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This Liberal Reconsidered Gun Control

mauserme

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mauserme Member

mauserme

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http://thefederalist.com/2017/11/02/liberal-reconsidered-gun-control-found-lot-complicated-guns-crime/


This Liberal Reconsidered Gun Control. He Found It’s A Lot More Complicated Than ‘More Guns, More Crime’

I started off this process thinking, as do many of my political coreligionists, that reducing gun violence is simply a matter of will, and of overcoming the National Rifle Association.

By Ken Stern
NOVEMBER 2, 2017

I have always looked at the gun problem and assumed that there is a “commonsense” solution if the gun lobby would just get out of the way and people would just screw their heads on right. Like most Americans, I still support efforts to improve the efficacy of the background-check system, but I now understand them to be common sense but not solutions - and potentially distractions from the core social questions of economic despair and shuttered opportunity, which plague both poor minority neighborhoods and the white working class alike.

Over the past year, I have from time to time posted the most mild-mannered of comments on Facebook, suggesting that the gun issue is more complex than one might think. I am not exactly fearless on social media, anxious about the cultural disapprobation that comes with conservative views in my circles. My posts have been exceptionally mealy-mouthed, timid suggestions that the gun issue is tricky or perhaps a particular National Review article is “worth a look.”

My reading suggestions have not been well received. My liberal friends have rather disdainfully rejected the facts offered, not usually with their own facts but with the statement that we just need to get on with doing “something.” This would seem to suggest that people who don’t agree with policy for window dressing’s sake are somehow hunky-dory with thousands of gun deaths every year. It is a little window into the sanctimony of some liberals, and I don’t like it very much.

Proposed Laws Would Rarely Have Stopped Recent Attacks

 

Virtually all of the guns used in mass-murder situations in the past decade were lawfully obtained, and could have been lawfully obtained under proposed laws, such as the extension of background checks to private sales (eighteen states already do so). The Aurora, Newtown, and Orlando shootings were all committed with lawfully obtained guns, or with guns taken from licensed owners.

And it is just not credible to think that restricting private sales at places like gun shows will substantially reduce urban violence.

...

Yes, We Have High Violence Rates, But It’s Not Guns’ Fault

 

One of the key arguments for gun control is the unfavorable comparison between gun violence in the United States and in other developed countries. As President Obama noted in 2015, “What we also have to recognize is, is that our homicide rates are so much higher than other industrialized countries. I mean by like a mile. And most of that is attributable to the easy ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.”

And it is true; out of the 35 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks 31st in homicide rates, though gun proponents hasten to note that the United States is far safer than Russia, Mexico, and Brazil, and a little safer than Latvia, none of which is likely to be bulletin-board material for our national tourism agency. And what is most disturbing is that we are not even a close 31. Our homicide rate is ten times the rate in Japan and three times the rate in Canada, for instance.

It’s truly depressing stuff, unless you are planning to move to England, where the writer Bill Bryson recently reported, in all seriousness, and with some satisfaction, that you are more likely to be killed by walking into a wall than by being murdered.

...


Those numbers are deeply satisfying to gun control advocates—and to the Brits as well, I should think - but it’s not clear what they mean for the United States. Gun control advocates link the low murder rate in England, for example, to the 1997 Firearms Act, which effectively outlawed private ownership of handguns, but in truth the homicide rate in England was low long before the Firearms Act and it has actually increased modestly since 1997.

Gun Prevalence Is Not the Key Cause of Crime

 

And the relationship between the number of guns and murder rates is not always very clear. If you are to believe the Small Arms Survey, countries like Russia and Brazil have relatively low firearms ownership rates, but apparently all those guns are in the hands of killers and thieves, and high-ownership countries like Switzerland and Finland have comparatively low murder rates.

Switzerland, for instance, is awash in guns—a “gun in every closet” is integral both to the national defense plan and the national culture—and there is roughly one gun for every two people in the country. And yet the murder rate is pleasingly low, not so different from England itself. It is not that there is no relationship between gun availability and homicide rates—of course there is—but the story of violence and the means of controlling it are far more complicated and nuanced than advocates on either side of the story would have us believe.

I started off this process thinking, as do many of my political coreligionists, that reducing gun violence is simply a matter of will, and of overcoming the Neanderthals at the National Rifle Association (NRA). But I have learned that it is not, and that if we really want to reduce gun violence, we should be focusing not first upon the weapons but on a lot of things around it: poverty, drugs, race, and addressing mental illness, opportunity, and gangs, to name just a few.

Ken Stern is president of Palisades Media Ventures and the author of "With Charity for All" and "Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right." He is a former chief executive officer of National Public Radio.

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vito Member

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It seems to be exceptionally rare for an anti-gunner to see the light and join the forces of freedom and individual responsibility. And facts do not matter, because for so many their anti-gun, anti-2nd Amendment, anti-NRA mindset is either a totally emotional reaction to crime and violence, or actually a key tenet of their almost religious faith in the ability of government to "take care of all of us" and to "keep us safe". I've been fighting this battle for most of my life, and I'm now 74. I have relatives who live in the anti-gun world of New York that can, in the same breath, admit that the police cannot be everywhere at once to "protect" them, that criminals will always find a way to secure a firearm regardless of the laws trying to keep them from doing so, that throughout America law abiding citizens have prevented or mitigated violent crime by using a firearm to stop the threat, AND that guns are evil, need to be banned, the NRA needs to be outlawed, and that the same lying politicians who keep them from having the ability to defend themselves with a gun should be re-elected. The only folks that I have ever been able to turn around are those who literally never have given any thought to guns one way or the other, and are open to consider facts and options that they were not aware of. A former nun and nurse that I worked with, agreed to come to the range with me just for the experience, and became an avid target shooter and gun owner (yes, a nun). Another woman I worked with, along with her husband, said that they were a bit intrigued by my thoughts on guns, and freedom and the 2nd Amendment and went to a gun shop with a range just to give it a try. Now they have a sizable collection and enjoy "cowboy" shooting events. And there have been others, but not so many that I feel the effort is always worth it. For those that are emotionally committed to liberalism, political correctness and to valuing feelings over rational thought, the anti-gun mindset is virtually unchangeable. That is just the way it is. That is why while much of the country is moving toward greater gun rights, some pockets of liberalism, primarily on the East and West coasts, are still solidly anti gun and likely to remain so for the indefinite future.

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ming Member

ming

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It seems to be exceptionally rare for an anti-gunner to see the light and join the forces of freedom and individual responsibility. And facts do not matter, because for so many their anti-gun, anti-2nd Amendment, anti-NRA mindset is either a totally emotional reaction to crime and violence, or actually a key tenet of their almost religious faith in the ability of government to "take care of all of us" and to "keep us safe". I've been fighting this battle for most of my life, and I'm now 74. I have relatives who live in the anti-gun world of New York that can, in the same breath, admit that the police cannot be everywhere at once to "protect" them, that criminals will always find a way to secure a firearm regardless of the laws trying to keep them from doing so, that throughout America law abiding citizens have prevented or mitigated violent crime by using a firearm to stop the threat, AND that guns are evil, need to be banned, the NRA needs to be outlawed, and that the same lying politicians who keep them from having the ability to defend themselves with a gun should be re-elected. The only folks that I have ever been able to turn around are those who literally never have given any thought to guns one way or the other, and are open to consider facts and options that they were not aware of. A former nun and nurse that I worked with, agreed to come to the range with me just for the experience, and became an avid target shooter and gun owner (yes, a nun). Another woman I worked with, along with her husband, said that they were a bit intrigued by my thoughts on guns, and freedom and the 2nd Amendment and went to a gun shop with a range just to give it a try. Now they have a sizable collection and enjoy "cowboy" shooting events. And there have been others, but not so many that I feel the effort is always worth it. For those that are emotionally committed to liberalism, political correctness and to valuing feelings over rational thought, the anti-gun mindset is virtually unchangeable. That is just the way it is. That is why while much of the country is moving toward greater gun rights, some pockets of liberalism, primarily on the East and West coasts, are still solidly anti gun and likely to remain so for the indefinite future.

 

 

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skinnyb82 Member

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I turned my girlfriend from anti-gun into gun enthusiast, "the Second Amendment is absolute," "we should be allowed to own machine guns." Yeah quite the shift in beliefs. It's worth noting that she was anti-gun because right before I met her, her best friend was murdered by his felon wife with "their" (illegally possessed) handgun. Guess how I did it heh. She knew about my carry permits, my FFL, so that kinda helped ease her anxiety as I'm not just some stereotypical "gun nut." I took her to my club's range. Let her shoot pistols and rifles in a controlled setting. Explained how the rifles and pistols function. Explained...if she had a question, I'd answer it. It was pretty obvious that she had bought into that whole "black guns are bad, no one needs 30 (or more) round magazines." As she's getting ready to shoot one of my ARs from the bench, she says "So I just pull back on the trigger and it keeps firing?" I laughed and said "Contrary to what NBC News has told you, automatic rifles have been banned since before you were born." She did not know that. Asks me why I need 30 round magazines ("high capacity clips") and I told her I don't NEED them (I really don't, but I may at some point) but I buy them because this is America and it's my right. I gave her a primer on Heller and Moore. Basically, I helped her see that guns are not inherently dangerous. The old "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Her tune has definitely changed after having our daughter. She now wants a CCL. Happy to say that she just got her FOID this past week and will be going deer hunting for the first time. Wants me to help her build a robin's egg blue AR haha.

 

Changing opinions/beliefs can be done. But it really depends on the person and how you go about it. My girlfriend is a very reasonable, logical person so if I show her something that challenges her beliefs but is factually correct, then she will concede that she was wrong. I'm the same way. If I'm wrong, show me, prove it, and I'll say "I was wrong." If she were closed-minded, then I would not have been able to expose her to this particular "hobby" (more like a lifestyle).

 

Sent from my VS987 using Tapatalk

 

 

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GTX63 Member

GTX63

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Should be about time for a good old fashioned holiday gun buy back, which reminds me-why do these groups call it a gun "buyback"? They can't buy back what they never owned.

 

Here's an idea-why don't they do a drug buyback? Let's get all the illegal narcotics off the streets by buying direct, up to 125% of the value. Imagine the hoards lining up to unload their bags of clorox, cat nip and aspirin. The addicts hovering around like dog pecker gnats. We could all feel good about ourselves for a month as we wait for the latest study to determine how much the drug activity has dropped; then when it shows a rise, we just comfort ourselves that we did something.

Feelings always outweigh results.

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FarmHand357 Member

FarmHand357

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I turned my girlfriend from anti-gun into gun enthusiast, "the Second Amendment is absolute," "we should be allowed to own machine guns." Yeah quite the shift in beliefs. It's worth noting that she was anti-gun because right before I met her, her best friend was murdered by his felon wife with "their" (illegally possessed) handgun. Guess how I did it heh. She knew about my carry permits, my FFL, so that kinda helped ease her anxiety as I'm not just some stereotypical "gun nut." I took her to my club's range. Let her shoot pistols and rifles in a controlled setting. Explained how the rifles and pistols function. Explained...if she had a question, I'd answer it. It was pretty obvious that she had bought into that whole "black guns are bad, no one needs 30 (or more) round magazines." As she's getting ready to shoot one of my ARs from the bench, she says "So I just pull back on the trigger and it keeps firing?" I laughed and said "Contrary to what NBC News has told you, automatic rifles have been banned since before you were born." She did not know that. Asks me why I need 30 round magazines ("high capacity clips") and I told her I don't NEED them (I really don't, but I may at some point) but I buy them because this is America and it's my right. I gave her a primer on Heller and Moore. Basically, I helped her see that guns are not inherently dangerous. The old "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Her tune has definitely changed after having our daughter. She now wants a CCL. Happy to say that she just got her FOID this past week and will be going deer hunting for the first time. Wants me to help her build a robin's egg blue AR haha. Changing opinions/beliefs can be done. But it really depends on the person and how you go about it. My girlfriend is a very reasonable, logical person so if I show her something that challenges her beliefs but is factually correct, then she will concede that she was wrong. I'm the same way. If I'm wrong, show me, prove it, and I'll say "I was wrong." If she were closed-minded, then I would not have been able to expose her to this particular "hobby" (more like a lifestyle). Sent from my VS987 using Tapatalk

 

Well-said (and done).

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