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TTAG-Sara Tipton

Obama Just Had A Huge “Accidental” Effect On Violent Crime & Murder the headline at madworldnews.com proclaims. There’s nothing much you don’t already know in the article: the President’s crusade against gun rights created a backlash that increased the number of gun sales and concealed carriers. The article includes stats and a Facebook post and caption that I shared on my personal timeline. (Yes, she asked my permission, and I gladly gave it. Anything to promote gun rights and concealed carry.)  But did her pro-gun piece sway others? Well . . .

I want to think so. I want to think that rational humans will read a well-researched article on gun ownership. I want to believe that people will look at the facts and consider common sense logic and conclude that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are effective at countering crime, both personally and for society. I want to believe that real information counters the bloody shirt-waving and the unicorn farts Utopian ideal that Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and the Campaign to Stop Gun Violence promote in their attempt to ban guns.

But wanting something doesn’t make it so. “Low information voters” – who often determine the results of our elections – are unwilling and/or incapable of considering facts. Period. They’re driven by emotion. The media’s constant focus on horrific firearms-related crime leaves them with a single thought: the cops and the government didn’t protect these folks. They can’t protect me or my family.

The next thought is simple enough: I need a gun. It’s a selfish thought, far from the liberals’ “it takes a village” philosophy. It has nothing to do with protecting liberty from a tyrannical government. But it’s a point-of-view that that promotes gun ownership and gun rights. So it’s not well-reasoned articles that move the needle on gun control. It’s screaming hysterical headlines, often accompanied by anti-gun agitprop. That’s not ideal but it’s effective. I can live with that. Can you?

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82 COMMENTS

  1. The article is a bit heavy on loaded language. I get that she doesn’t like Obama, but calling his entire presidency a failure needlessly shuts out readers who may not agree with it. She needs to stick to the subject at hand; it could be the best “researched” article ever written, but that will be overshadowed if she is unable to resist the temptation to editorialize all over it.

    • Whether you believe it or not, His Presidency as not been great.
      ACA (Obamacare) what a joke, It gave insurance companies the
      right and ability to substantially increase premium, continually.
      ” if everyone has it,(health insurance) it will cost you less!” BULL CRAP.

      As a person with a company plan … we DON”T GET NO (any) SUBSIDIES!
      Our premiums have increased substantially and services reduced since Obamacare kicked in,
      and we have been told the premiums will increase almost 30% more in mid 2016.

      As a fiscal point, the government probably would have spent ( gave away)
      MUCH less money without the “MANDATE” if it simply paid for those medicai
      services as needed by uninsured persons. Instead Uncle Sam is paying out
      rebates for premiums paid out the insurance companies.
      There was NO Reform to fix healthcare, just more handouts to big corporations.

      As a country we are worse off and more divided due to his policies, conduct and comments.

    • I disagree. I avoid the fight, I open carry to discourage an attack, and then if needed would use the firearm to stop a threat. I’m not a pacifist but why risk injury to my family or livelihood by fighting?

  2. I can live with it for the good reason the article points out, people often operate out of raw emotion with facts falling to the side when making important decisions. The pro-2A people know this reality all to well. This low-logic raw (fear) emotion is how the anti-gun community gain votes, so fair is fair, the pro-gun can too. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

    Sara Tipton is clearly unique, a good unique. If there are other women like her, I never met one. My hat is off to her for displaying a level-headed candor and creating a positive role model.

  3. The mind conditioning/brainwashing of a Liberal/progressive upbringing is amazing in being able to convince a human being all things that violate mother nature, logic, fact, experience, and facts are in fact, true, and a “law of the universe”.

    It is a mental and emotional delusion that usually takes the facing of ones death to realize the fallacy upon which it is based. I speak from personal experience.

    It is a rare person indeed that can be shown the error of their ways without a near death experience,

  4. There may come a time very soon where low information voters, in their quest for free stuff, help create a government that is so violently intolerant of civilian gun ownership that peace is no longer possible.

    • And those sheep will most certainly be bleating at their loudest when they finally realize that the wolves they installed in the government are ultimately seen to be no match for an armed citizenry.

      • It’s a little more insidious than even that. These sheep don’t willfully install wolves in government. They do, however, willfully install sheepdogs and shepherds in government. Now, that may sound good. Shepherds and their dutiful sheepdogs are often depicted as simple, principled souls tending to their flock, watching over them, protecting them from those oh so evil wolves. Well.

        They’re only herding them, tending to them, and protecting them, so that they can use and consume the sheep themselves. Shepherds are not pastoral paladins. They’re upstream agents in the butchery business.

        These low information voters, aka complete and utter, emotion-driven morons, think they’re exchanging freedom for protection by granting government shepherds illimitable dominion over their lives to keep the wolves from the door. However, not only does government fail to hold up its end of that Faustian bargain, the government is often itself as bad or worse than what it’s supposedly standing guard against.

        Never mind wolves in sheep’s clothing, pay attention to the shepherd right there in shepherd’s clothing. There’s the imminent threat to liberty.

        • Yep. That’s about right.

          The sheep are lulled to sleep by what they dream to be the sounds of the shearers, but in fact they are the whirring machines of the slaughterhouse.

  5. I can live with that. In fact, I love it.

    The police and government obviously aren’t capable of stopping crime and keeping people safe, otherwise we wouldn’t see all these heartrending tragedies on the news.

    If I don’t want to be one of those all-too-common tragedies, I’m going to have to protect myself. So what’s the best tool in the world for stopping violent criminals…hmmm…maybe one of those pistols the police use? I better get one of those. What, the media says I shouldn’t have one? But what about all this crime? I need to defend myself here.

    The Old Media’s constant drumbeat of fear/crime/fear/crime has been all too effective.

    Ah, delicious irony.

  6. Reading this article I was struck by a thought, ” What if it’s just that simple, that though the excuse ( safety, crime, racism etc. ) may change, is the real reason so many people want American people disarmed is that it does level the playing field. If we aren’t frightened, if we aren’t crying out for help, that’s the problem they are really trying to address? I’ve read that more than half of the country is on some type of government assistance, and that is a success.

  7. I would change the caption slightly to

    I am not armed so that I can start fights. I am armed so that I can hopefully walk away from fights. Whether or not my attacker can walk away isn’t my concern.

  8. Calling BS as usual on the brainwashed gun-slaves who are nothing but sheeple and profits for the NRA and the gun lobby.

    Stupid people are the ones who kill more efficiently and far easier with guns, Sara. Stupid people are the ones who let their little kids get hold of guns and the kids suffer the consequences. Stupid people are the ones who leave their guns in their cars and they’re stolen. Stupid people are the ones who clean their loaded guns. Stupid people are the ones who consistently attempt to portray the guns as benevolent objects when in fact they exist for killing.

    The answer IS taking away guns. Since everyone seems to agree that idiots with guns kill people, we need to take those guns out of the hands of idiots. It is time for yearly mandatory mental health testing for anyone owning a gun/wanting to purchase a gun/or living in a household with a gun in it. If that evaluation can’t be passed, bye-bye guns.

    Why would any “law-abiding citizen” be against any of those things?

    Look how ignorant you are, Sara. Not a single person has proposed taking guns from a law-abiding person.

    Not one. Judging from your lack of reading comprehension, I concur with you that you WOULD shoot an idiot–yourself.

    You are going to trust the average American moron with protecting us from terrorism, criminals attacks or another gun-nut going rouge by arming everyone? What? The reason there is less violence in other countries is not because of the armed guards in some places, it is because they do not have guns in the hands of anyone who wants one, like we do here. If you want to dispute that more guns leads to less gun violence, then you are an idiot.

    In fact, Lost in the irony of your statement is that Europe, Australia, Japan and Africa of all places has lower crime and homicides than us.

    America has the highest crime rate of any first world country. For that matter, America has a higher crime rate than most 2nd and 3rd world countries. Even a lawless 4th world country like Somalia has a lower per capita crime and murder rate than America.

    Would you like to rephrase whatever ignorance it was you were trying to spew?

    Are you completely stupid or do you think that no one can actually count. Number of murders per year in the Great Britain (gun bans) Australia etc is much lower. In addition, your Swiss example is completely #$%$. Yes, people own guns but they are also in the militia. Outside of that the Swiss population is entirely different and overall their gun laws are much stricter. All the facts are at your fingertips but apparently you let the NRA decide them for you. UK and Australia has less than 1/4 (closer to 1/5th) of the HOMICIDE RATE. That means people killed with guns, knives, clubs and kangaroos all put together. Ergo, we are not doing something right and they are. Also, just want to point out…the reason you want to own carry a gun is because you feel inadequate below the waist or because you cannot do one unassisted chin up or perhaps both. In closing, please do not breed. Seriously, do you even bother to look this stuff up or do you hope that making things up causes them to be true?

    • “Gun owning intelligentsia” is a popular phrase at TTAG; however, intelligence is relative and dynamic according to other variables, a person with intelligence in the 95th percentile still has a five percent chance of doing something relatively ‘stupid’ 5 percent of the time.
      Besides, many supposed experts on intelligence, learning, and mental health base their understandings on questionable attitudes of over a hundred years ago.
      Your second amendment was formulated with a lot more foresight, and hindsight, than you give it credit – but you do still have a point, those who can be objectively demonstrated as irresponsible should at least be helped to be more responsible or given the support of those more responsible in their personal defence.

      • An English Person: “a person with intelligence in the 95th percentile still has a five percent chance of doing something relatively ‘stupid’ 5 percent of the time.”

        That is the dumbest thing I’ve read in a while. 95th percentile in regards to intelligence does NOT mean they have a 5% chance of doing something stupid. It means they have a higher intelligence than 95% of the population. It states nothing about “chance of doing something relatively stupid”. FLAME DELETED

    • Jeebus, tubesteak. You wear your single minded fascism like a proud flag. Any sensible person reading this hate filled rant would get visions of cattle cars and deathcamps. And would want to gun up accordingly.

      Keep up the good work. Every time you speak more guns and ammo get sold. 🙂

    • Willy, you are wasting your time and energy posting on here. Most of us know that you are a shill for the gun grabbers. FLAME DELETED

    • I’m sure you can cite sources for all of your made up statistics, Willy. Please do.

      I also want to know about this amazing country of peace called “Africa”. You know about Boko Haram right? The Rwandan Massacre? Idi Amin? The state of anarchy in Somalia is a fine example. Do you think that the Somalian FBI is collecting statistics and crime reports from local districts and putting forth a statistical brief once a year? Hardly. Countless civil wars over the last 100 years has cost millions of lives in Africa. The strict “no guns for anyone” laws in Tunisia were unable to prevent an ISIS terrorist from taking 38 lives just a few weeks ago. One man, completely unopposed on a beach, in a giant gun-free zone killed 38 people. Police took 47 minutes to respond. And your solution is to take away all of the guns??? How’s that make a lick of sense?

      I’ve got news for you Willy: the fact is that gun sales are soaring and the crime rate in America has dropped by half in 20 years. Both violent crime and non-violent crime. That’s the FBI talking, not me, look at the Uniform Crime Reports published on http://www.fbi.gov. There is NO correlation between gun ownership and crime. None. There may be an inverse relationship but I’m not here to argue that point.

      I’ll address your concept of mandatory mental health testing.

      One – functioning sociopaths (the ones causing the mass shootings) easily pass them because it’s easy to tell a psychiatrist what they want to hear if you have an ounce of sanity left. Take the scumbag who stabbed/crushed/shot his way through Santa Barbara. The police visited him because his family was concerned, they interviewed him and determined he was no threat to anyone just a day or two before his rampage. Take the Charleston scumbag. He lied on his background check, the FBI (whose job it was to investigate the discrepancies) made simple errors in performing their investigation and he got his gun anyway. That’s the best law enforcement agency in the world unable to do the thing you are asking: monitor and prevent gun purchases to those who are not eligible to own them under the current laws.

      Two – you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a civil right is. A right that is dependant on the governing body approving or denying it is not a right at all, but a privilege granted to the citizens. Allow me to give a non-gun example. Change voter registration into a voter licensing program. Apply for the right to vote. If you don’t meet the guidelines set forth because 10 years ago you were depressed and seeing a pshrink and you’ve lost the right to vote? Or maybe the voter licensing program requires a “character review” by local law enforcement (whom you’ve never met). They don’t like you for whatever reason in your 15 minute interview? Denied your voter rights. Doesn’t seem like a right to me. Sad thing is that this is not hypothetical – this is the process in many places to get a firearms owner ID or concealed pistol license. And surprise, surprise, it’s the minority applicants that are getting denied by local law enforcement for arbitrary reasons.

      Another example. Maybe make free assembly and protest require permitting. Maybe you are upset about a city council decision, and you have to apply to the city to hold a peaceful protest. You know, the stand-on-the-corner-and-wave-a-sign sort of protest; “NO ON CITY COUNCILMAN’S RAISES”. But since the city now requires a permit to assemble publicly and protest non-violently, they can just deny your application for protest.

      Civil rights belong to all people whether or not you like them. Sometimes it is messy and inconvenient but they exist for the betterment of society. This Great Experiment is unlike any other in the history of the world; to see what mankind can achieve given true Liberty. Sadly, what we have achieved is mostly to squander it.

      Third point: There are about 100,000,000 gun owners who you’re demanding get some sort of annual mental health test to own a gun. Who’s going to pay for that? Tax dollars? Not hardly. You’ll insist that the gun owners pay the fee. I’m sure that evaluation by trained mental health professionals is cheap, right? Regardless of what it costs, you are now burdening the poor and minority communities who can’t afford it – and they are the people who need it the most. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s where the crime is and where people have the highest likelihood of using a firearm in self-defense. Either way, we now we have a situation where you’ve instituted a poll tax – a tax/fee/charge to exercise any right is strictly prohibited by the US Constitution.

      Final (remember we are talking about your fictional “mental health screenings for all gun owners” concept here). Criminals do not obey laws. The gang members in Chicago, LA, and NOLA are not lining up at the Department of Mental Correctness to get permits to own guns. They aren’t going to gun stores now, they aren’t getting background checks, they aren’t applying for CPLs and getting fingerprinted. They are buying stolen guns from other criminals.

      Two true stories – I have been offered illegal guns twice at prices that are unbelievably cheap. Most recently: $180 for a full-auto AK-47 (yes, a real “assault rifle”) with no serial numbers. Something that should cost $8000-10000 to buy legally, require extensive permitting through the BAFTE, and take likely a year to procure (legally). I declined that offer because I am above the criminal element, just as I expect the entirety of the TTAG readership to be. Criminals will ALWAYS be able to get firearms – they are able to in Japan, Australia, and the UK too, else their gun violence rates would be ZERO.

      What we have is a CRIME problem not a gun problem. Our news media and entertainment industry glorifies violence. Our economy doesn’t work for half the people in the country (or else they wouldn’t need food stamps and taxpayer-subsidized health care). Organized crime exists to supply prohibited substances and they take violent action to protect their trade. I read somewhere (don’t recall where) something that enlightened me… “When people believe in a society, they tend to obey its rules” (paraphased). We have millions of people who no longer believe in this society and THAT’S where our problem is.

      • http://businesstech.co.za/news/government/90808/south-africa-is-one-of-the-most-violent-and-unsafe-countries-in-the-world/

        From article:

        Top 10 least peaceful countries (Capitalized text added since I’m assuming Willy is as bad at geography as I he is at deductive reasoning)

        # Country Index Score
        162 Syria 3.645
        161 Iraq 3.444
        160 Afghanistan 3.427 – AFRICA
        159 South Sudan 3.383 – AFRICA
        158 Central African Republic 3.332 – AFRICA
        157 Somalia 3.307 – AFRICA
        156 Sudan 3.295 – AFRICA
        155 Democratic Republic of the Congo 3.085 – AFRICA
        154 Pakistan 3.049
        153 North Korea 2.977

      • Ah, Look at what weak arguments the gun nuts have given me that have been debunked many times.

        Hyperbole is the last, desperate resort of fools who dislike social change but have no rational argument against it. Your reply comments would be weak even if you managed to find an article about a subject that was vaguely related your little rants.

        More guns = more deaths. Dozens of studies have found the same result. Even more would have found that result if Republicans/the NRA (same thing, really) had not banned government funding of research into gun violence.

        Illinois loosened their gun laws about 2 years ago and CCWs have been freely available since then in Chicago. Shootings and murders have only gone up. The more you know….

        Listen to this you guy trying to act like the safe countries I mentioned are so is so rough lol. Hey…by the way….The U.S. gun death and crime rate is 5 times those countries I mentioned.

        Maybe instead of using “I love my guns” as a reason to arm everybody, why don’t you look at the stats of gun use in the US, States with lax gun laws have higher crime and murder rates than states with strict laws.

        But all guns are owned buy legal gun owners before a criminal uses them…a lot are stolen from the owners which proves criminals would not have them if you didnt.

        Sometimes it helps to do a little research before you just start making stuff up. Maybe you wouldn’t look so ignorant.

        According to your logic, I guess we shouldn’t have ANY laws since they don’t really stop anything.

        Any trained monkey can spew out some numbers like you did, but it takes a higher level of intelligence and education to understand how the numbers were determined and how they relate to real world situations.

        BTW Alex Jones, NRA, Glenn Beck and the gun lobby makes millions off you idiots. Just keep that in mind next time you tin foil hat cultists screaming about the globalists

        The Internet has given a platform for all these conspiracy nutters and TTAG seems to be the biggest propaganda nest for you terroristic right-wing militia nuts..

        • So, you agree Afghanistan is in Africa or wasn’t that as considered and rational a reply as you thought it was?

        • You know, I HAVE done my research and provided two sources for data. To be honest, I use to be just like you, a low-information voter who believed every infographic that Forward Progressives spoon fed me. About two years ago I started following up on their data as part of a bid to be more intellectually honest. And it got we where I am. I’m still waiting for you to support any of your data with a citation. Such as your claim that Illinois is much worse now that people have CCW permits. Maybe you can find me some examples of permit-holding citizens in Illinois that are committing crimes. After all, if that’s the supposed cause then that shouldn’t be too hard for you to find.

          I love that you’re throwing out a bunch of ad hominems like attacking my character is going to work. I’m not an NRA member. Not SAF, not GOA, none of them. I don’t listen to Alex Jones, read Infowars, Breitbart, or FOX News. I voted for Obama twice (which I admit was a mistake the second time around but I thought he was better than Flip Bombney). I mostly listen to MSNBC for news on Satellite radio while I drive my alternative-fueled car to a tech job. I’m a moderate who hates both political party, who looked at data from non-biased sources: the FBI and CDC primarily – and came to the conclusion that the gun control crowd has utterly failed.

          A fine example albeit a little dated (2 years): http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/14/disarming-realities-as-gun-sales-soar-gun-crimes-plummet/

          From said article:
          “According to DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. gun-related homicides dropped 39 percent over the course of 18 years, from 18,253 during 1993, to 11,101 in 2011. During the same period, non-fatal firearm crimes decreased even more, a whopping 69 percent.

          Pew researchers observed that the huge amount of attention devoted to gun violence incidents in the media has caused most Americans to be unaware that gun crime is “strikingly down” from 20 years ago. In fact, gun-related homicides in the late 2000s were “equal to those not seen since the early 1960s.” Yet their survey found that 56 percent believed gun-related crime is higher, 26 percent believed it stayed about the same, and 6 percent didn’t know. Only 12 percent of those polled thought it was lower.”

          I’d say you are in the low information group who is unaware that the USA is basically as safe as it has ever been since the FBI was founded and statistics were gathered.

          You’re also repeating a “debunked” gun-grabber myth. The NRA/Congress did not ban gun research. They prevented the CDC from conducting certain studies that could only be used to curtail civil rights – and they didn’t even ban those studies. They chose not to fund them because they were advocating restricting civil rights. The CDC and FBI both still study the issue extensively and publish their findings annually.

          Some states with lax firearms laws have higher crime rates. Some states with lax firearm laws have astoundingly low crime rates. Take Vermont as a fine examples – Bernie Sanders’ home state has what are considered the least restrictive laws in the nation and is considered one of the safest.
          http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381136/vermont-safe-and-happy-and-armed-teeth-charles-c-w-cooke

          Crime and violence is far more complex an issue than merely the presence of a deadly weapon. I see economic, demographic, and population density as some of the strongest correlations. A wealthy, homogeneous population does not commit crimes against each other. If you think you’re helping the cause of reducing crime by repeating your talking points, then you are doing yourself and your cause a disservice because you are ignoring the social factors that contribute to crime while focusing on the tool used to commit it.

          I’m sure you’ll dismiss this as an outlier without giving it a second thought. That’s the problem; you aren’t even considering that there’s a possibility that you are wrong or even just misled. If you have been fed the wrong, biased info all your life there is no wonder you have the erroneous stance you do. Have you ever heard of commission bias? That the results of a study are shaped by the expectations of those conducting it?

          Here’s one of those mythical “banned” studies into gun violence and suicide from Harvard School of Law (I’m sure they’re “just a front for the NRA,” right?) http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf – this was published in Harvard’s Journal of Law and Public Policy.

          From the article:
          “Since at least 1965, the false assertion that the United States has
          the industrialized world’s highest murder rate has been an artifact
          of politically motivated Soviet minimization designed to hide the
          true homicide rates.2 Since well before that date, the Soviet Union
          possessed extremely stringent gun controls3 that were effectuated
          by a police state apparatus providing stringent enforcement.4 So
          successful was that regime that few Russian civilians now have
          firearms and very few murders involve them.5 Yet, manifest suc‐
          cess in keeping its people disarmed did not prevent the Soviet
          Union from having far and away the highest murder rate in the
          developed world.6 In the 1960s and early 1970s, the gun‐less So‐
          viet Union’s murder rates paralleled or generally exceeded those
          of gun‐ridden America. While American rates stabilized and then
          steeply declined, however, Russian murder increased so drasti‐
          cally that by the early 1990s the Russian rate was three times
          higher than that of the United States. Between 1998‐2004 (the lat‐
          est figure available for Russia), Russian murder rates were nearly
          four times higher than American rates.

          [T]here is no consistent significant positive association be‐
          tween gun ownership levels and violence rates: across (1)
          time within the United States, (2) U.S. cities, (3) counties
          within Illinois, (4) country‐sized areas like England, U.S.
          states, (5) regions of the United States, (6) nations, or (7)
          population subgroups . . .

          In 2004,
          the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation
          from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government
          publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to
          identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, sui‐
          cide, or gun accidents.15 The same conclusion was reached in
          2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then‐
          extant studies.

          Although the reason is thus obscured, the undeniable result
          is that violent crime, and homicide in particular, has plum‐
          meted in the United States over the past 15 years.34 The fall in
          the American crime rate is even more impressive when com‐
          pared with the rest of the world. In 18 of the 25 countries sur‐
          veyed by the British Home Office, violent crime increased
          during the 1990s.35 This contrast should induce thoughtful
          people to wonder what happened in those nations, and to
          question policies based on the notion that introducing increas‐
          ingly more restrictive firearm ownership laws reduces violent
          crime. Perhaps the United States is doing something right in
          promoting firearms for law‐abiding responsible adults.

          There is no social benefit in decreasing the availability of
          guns if the result is only to increase the use of other means of
          suicide and murder, resulting in more or less the same
          amount of death. Elementary as this point is, proponents of
          the more guns equal more death mantra seem oblivious to it.
          One study asserts that Americans are more likely to be shot
          to death than people in the world’s other 35 wealthier na‐
          tions.46 While this is literally true, it is irrelevant—except,
          perhaps to people terrified not of death per se but just death
          by gunshot. A fact that should be of greater concern—but
          which the study fails to mention—is that per capita murder
          overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in sev‐
          eral other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by
          strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.4

          Let me repeat what I started with. NO ONE has spoon fed me any of this information. I’m not getting data or sources from anyone but Google. I started two years ago with a liberal anti-gun bias – I sold off family heirlooms because I bought into the “a gun in the house is more likely to kill you” argument (not realizing that this was a simplistic analysis of the ratio homicide-by-gun to suicide-by-gun. What a horrible mistake THAT was. I found these articles above when I started searching for some unbiased sources and found compelling arguments from credible sources (Forbes, Pew, FBI, CDC, Harvard).

          I doubt sincerely I’m going to change your mind. But this is great opportunity to refresh myself on all the reasons that my cause is Just. I doubt you’ll even click one link or read one contrary article to your dogma. I dare you to do it. I dare you to read what Harvard published and refute it. WITH SOURCES PLEASE.

        • And remember, willy. This is a pro gun site. Even tho you’re an anti gun, fascist troll every time you comment hear you add strentgh in numbers to the pro gun cause. Senators and congressmen are told of the majority of Americans wanting less gun laws and sites like this with their numbers of hits are used as references on the pro gun side.

          You actually benefit the pro gun cause with every comment here. Thanks for insuring more guns for all and more rights to carry said guns in public.

        • An English Person — I saw my error immediately after I had posted it. Much easier to digest my own wall of text when it’s displayed as a post. With 7 minutes and 2 seconds of edit time remaining, I was unable to edit my article, I call BUG on that.

        • “Any trained monkey can spew out some numbers like you did, but it takes a higher level of intelligence and education to understand how the numbers were determined and how they relate to real world situations.”

          Meanwhile you’ve yet actually quote a source or actual statistic for your alleged facts. So your incapable of the intellectual prowess of a trained monkey then I guess.

        • Richard in WA

          In theory, you have five minutes to do an edit. However, for some inexplicable reason, the site has been adding extra time to the countdown timer. Crazier, though, is that no matter where the countdown timer starts, you aren’t allowed to edit until it counts down to five minutes.

          It will also not let you post again for some period of time (an anti-spammer measure), but that length of time seems to be tied to the same broken timer, and it was several minutes before I could post again, last time I was in that situation.

          So yeah. BUG!

        • At the end of the day Willy, how does someone owning a gun affect you?

          Answer – it doesn’t! You can live your life as you see fit. You needn’t impose your worldview on others.

          In simplistic terms, the best course of action for you to lead a successful life is for you to mind your own bloody business. I do it every day. I stay out of people’s lives, they stay out of mine.

        • I still don’t know why you guys get your blood pressure up every time WLM posts something here. It can be dismissed as a spam post much easier. He can’t be converted to our way of thinking, so ranting and raving at him is just encouraging this behavior.

        • Hay Willy, hope you’re never in a dangerous situation where seconds matter. It wiil be better to bend over and take it is what I hear you saying.

        • Chrispy – I mostly ignore him. But I’m sure he’s proudly showing his progressive friends how he’s going into the lion’s den to rustle the jimmies of the pro-gun crowd. Every now and then it’s good to go with a reasoned, non-jimmies-rustled response with cited sources. Maybe one person will read it and have the flame of doubt introduced on their anti-Liberty stance. Maybe a POTG will see an article or argument they haven’t seen before.

          Honestly I find the Harvard piece very compelling and those who would restrict our rights tend to find it more credible than the work of John Lott (who says much the same thing in MGLC).

    • People who give to the NRA do so voluntarily because they believe in the cause of liberty and self defense.

      As for stupid people, you’re never going to get rid of those.

      In fact you can consider yourself Exhibit A.

      I know I do.

  9. I believe that a lot of the reactionary gun buying is also a way for people to demonstrate that they love freedom and hate politicians who want to take that away from them. Buying a gun is like a middle finger in the air saying “Hell no, you will not make me a slave to your wrong headed leftist ideals”. And “I am done listing to your stupid reasons why free men (and women) should not own guns. And to prove it, I am buying one”.

  10. All this might not matter in a hundred years. With the rate the worlds population is growing, it’s my bet some lunatic will probably set off WW3 with a nuclear strike, or global warming will smoother the earth with fire and water!.
    Our forests are diminishing at a rate so fast, there will only be a few animal species left, and no place to fire a gun!
    Who to blame? Start with “Octo-mom” and the “Dugger’s”.

    • Has there ever been a hundred year streatch of time where the human race wasn’t facing imminent disaster?

      The sky hasn’t fallen yet.

        • The Roman empire was a fairly small chunk of the world, even at it’s greatest day. And Roman peace was enforced by roman swords. If you lived in one of the towns or villages pacified by the legion you would have felt the world was ending. And likely, your world did end.

        • I was just going to say that eventually the sky did fall.

          The human condition is nothing but conflict throughout all of recorded history.

        • Which included the reigns of such notables as Caligula and Nero, so maybe not so nice.

  11. “America has the highest crime rate of any first world country.”

    Take away the violence associated with the “War on Drugs” including the gang violence that it helps fund, and our crime rates begin to look a lot like other first world countries. Even those with far fewer firearms.
    Instead of identifying the actual problem, Mr Lunchmeat chooses to vilify that which he personally does not like and proposes fixing the problem by incrementally creating another violence ridden black market. Perfect. Provided you don’t learn from your mistakes.

    • +1,000. I always point out to antis that the U.S. rates would tie with other western nations if NYC, LA, Chicago, etc didn’t exist, and that the two greatest causes of gun deaths are gang membership and suicide, the former of which is almost exclusively restricted to the nation’s largest cities. Many of the antis I talk to hail from those places listed above, and eventually the argument “to stop gun violence” turns into “Well if everyone did everything the way we city folks do, there would be no problems because we’re socialist progressives and therefore superior to everyone else,” even though the quality of infrastructure and standard of living are much lower in NYC alone than the entire state of Texas. The cognitive dissonance is utter lunacy.

      • We should not include suicide. People who are bent on suicide will succeed regardless of it being a gun, a rope, razor blades, or a handful of pills and plastic bag.

  12. It’s tough to read past the picture. Maybe I’m more Neanderthal but Sara, c’mon. I’m a NAVY man, we need more navel.

    ; )

  13. Richard in Washington is correct in his facts but lost credibility when he says he listens to MSNBC.
    Ponder this where families are required to have full auto weapons in their homes:

    Responsible gun owners = less crime

    Switzerland has it right. The gun-loving Swiss are not about to lay down their arms. Guns are ubiquitous in this neutral nation, with sharpshooting considered a fun and wholesome recreational activity for people of all ages.

    The Swiss are very serious not only about their right to own weapons but also to carry them around in public. Because of this general acceptance and even pride in gun ownership, nobody bats an eye at the sight of a civilian riding a bus, bike or motorcycle to the shooting range, with a rifle slung across the shoulder. Switzerland was at risk of being invaded by Germany during World War II but was spared, historians say, because every Swiss man was armed and trained to shoot.

    Despite the prevalence of guns, the violent crime rate is low: government figures show about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. The U.S rate in the same year was about five firearm killings per 100,000 people, according to a 2011 U.N. report.

    Our higher statistics are not because of gun ownership, but because of the inner-city culture, the drug epidemic and ignored mental health issues in our country. To lower our gun deaths, these are the issues that have to be seriously addressed.

    John Lott, economist and gun-rights advocate, has studied mass shootings and reports that, with just one exception – the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011 – every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.

    The deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary, Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Century 16 movie theater in Colorado, and most recently the Church killing in Charleston, South Carolina (among others) all took place in gun-free zones. The murderers, while deranged and deeply disturbed, are not dumb. They shoot up schools, universities, malls and public places where their victims cannot shoot back.

    In 1982, Kennesaw, Georgia, passed a law requiring all households to have a gun-burglaries dropped by 89 percent. In Texas, murder rates fell 50 percent faster than the national average in the year after their concealed carry law passed. Rape rates fell 93 percent faster in the first year after enactment, and 500 percent faster in the second. Assaults fell 250 percent faster in the second year. The crime rate has dropped in all states with similar concealed carry laws.

    This is the exact opposite conclusion of Democrat lawmakers who want to register Americans for seemingly innocuous “background checks.” Americans know better and can sniff the gun-grabbing agenda a mile away.

    Eliminating or restricting firearms for public self defense doesn’t make our citizens safer; it makes them targets. Firearms possession and its potential threat for criminals and other predators deter property crime, violent crime, and yes…even tyrannical government.

    Donna Emerson lives in Montgomery. She is a mother and a grandmother, retired from Procter & Gamble, and was a Republican precinct executive in Symmes Township for two terms.

    OBW- They have full automatic weapons also.

    • I take news from a variety of sources including MSNBC. They’re particularly good at highlighting terrible politicians and I appreciate that a lot as I hate most politicians. After all, we have MSNBC to thank for the “Shoulder thing that goes up” meme. That was an interview with Carolyn McCarthy where they were pointing out how she was legislating items she had no knowledge of.

      I was trying to point out to Billy Pastrami up there that one does not have to be a staunch conservative, an NRA member, or feeble-minded follower (which he implied we all are). An independent thinker can easily examine the facts surrounding gun ownership and crime rates and come to the logical conclusion that guns do no equal crime.

      Whenever I take a sort of political assessment, I score dead-middle of the political spectrum, although I admit I identify more with Libertarian views than either of the two major parties – and in the current political landscape I identify with Trump more so than any of the other candidates. I’d call him foolishly honest.

      We’re on the same side, man.

  14. Fact: US ranks # 111 out of 213 world countries in murder rates. Take away the drug and gang crimes in several large cities and we rank last in murder. What does it mater the tools used t kill? That is the US ranks in the bottom half.

    • “Fact: US ranks # 111 out of 213 world countries in murder rates. Take away the drug and gang crimes in several large cities and we rank last in murder. What does it mater the tools used t kill? That is the US ranks in the bottom half.”

      Fact: Take away the several large cities (with their drug and gang crimes) and we will rank last (and a stern glance away from zero) in gun control. There, fixed it for all of us.

      FU(D)EVILPOSBLUESTATELIBs.

  15. Willy Lunchmeat, I’m going to surprise you. I suspect that you’ve never fired a gun, never seen a gun. I am going to extend the hand and offer to take you to the range, teach you how to shoot. Heck, I’ll even pay for the ammo and range fees. This is a genuine offer, no strings attached, all you have to do is be in Southern California, San Diego to Los Angeles. If you decide to take my offer, post here and we will arrange it, privately if you prefer or publicly if you have some how managed to construe this as a veiled threat.

    • Don’t bother with Willy, he’s not just a shill, he’s a plant, he’s on overwatch for the evil House of Blue (D). They, like Willy, are not ignorant of History, they know exactly where all their efforts are pointed, they know the end game, they know it’s been tried many times before, they want to subjugate you and yours and come out on top. Willy and his kind know that if he gets your gun, he can get you to give up everything else, and at the same time leave your junk swinging in the wind to be plucked by every other nation out there whose guns, Willy and his broke-d_ck kind will never get. As Communism always says (in any language it hides behind) “If we all pull together, I won’t have to do an F-ing thing except tell you where to pull-it.”

      The election is coming, and if Willy and his EVIL/BLUE STATE/HOUSE OF (D) gets his way, he might (if were lucky) eventually get everyone else’s way.

      Has Willy received any foreign $ to overthrow [this small but paramount piece of] our Constitution? If so, there’s a name for that.

      • All that may be and most likely is true, still, it never hurts to try to educate someone who’s outlook is wrong. I don’t expect him or her to actually take me up on it. Either I’ll get a “guns are so evil I’d never touch one” or “I don’t live in SoCal” or a complete ignore the offer. If the second of the 3 responses, I’d hope someone else would step up and make the same offer. It’s hard to demonize a group when they extend a hand of friendship. Makes you a particularly weak kind of asshat.

        • Ok, you call ’em in. I’ll get behind the game and beat the bushes and drive him to ya. But we’ve declared sides.

          This is my hunter ORANGE.

    • Free ammo! If Willy doesn’t show can I take advantage of that offer? The savings will probably be far more than the airfare for me to get there!

  16. Why do people in the USA keep bleating on about having guns? You’re all freaks. You don’t need guns. They kill people. Simple as that. Get rid of all of them like most civilised countries. It’s just odd.

    • Of course, because no one was ever killed before gun powder was invented. Or even today – you are not really killed unless you are shot, right?
      People kill people. Always did, always will. Criminal who wants someone dead will not give up on murdering just for lack of firearm. Decent person is not going to kill anybody (except in defense of innocent live) no matter how many guns he or she has at disposal.
      If you had a magical wand that can make all guns in the word disappear today (I know you would love that), violent people will still kill and injure others using other weapons from piece of pipe to knifes to bare hands and boots.
      Only effect would be that strong and young would have even bigger advantage over not so strong and young. Gun gives even feeble old lady fighting chance against violent predator. Guns are the best way of defense against threat to life. That’s why cops carry them.
      Keeping and bearing of arms including firearms is every American’s right. Goverment must NOT infringe it. Admittedly it does so on many levels, which is unfortunate, unconstitutional and plain wrong in my opinion.
      Oh, and one more thing – guns are FUN! You should try shooting and maybe you will get a bit closer to understanding why we keep “bleating ” about guns. Just remember, the animal that bleats is defenseless. Just like you. We on the other hand are not.

    • Davy we like being “odd”. Hope you never are in a dangerous situation where seconds count too. Or can you bend over as far as Willy?

  17. Dave, we’re not British because the locals had guns…and the tradition just kinda stuck 🙂
    They aren’t going anywhere.

  18. You Americans just carry on buying your guns and shooting each other. The world is overpopulated. You’re doing the civilised world a favour. Just don’t bother trying to justify your stupidity.

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