HAH! Obama Orders Gun Study, Which Finds Guns Save Lives
HAH! Obama Orders Gun Study, Which Finds Guns Save Lives
Even as the Obama administration continues its relentless press to keep guns out of citizens' hands, a study from the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, operating under the directive of the administration's own Centers for Disease Control, contains good news for gun owners. Maybe that's why President Obama, who issued an executive order mandating this study, has been ignoring it.
(Read More: Nanny Cam Catches Mother Assaulted Brutally By Home Invader In "Gun Free" New Jersey.)
Basically, the report supports the NRA world-view, not the "Let's deprive people of their Second Amendment Rights" world view. To begin with, when it comes to gun-related deaths, mental illness is the real problem, not guns:
Between the years 2000-2010, firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.
(Read More: AR-15s Dramatically Drop In Price – Great Time To Buy.)
It's sad that so many people take their lives, but it reminds us that guns are just tools. Suicidal people use what's at hand, and if there aren't guns, they'll turn to other tools of death.
Madonna agrees with the NRA: "Guns don't kill people; people kill people."
Although mass shootings make for great television, and then drive insane legislation, the fact is that they are extremely rare:
(Read More: Madonna Supports NRA, Dismisses Gun Grabbers "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People".)
The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Specifically, since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in a day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.
Using mass murders to drive gun policy means that our policies are built around a statistically insignificant type of crime. This is not to denigrate the tragedy that is each mass murder, especially when it involves children, but "tragedy" is not a public policy.
(Read More: Gov. Jindal of Louisiana Signs 6 New Gun Bills Into Law To Protect Gun Rights.)
One of the anti-gun crowds' favorite arguments is that guns are seldom used in self-defense and that people are more likely to hurt themselves, than to protect themselves, with guns. This is a classic fallacy that arises from the fact that newspapers don't report on crimes that never happened. What they do report are actual crimes and bizarre self-defense accidents. The study, though, shows that defensive uses of guns far outweigh gun crimes, with the implication being that, without defensively-used guns, there would have been between 500,000 to 3 million more crimes in America:
Obama will play with pretend guns; he just won't let YOU or your children play with them.
Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence [...]. Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
(Read More: Bloomberg Anti-Gun Rally Claims Boston Bombers Were "Victims" To Gun Violence.)
And finally, what's true for women's self-defense classes is also true for guns. One of the things women are always told in self-defense classes is that, if you put up a vigorous fight against an assailant, you're more likely to get hurt (punched, stabbed, or even shot), but you're much less likely to end up dead. Fighting has real risks, but being a victim has greater risks. When it comes to using guns defensively, the statistics are even better, because it's possible that you'll escape entirely uninjured:
Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns [...] have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.
(Read More: Colorado Recalls Anti-Gun State Senate President.)
The study's not all good, of course. It shows that young black men in America are dying at staggering rates from gun crime – but the fact that these deaths are so tightly focused indicates that this is a cultural problem, not a gun problem. Still, if one could remove guns from their hands, more would survive. The only thing is that the gun grabbing legislation used in large, Democrat-run urban areas are counterproductive, because they actually put more guns in gang-members hands.
Guns are objects, just the way cars are and, like cars, they're useful, fun, and dangerous. We don't ban cars (which don't even have constitutional protection), but we do try to find ways for society to use them as safely as possible, with minimal limitations because of their utility and entertainment value. The report suggests (although it never says) that we should view guns (which are constitutionally protected) the same way.
HAH! Obama Orders Gun Study, Which Finds Guns Save Lives
http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/06/19972-hah-obama-orders-gun-study-which-finds-guns-save-lives/
John Hames
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