot. While I am sure that if someone attacked him on his farm he would use it to defend himself, that is not what it is for, and not what it was designed for. If we take your attitude, the right to own such a gun would disappear quickly, since it is not built for the specific task of self defense. The right the constitution guarantees is RKBA, not self defense. I believe if you consider the ramifications of your position, you will retract it.

  11. Actually all of those scenarios would be exceptions to the rule.

    The more common occurrence would be, ” Good guy has gun, nothing out of the ordinary happens, and life goes on.”

  12. By Nagel’s logic then.
    A person with a camera is now a professional photographer.
    A person with a paintbrush is now an artist.
    A person with a pair of scissors is now a seem stress or tailor.
    A person in a kitchen is a professional chef.

    To think that, “A good guy with a gun, turns into a bad guy with a gun,” is a seriously unsupported guess at best.

    I’m typing on my Android device right now. Does that make me an IT guru?

    • I think it would be more like:

      A person with a camera is now a stalker.
      A person with a paintbrush is now a graffiti vandal.
      A person with a cleaver is now Jason Voorhees.
      etc.

      Don’t forget to give your examples a negative outcome – William Nagel doesn’t like positive results.

    • Oh, you have an Android device?! Well, then you will become a black-hat hacker!

      – don’t hack my bank account, Bro!!

  13. Onr must occasionally light incense and stage a ritual to appease the anima of the guns before they go bad…Im suprised more gun maintenance literature doesn’t mention this

  14. Just so I understand this correctly…

    I should not be allowed I own a gun because eventually (today? Tomorrow? Next week? Etc) I will turn into a bad guy with a gun. The only people allowed to possess guns should be the police, the military, and other government entities, upon whom I should rely for protection.

    Umm, what do I do when the guns turn all of THEM into bad guys?

  15. The only good guys using their weapons against us are the militarized police and those same politicians wielding what they precieve as their own personal military.

  16. To Expand on Jeremy S’ point of the lack of outrage for other causes of children’s death, I heard a very interesting story on NPR this AM.
    I seems that in Florida because of lack of access to swimming pools, black children drown at a rate five times higher than whit kids. So what did a group of activists do? The got a pool built and essentially, threw the kids in the water. Meaning they exposed children to the danger but neutralized it by teaching them how to swim. A great deal of true common sense in this case.
    Not, lets keep them away from the water, let’s teach them what to do with water.
    So, let’s go over the universal truth here.
    Something presents a mortal danger to our children.
    Teach children how to deal with the danger.

  17. Minor suggestion: do not routinely cite Wikipedia, even for simple things such as a definition. It detracts from the credibility of the author, especially when it is in the first sentence. Merriam Webster or Encyclopedia Britannica would be okay alternatives considering there is a editorial process for the production of those products.

  18. If we are to believe they are willing to do everything needed to save the life of just one child why are they not pushing for a nation wide ban on abortion?

    • Because it’s not a child until it comes out of the womb and becomes dependent on people other than the parents.

  19. Your use of the term “fuzzy logic” was very poor. As fuzzy logic refers to degrees of truth in reasoning. Not extremes, and unsubstantiated false truth the antis are so proficient in.

    • Actually, “fuzzy logic” has a distinct IT meaning these days as a non concrete method of arriving at a conclusion, is a very advanced concept. Other than that, it is beyond my capability to understand, much less explain, but believing it refers to muddled thinking is not correct.

  20. Using Mr. Nagel’s logic……..anyone with a set of balls, is a potential rapist…………well………guess Mr Nagel will never have to worry about that charge.

  21. What sails past everybody (including YOU, Robert) is that no matter what so-called ‘evidence’ is presented to justify gun control, it is irrelevant, whether it would work or not.

    The right to keep and bear arms is fundamental and unalienable.

    It is therefore beyond any such considerations.

    Those were the ground rules established at the beginning of this ‘game’.

    No one has any choice but to play by them.

    Period.

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