Funny how “Putting politics aside” means “Advancing the Democrat Left Agenda.”
| GAY PATRIOT |
I would be remiss to NOT add this by BEN SHAPIRO (for the transcript read THE DAILY WIRE):
Some must read articles and stats — the first is an article by GAY PATRIOT, who quotes a WAPO article (which I will include in full, below). Here is GP referencing about the Washington Post article:
In a rare moment of honesty on the left, a left-wing statistician went through the evidence scientifically and without bias and came to the conclusion that none of the left-wing’s favored policies would put a dent in gun deaths.
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
It’s like us Right-Wing Nut Jobs were saying all along. The policies of the left will fail, and may perhaps even be designed to fail so that their failure will make the case for ever increasing levels of gun control leading ultimately to what the left actually wants: to outlaw the private ownership of firearms.
By the way, the correlation between gun ownership and homicides is actually inverse.
There are actually two policies that would make a difference, but they are politically unpalatable to the Progressive Left.
The majority of gun deaths in the USA are suicides – about two-thirds of all of them….
I want to pause here and break down the suicide numbers a bit… and this is really for all the people that support assisted suicide. Why does it have to be assisted? The biggest demographic that shoots themselves are the geriatric. Many of whom are in the throes or chronic pain or were diagnosed with a life threatening disease with no hope of overcoming. Here are the suicide by gun numbers:
It is sad, but using the Left’s argument FOR suicide… why is this bad? CONTINUING with Gay Patriot…
…The great majority of the gun homicides in the USA are committed by young male criminals in urban areas. The Democrats who run these urban areas are loathe to crack down on this violence for fear of riling “community activists” who claim that stopping young urban males from committing crimes is a conspiracy to re-enact slavery via the “Prison Industrial Complex.”
So, for whatever reason, the only “politically palatable” solutions involve restricting the rights of non-criminal people to possess lawful means of self-defense…..
Mmmm… that brings up a different stat. I wouldn’t know where to look for such a study, but, I bet if one were to quantify those who are Democrat and those who are Republican using guns in homicide activity… I wonder what the comparative percentages would be.
For instance, one can see many more Republicans own guns, but more inner-city gang members use them illegally.
Last I remember from being in jail myself, most minority criminals are Democrats in regard to who they support.
Also, as people buy more guns, the death rate has dropped. If one were to believe the rhetoric of the Left… this should be the exact opposite:
Dennis Prager is right… this and other arguments from the Left are driven by emotions:
Here is the promised article… Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, and a Leftist!
I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer My Research Told Me Otherwise
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.
As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, who make up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
Even the most data-driven practices, such as New Orleans’ plan to identify gang members for intervention based on previous arrests and weapons seizures, wind up more personal than most policies floated. The young men at risk can be identified by an algorithm, but they have to be disarmed one by one, personally — not en masse as though they were all interchangeable. A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
In this meme a point is made that I think is worthy… and that is…. there are already laws on the books to make murder illegal. What law can you pass that will stop a person from really committing this horrible act? If laws like this work, why haven’t they?
More than 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016. Over 11,500 deaths by homicide are gun related each year [+/-]. Has the war one drugs and all the regulations and laws (local, county, state, and federal) stopped this? No. The answer is no. NEITHER would any law have helped less people die in Vegas. The next media presentation is prefaced by POLITISTICK:
Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar from Texas admitted something tonight on FOX News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight that you will rarely — if ever — hear from a modern-day Democrat that has taken a hard-left turn the past eight years under Obama, funded by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre in which dozens of people were murdered and hundreds more injured by a madman shooting from a high-rise hotel — at a time when most progressive leftist’s knee-jerk reaction was to blame Second Amendment rights — Henry Cuellar admitted that gun control doesn’t work…..
The following is from an family friend-of-a-friend who was in law enforcement for 35-years:
Here are some very interesting statistics on gun violence, gun deaths, and lots of other causes of death that we deal with every day. Yet no one gets too concerned unless the cause of death is by a firearm. And yes the math is correct.
There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed. The U.S. population is 324,059,091 as of June 22, 2016. Do the math: 0.000000925% of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:
- 65% of those deaths are by suicide, which would never be prevented by gun laws.
- 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified.
- 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – better known as gun violence.
- 3% are accidental discharge deaths.
So technically, “gun violence” is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100. Still too many? Now lets look at how those deaths spanned across the nation.
- 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago
- 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore
- 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit
- 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)
Basically, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause. This leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others. For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1. Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand, it is not guns causing this. It is a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.
Are 5,100 deaths per year horrific? How about in comparison to other deaths? All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault are all done by criminals. It is ludicrous to think that criminals will obey laws. That is why they are called criminals. But what about other deaths each year?
- 40,000+ die from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!
- 36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths
- 34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities(exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide).
Now it gets good:
- 200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors. You are safer walking in the worst areas of Chicago than you are when you are in a hospital!
- 710,000 people die per year from heart disease. It’s time to stop the double cheeseburgers! So what is the point? If the liberal loons and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc). A 10% reduction in medical errors would be 66% of the total number of gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides, simple, easily preventable 10% reductions! So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns? It’s pretty simple: Taking away guns gives control to governments. The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace of the colonies. It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace is a controlled populace. Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S. Constitution. It must be preserved at all costs. So the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about saving lives, look at these facts and remember these words from Noah Webster: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed.”
