Guns -- The Political Angle

I'm not going to rant on for several pages, though I certainly could. Just several quick points. (Some of the terms may require reference to my technical page on guns.)

• Gun control only disarms the honest, since criminals don't obey laws in the first place. Even if it disarmed criminals too, though, they are generally stronger and tougher than most people, so

• gun control leaves the honest as "easy pickin's" for the criminals. This in turn means not only that

• gun control doesn't reduce crime, but worse yet,

• gun control increases crime, by providing easy targets and practically eliminating the "victim administered" penalty. If gun control reduced crime, New York City and Washington DC would be the safest places on the planet. Instead, they are among the least safe!

• Gun control doesn't make it harder for criminals to get guns, since they rarely get them through legal channels in the first place. Purchase restrictions only hinder the honest, who of course are not the problem (and in fact are part of the solution). Even more so,

• it's already illegal for most criminals to have guns. The Gun Control Act of 1968 made it a federal felony for anyone previously convicted of a felony (or ajudged insane by a court of law) to so much as hold a gun, or even a single round of ammunition -- and most violent crime is committed by repeat offenders.

• Guns do not cause crime. If they did, Switzerland would be a bloodbath -- most households there contain a genuine assault rifle (i.e., something that, as the hoplophobes say, "sprays bullets") and plenty of ammo, and most of the rest also contain at least one gun. Instead, it's one of the safest places in the world!

• Only approximately 1 in every 500 guns is ever used in a crime. Even for handguns, it's only about 1 in 250. There are about 250 million guns owned by civilians in the USA. Roughly half of all American households contain at least one gun. Yet violent criminals are a tiny minority.

• If robbed or assaulted, your best chance of not being killed or seriously injured is to resist with a gun. That's about a 17% chance of death or injury. If you give the perp everything he wants, your chances are still almost 50-50. If you resist with any other weapon, the results are between the two. If you resist unarmed, including passively, or yell for help or try to escape, you are very likely to be seriously injured or killed.

• The so-called "assault weapon ban" (actually a manufacturing freeze) is based on nothing but cosmetics. The "banned" guns are functionally absolutely identical to perfectly ordinary hunting or target guns. They are not machine guns, which have been under very heavy federal restriction since 1934. Nor do they use unusually deadly cartridges; in fact, their ammo is usually less powerful than typical hunting ammo.

• Attempts to outlaw so-called Saturday Night Specials or Junk Guns on the basis of "product safety" are a transparent sham. Such proposed laws always exempt police. Why would you want the police, of all people, to have guns of inferior quality?

• The idea of so-called "cop-killer" bullets is a total fabrication. The bullets often so labelled are in fact worse at penetrating body armor than normal ones, were developed for use by police, and were never offered for sale to the public.

• So is the idea of X-Ray-Invisible Plastic Terrorist Guns. The guns accused of being such (for all intents and purposes, any with a plastic frame) have plenty of metal, easily detectable by x-ray machines, metal detectors, and other common security equipment. Smeared as "a gun only a terrorist could love", they are in very common use as police, military, personal defense, and target sidearms.

• And so is the Gun Show Loophole. The exact same laws apply whether you buy your guns at a show, at a dealer's own store, or anywhere else.

• The problem is not repeating firearms but repeating offenders. Repeating firearms are nothing new -- they have been around since the 1700's. Even machine guns and semiautomatic pistols have been around since the late 1800's. They have never been a problem. What changed? Many social factors, such as Prohibition II (aka the War on Drugs, with exactly the same results as the first Prohibition), but mainly the rise of bleeding-heart liberalism. Now we coddle even the most vicious of violent criminals, and let them go after a mere slap on the wrist -- often to repeat their crimes.

• Accidental firearm fatalities are extremely rare. They have been steadily decreasing since the U.S. government began keeping records... in 1903! Cars, swimming pools, stairs, electrical outlets, poisoning by household chemicals, and choking on foreign objects each account for more accidental deaths per year, even in the USA.

• Most people who die by gunshot would die anyway without guns. That's because most (about 56%) of them are suicide. Study after study shows that if someone wants to kill themselves, they will find a way. A near-total gun ban doesn't stop Japan from having a much higher suicide rate than ours!

• Many of the so-called "kids" who die by gunshot are as old as twenty-four! Didn't you ever notice how most of the anti-gun groups who try to scare you with rhetoric about how many "kids" die by gunshot every year, never tell you what age range they consider "kids"? They do this to inflate the numbers -- and include prime gang years.

• Guns save more innocent lives than they take. American civilians use guns to stop a crime approximately two and a half million times a year!

• The police cannot protect you. The only two people guaranteed to be at the scene of a personal violent crime are the perp and the victim. At best, the police might arrive in time, if you can manage to contact them. Furthermore,

• the police are under no obligation to protect you, only society as a whole, according to multiple Supreme Court decisions.

  Don't get me wrong, the police do the best they can, but they can't be everywhere. There's a name for places where they can -- a police state! That brings us to, though crime seems to be the anti-gunners' main point:

• Guns are the last-ditch protector of democracy. Sure, we have votes, but only the ever-prevent possibility of armed revolt can ensure that the government obeys the vote. As the saying goes, "Five boxes protect our freedom: soap, ballot, jury, witness, and cartridge. Use in that order."

• The Second Amendment is not about "sporting purposes". If you read the letters, debate notes, etc. that the Founding Fathers wrote about the right to keep and bear arms, you see over and over, almost exclusively, these reasons, in this order of importance:
  1. Prevention or removal of tyranny
  2. Common defense (i.e., of your country, state, or city/town/neighborhood/whatever)
  3. Personal defense (i.e., of your self, family, home, etc.)

  Even omitting the other writings, the Second Amendment does not even mention "sporting purposes". It is absurd to infer that that is what was meant, in a document specifically devoted to protecting the rights of the people against governmental tyranny.

• The Second Amendment does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to government-run militias. The "militia clause" is grammatically a dependent clause, and thus an explanation, not a limit. "Well-regulated" does not mean "under government control", but "smoothly and efficiently functioning". Besides, almost all men, and many women also, are "the militia", to wit, the Unorganized Militia of the United States; see U.S. Code, Title 10, Section 311. (Link coming, if I ever find an online source.)

  Translated into clear modern English, the Second Amendment would read:

  Since smoothly functioning militias are necessary to the security of a free nation, the right of all citizens to own and carry weapons shall not be limited.

  (The connection from armed populace to militia is that a militiaman is expected to supply his own weaponry, and already be proficient with it, or at least with arms in general. This, of course, is far easier if the populace is explicitly allowed (or encouraged!) to be armed, and utterly impossible if the populace is disarmed!)

• The ultimate downside to gun control is not merely crime, nor even tyranny, but genocide. There have been seven major genocides in the 20th century, each preceded by disarming the victims. The disarming was frequently done by a previous, more benign government.

For more political information on guns, see:

• Fedstats: One Stop Shopping for Federal Statistics
• GOA (Gun Owners of America)
• "Gun Control and Economic Discrimination: The Melting Point Case-in-Point", law review article by T. Markus Funk explaining why the "Saturday Night Special" concept is discriminatory.
• Guns Save Lives
• JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) (especially re: tyranny and genocide)
• Libertarian Party of the USA (Forget the Republicans, they're just as bad as the Democrats!)
• NRA (National Rifle Association (of America))
• "The Racist Roots of Gun Control", law review article by Clayton Cramer
• Second Amendment Law Library
• PRN (Paul Revere Network) (especially the main forum)
• recguns.com, the web site for the the rec.guns newsgroup.
• Fidonet's RTKBA echo, and the similar forums of other BBS networks
• VCDL (Virginia Citizens Defense League) (especially re: crime)

Here are more things I've written on the political issue of guns:

• Stand for Children -- Stop Gun Control!, article published in the VCDL Defender, VSSA Bullet, and a few other places.

• Letter to the Editor of the Vienna Times, published in the April 16, 1998 issue under the title "Irresponsible use of guns, drugs real issue".