Two different kinds of gunshot victims

"Is that a .357?" asked the thin, quiet twenty-something guy from Lawrence during the break, pointing at the Ruger Service Six classroom gun.  I told him it was.  "I got shot with one of those.  The hollow point bullet is still inside.  Here's where it hit and went into my kidney."  The kid had the scar to prove it. 

I didn't ask who shot him, or if he had it coming.  He seemed like a nice guy, and you don't take a firearms safety course if you have a criminal record.  We chatted for a few minutes about what kind of semi-auto he should buy for home protection, and he was disappointed to find out the Lawrence Police would probably restrict his license against concealed carry.  

I never saw him at the club after that.  He most likely got his License to Carry and is a peaceful gun owner like the vast majority of us.  Though I don't know his relationship or feelings toward the shooter, I do know that he's thoughtful enough to not blame the gun, the inanimate object.  Instead, he saw the gun as the most useful tool for his protection. 

Politicians and activists love to trot out gunshot victims as an emotional appeal for new legislation.  The high-profile ones tour the country and make movies that try to persuade us of the need to ban guns.  But they're the extreme outliers. 

In judging the honesty and character of gunshot survivors, would you favor the one who quietly becomes a legal gun owner himself and takes responsibility for his safety, or the one who makes a living trying to ban the one thing that could have saved the lives of the people in the room with him? 

The real reason Joan Peterson obsesses over gun deaths

Brady Campaign board member Joan Peterson is frustrated that the average person doesn't obsess over "gun deaths" like her:

"These things fly under the radar of the average person."

Has she considered that there may be a good reason for that?  That is, accidental shootings are so incredibly rare in this country that they affect hardly anyone? 

I know from my training that accidental shootings always result from violating all three of the rules of gun safety.  It takes a great amount of disregard for human life to do so. 

Therefore what's on my radar is not the rare actions of the most negligent and criminalistic in our society, but the legislative agenda of gun ban advocates who want to use those rare events to restrict my rights. 

It is comforting that as gun sales and CCW permits continue to increase, with coincident decreases in "gun violence," that even fewer people will have guns on their radar.  The only real hope Joan Peterson has for new restrictive legislation would be new episodes of highly publicized mass shootings.  I hope she doesn't get what she wants. 

A textbook example of the "gun death" fallacy

From the "Lying with Statistics" chapter of a stats textbook (emphasis mine). 

Some other strange numerical comparisons appear in the articles shown in

Fig. 10.4. For example, it is sad that 13 children were being killed per day, but

it is not at all clear why this should be compared to the rate at which police

officers are shot. The comparison later in the article to Northern Ireland is more

reasonable (although it might be even more relevant to compare all violent deaths

rather than restrict to gunshots).

It would be more relevant to a rational person, not to the "gun death" fetishists.

Joanna Malloy's baffling anti-gun column in the NY Daily News

Here are a few highlights (emphasis all mine) of the article, reflecting her poor understanding of what she wants to ban, and just as offensive, her butchery of the English language:

Anything less then [sic] a ban on these bulk bullet clips, like the ban proposed in bills before Congress, "is reckless ... and wrong," Bratton says.

What is a bulk bullet clip? 

Bratton has teamed up with former Manhattan prosecutor Richard Aborn, who must feel like trying to pass the ban is like déjà vu all over again.

That sentence is just awful. 

As head of the Brady Campaign, he helped write the assault-weapons ban that got passed under President Bill Clinton. Congress and President George W. Bush let it end in 2004.

When the Brady Campaign writes legislation, it's to save the lives of police officers.  NRA-sponsored legislation seeks to increase the blood-profits of their gun industry patrons. 

Like Jared Loughner, who killed six people and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others with 30 bullets in 15 seconds in January.

I can fire 30 rounds in 15 seconds from my Ruger SP101.  You don't need a big bullet blasting box to fire two rounds per second for thirty seconds.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly would "definitely support a legislative ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. "We in the Police Department don't even use them."

Is Kelly actually saying the NYPD limits their officers to 10-round magazines in their Sig, Glock, and S&W autoloading pistols?  I've sent an inquiry to Kelly to see if he was misquoted.  I would be amazed if Malloy is accurately representing what Kelly actually said. 

No other civilized country allows this. Every country has crazy people; America is the only one that arms them.

America doesn't arm civilians.  Is there some gun welfare program I don't know about.  

Let's get sane, and click our support for the large-capacity ammunition magazine ban at nycrimecommission.org.

A political appeal for meaningless action following an appeal-to-emotion, fact-free argument.  Though it would be generous to call it an argument, especially toward the end of the column where it just broke down into non-sequitur Brady Campaign talking points.  Joan Peterson writes more coherently than this. 

You're better than this, NY Daily News.  Or, maybe not. 

The menace of .223 caliber three-rounds

We all know the typical journalist loses 50 IQ points when writing about guns, so you expect them to use made-up terms like "semi assualt rifle" and "high volume bullet clips."  But what could the South Bend Tribune's Jeff Parrott have possibly meant by:

In particular, the store has proposed selling .223-caliber three-rounds, which is used in high-powered rifles such as the A.R.-15, Dieter said.

Anyone?  Jeff? 

And how could the reporter omit the very relevant fact that the controversial .223 cartridge is far less powerful than the politically correct 30-06, which, presumably, the zoning board is not concerned about?

"Obama to speed up US oil production"

This was a headline in today's Boston Globe. 

Isn't it messed up that an American politician determines the rate of production of a commodity?  It's just as scary as reading "Stalin to speed up USSR steel production."

Why it's pointless and wrong to use the "terrorist" watch list to deny gun sales

Because I guaran-effing-tee you there's some Real IRA douchebag on the list whose name I share. 

To the Brady Campaign, he was an innocent victim

The article in yesterday's Globe starts out:

It was just under a year ago that Marilyn Thomas-YisraEl’s son was shot to death as he sat in his wheelchair on their front porch. A bullet had hit Jihad Watters, 24, two years before, leaving him paralyzed. Last spring, he was enjoying a sunny afternoon and planning to barbecue before he was gunned down.

Yesterday, on a day meant to honor mothers and bring families together, Thomas-YisraEl could only think of the day her family was ripped apart.

“This is my first year without my son,’’ she said. “It’s really hard.’’

Tragic, isn't it.  Just a nice young man enjoying a sunny day and getting ready to throw some ribs on the BBQ.  He's one of the innocent victims of gun violence that the Brady Campaign loves to talk about - in fact, the 24 year old would qualify as a child in their demographic breakdown. 

What the article doesn't mention is that Jihad Watters was a career drug dealer and illegal gun owner.  Yes, I am as shocked as you.

I write about this in response to our favorite Brady board member, who today wrote "Such is the way of gun deaths. They are sudden, unexpected and violent. They can happen to anyone. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it won't."  


No, they are not, Joan.  Violent crime, whether or not the gun is the chosen tool, is not really distributed equally throughout the population.  A lot of the "victims" people like her trot out aren't really victims at all.  Many of them have made the concious decision to be a career criminal.  If you make the decision to compete with other drug dealers in Dorchester, and they kill you, you're not really a victim. 


The Brady types think we should ban guns to save the lives of people like Jihad Watters, when the truth is that good people need guns precisely to protect ourselves from the Jihad Watters of the world. 

How to make a gun buyback really work

L.A. had another gun buyback recently.  Residents turned in a few hundred guns in exchange for a $100 or $200 gift certificate, depending on how scary their gun looked. 

The police interviewed in the story made the bizarre claim that the program will save lives because they can never be used in a crime and they're getting guns "off the streets."  But the fact that people willingly turned the guns in shows that they didn't intend to use them in crime anyways, and I see no evidence that these guns were on the streets as opposed to people's closets.  These were not the community guns stored under a brick in the courtyard of the projects. 

A gun buyback will never reduce crime - gun related or otherwise - because the people who turn in guns are self-selected.  The people who sell back guns are not the people we're worried about.  No rational criminal would surrender his gun any more than a carpenter would surrender his tool belt.  The only way a gun buyback could possibly work would be to send the police to known gang members, and make them an offer they couldn't refuse. 

The gun buybacks satisfy two goals of the shrinking gun movement: to give the appearance of doing something, and reducing the supply of guns. 

Hypocrisy in the gun ban crowd

I was at a local gun shop last week to pick up a case of primers, shortly before closing time.  As I was checking out the used guns, I noticed the owner looking at some papers with a 4x loupe.  It seemed odd, so I took a closer look and saw that he was trying to know for sure the serial number on the federal paperwork. 

This legitimate, bricks and mortar gun dealer was basically terrified - for good reason - that a simple paperwork error would bring about a 70-agent raid on his home and store.  Two things occured to me here.  First, I would never want to be an FFL.  Second, why is it that this businessman is under constant, close scrutiny of the ATF, while the Violence Policy Center's Josh Sugarmann can run an FFL in clear violation of ATF regulations and be untouchable? 

Sugarmann, one of the only FFLs in D.C., just renewed his FFL until March 2014.  Back in the day, he wrote hysterical articles about the threat of "kitchen table" FFLs, leading to the current ATF policy that applicants must have a commercially-zoned place of business, and be engaged in the business of selling guns for profit.  Josh Sugarmann has neither. 

He admits that he doesn't sell guns in D.C.  No one's seen his bound book, if he even has one, so we can't know whether he's lying or not.  So how is it that he's able to keep an FFL for "research purposes?"  It's safe to say he has some high-up ATF bosses protecting him.  If I, or John Lott, or Alan Gura, applied for an FFL, declaring our intention to never sell guns, a quick denial would be certain.  In fact, on the "Do you intend to run this business for profit?" question on the application, it says not to bother submitting it if you check "no."  Somebody in the ATF made a very special exception for Josh. 

We've known for years that Sugarmann is a federally licensed gun dealer.  When we first found out in 2008, we called and wrote the ATF, complaining that this man, who pushed so hard to revoke home-based FFLs, is one himself.  The feds made it clear that Sugarmann is special, that the rules that apply to my local dealer don't apply to Josh.  He is a definite hypocrite, and a possible perjurer. 


It's not surprising, coming from the gun ban crowd.  Former Mayor Daley, the man who banned guns in his city while he surrounded himself with armed guards, must be proud of Sugarmann's impressive circumvention of the law.