GUN VIOLENCE

 

INTRODUCTION

 

One of the things that makes America great, are the many individual rights enshrined in the Constitution.  Even criminals, or those accused of crime, are treated with unusual respect.   Some of these rights include

 

1.      No one can be forced to testify against himself.

2.      No one can be arrested and kept in jail without specific charges being brought.

3.      Every person accused of a crime can see all the evidence against them and must be present while anyone testifies against them.

4.      Everyone has a right to a fair and speedy trial and a right to be judged by fellow citizens in a jury and not by the police or politicians.

5.      No one who is found not-guilty can be accused of the same crime a second time.

6.      No one who is convicted of a crime can be tortured with cruel or unusual punishment.

 

But while the Constitution affords criminals many protections against the power of the state, there is one, and only one, clause that permits citizens to protect themselves against criminals.  And that is the right to own weapons for self-defense established in the Second Amendment.

 

THE SECOND AMENDMENT

 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, this right of self-defense is so clearly stated that it is legally impossible to prevent ordinary citizens from owning guns.   To do that, you would have to repeal the Second Amendment.  Anything else is vacuous verbiage and political demagoguery.

 

But then why would we want to repeal it?  The Second Amendment does not permit crimes or protect criminals.  It does not grant felons the right to use guns or even to possess them.  Rather its sole purpose is to allow law abiding citizens to protect themselves from criminals.

 

If liberals have any doubt, they might recall we already have laws forbidding gun violence, which the Supreme Court says are allowed under the Second Amendment.  A few of these are

 

1.      It is now illegal for someone previously convicted of a crime to own a gun.

2.      It is now illegal to use a gun to commit a crime, like an armed robbery or an assault.

3.      It is now illegal to murder someone with a gun.  It is illegal to murder a lot of people with a gun.  It is illegal to murder a child with a gun.

 

The simple fact that there are laws against using guns to shoot large numbers of people, and yet school massacres still happen, seems to imply that simply passing more laws, to include repealing the Second Amendment, wouldn’t solve the problem.

 

The simple fact that large numbers of people are being massacred by terrorists in trucks plowing through crowds or by bombs (e.g. Oklahoma City or the Boston Marathon), or by airplanes flying into buildings, or in any number of other horrible ways seems to imply that probably ineffectual attempts to remove all the guns, wouldn’t solve the problem either.

 

A similar societal disaster was caused by fuzzy minded left-wing thinking in the 1930s with the prohibition of alcohol.   Family violence, drunkenness, and driving accidents increased fueled by the rise of organized crime to the extent that sane right-wing politicians finally mustered sufficient support to end the nonsense.

 

If nothing else, the police and military would still be armed.  This would also be true of organized crime and neighborhood thugs because criminals are good at breaking laws and stealing things.  Indeed, those cities and states with the most restrictive gun control have the HIGHEST gun violence. 

 

Could it be that criminals are emboldened knowing their law-abiding victims are unable to defend themselves?  If there is another explanation for this unmistakable correlation, no one has yet been able to adequately express it.

 

And in fact, maybe more guns would help?   Banks have armed guards to protect our money.  Maybe our kids are even more important than money and should be protected as well?

 

POLITICS

 

Federal laws on firearms or one size fits all, are inept and mostly serve politicians who want the public wrongly to believe they “care”.   What works in New York City like “stop and frisk” is irrelevant in the wilds of Wyoming where gun control means a “steady hand”. 

 

The difficulty is that the voting public is mostly ignorant of the issues involved.  A case in point is the democrat Dianne Feinstein who lied about her concern for gun violence.  She sponsored a law entitled “Assault Weapons Ban.”   Now who could be against that?   The answer is every rational person in America who wants a safer society.

 

The “Assault Weapons Ban” did not ban assault weapons like machine guns used by the military.  They have always required so many fees and forms as to have been effectively forbidden to US citizens since 1934.  Rather our caring Dianne Feinstein re-named less than twenty models of ordinary semi-automatic rifles, which are more than 80% of all rifles currently sold in America, as dangerous because they “looked scary.”  Since these were not the largest caliber or the fastest firing types that left upwards of one thousand more dangerous models which remained legal to sell and to own and to use.

 

So when the next future mass murderer tries to buy one of Dianne’s forbidden semi-automatic rifles, the gun store owner will helpfully note that would not be the most powerful or fastest firing choice.  But he will routinely offer a brochure with nearly one thousand other models which are more deadly, and still legal.   So police officers will waste time ensuring that the slow firing, less powerful rifles are not for sale.   And slightly more people will be killed in the next mass shooting.  And there will be an even greater need for a caring democrat Dianne Feinstein at the next mass funeral for murdered children.

 

Dianne’s so-called “Assault Weapons Ban” lasted from 1994 to 2004.  During that time, there were no prosecutions for any sales of the forbidden 1% of semi-automatic models.  Please again note these were identified as dangerous because of the shape of their trigger grips and stocks, ignoring any consideration of firepower.  That this and similar laws had little practical effect is clearly an understatement.  But the utter futility of this exercise in preventing murder is perhaps best illustrated by the National FBI Crime Statistics for 2016

 

Murders In the US for 2016
Handguns	7105
Knives	1604
Fists/Kicking	656
Clubs/Hammers	472
Ordinary Rifles	374
Shotguns	262
Drunk Driving	10,497
Abortion	652,639
Military Assault Rifles	0

 

This table is for 12 years after the ban expired but the relative rates are identical to those before and during the ban.   The “Ordinary Rifles” line item is for all bolt-action and semi-automatic types.  Military assault rifles have been effectively illegal for more than 80 years in the US (since 1934) and while their use in crime is not unknown, it is statistically insignificant.  

 

While any death is tragic, ordinary rifles are clearly not the weapon of choice.  The use of fists and feet kill nearly twice as many, and the number from knives is more than four times greater, and the number from handguns is nearly twenty times greater still.   One might reflect on the time and ink and energy wasted on “assault weapon” democrat demagoguery used to frighten votes out of the uninformed, which of course hindered law-enforcement of everything else.

 

And to slap down yet another canard, note that loading a new clip of ammunition into a rifle typically takes less than about one to three seconds which action is extremely unlikely to hinder any carnage.  One has to wonder who would vote for these democrats and also why the newspapers fail to honestly investigate and report these manifest and undeniable facts.

 

ROOT CAUSES OF VIOLENCE

 

So how do we prevent mass murder in schools and elsewhere?  Perhaps we should think about why the number of angry young men is increasing and not so much the means they employ to vent their frustrations.

 

And while correlation is not always causation, some observations are hard to ignore.   In all societies in all periods of history, to the extent democrat-socialistic programs are implemented, social violence has also increased.

 

The problem is that the democrat welfare state destroys the family unit.  Being raised in poverty by a single Mom who struggles to provide food and shelter and education produces undisciplined children.  Trickle-down crumbs from the Government table can never be sufficient.  But the main issue is that young men have no father figure to instill discipline.

 

Throughout life, it is our immediate family who knows and loves us best and who best provides for us.  The democrat substitute of a welfare program administered by a political bureaucrat is a very poor alternative indeed and it destroys those minority communities on which it is forced.

 

Statistically speaking, illegitimate kids have no moral or religious training and preferentially swell the ranks of prison populations.  And in nearly every case, mass murderers come from broken homes.   The correlation is so strong one cannot but imagine this is a contributing, if not a primary, cause of anti-social tendencies.

 

And as one might have expected, the number of illegitimate children being raised by a single parent, which is almost always the mother, has skyrocketed since democrat President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” started in 1963 and the never ending expansion of welfare rolls by the democrats in Congress.

 

But this shouldn’t surprise anyone.  On the other side, affluence and being law abiding is strongly correlated with having been raised in stable family unit.  Again this is only reasonable.  

 

CONCLUSIONS

 

New laws which rename roughly 1% of ordinary rifles as assault weapons, which they are not, are idiotic.  That “banning” these low-firepower models only encourages criminals to buy higher firepower versions which are still legal, is counterproductive.  That this publicity stunt distracts law-enforcement, from policing handguns, knives, clubs, physical attacks, and other violence that comprises most of the deadly violence in society is disgraceful.  That left-wing politicians get elected corrupting the public dialogue with this demagoguery is obscene.

 

Today democrats subsidize single mothers with Federal Government welfare checks, free apartments, food stamps, and a host of other programs.  And the numbers of those needing assistance tracks the amount of money allocated.  What we subsidize, we get more of.   Wow, who would have thought?

 

Maybe we should not be happy with the democrat status-quo of inter-generational poverty and crime infested minority neighborhoods where the family unit is non-existent.  Maybe we might want instead to give Republican solutions, like repairing minority education or better policing crime infested neighborhoods, a chance?  And just which side is the compassionate one? 

 

 

Obviously more welfare money hasn’t yet won the “War on Poverty” (1963).  And we have very good reasons, despite the votes it buys and the corruption it instills, to believe it never will.

 

 

Children Born to Unwed Mothers [15-44] and On Welfare