Reality brings out the CAPSLOCK RAGE
Yadayadayada- we have gone over this so many times that it hardly bears repeating but here goes again- I AM TALKING ABOUT GUN DEATHS AND INJURIES ON THIS BLOG AND NOT OVERALL CRIME RATES. THE TWO ARE DIFFERENT COMPARISONS. I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT ME TO BE TALKING ABOUT THE CARNAGE BY GUNS BUT THAT IS WHAT I AM DOING. DIVERTING ATTENTION AWAY FROM GUNS TO OVERALL CRIME IS A TACTIC BUT IT DOESN’T CHANGE THE FACTS. GET OVER IT. I WILL CONTINUE BLOGGING ABOUT GUN DEATHS AND INJURIES ON THIS BLOG.
Diverting attention away from “Gun Death” to “Death” and “Gun Violence” to “Violence” is a tactic. Its called clarifying the issue. Does a soldier keep his head down in a firefight because he doesn’t want to get shot, or because he doesn’t want to get killed? Also I have several friends who served in Iraq and what they say they feared most were the roadside bombs. If a police officer arrests somebody and finds a pocket knife on them, does he ignore that because it isn’t a gun?
We divert attention away from artificially narrow fields. When Linoge published his three graphical analysis of guns and crime in America Here, Here and Here. He was not “Diverting attention AWAY from guns” but simply expanding the field to include all the relevant data points. You see, a person beaten with a baseball bat, or strangled with an extension cord, is just as dead, and just as tragic as somebody shot. We’re not diverting attention, we’re simply accepting that guns are only one way for somebody to be injured or killed.
What’s really getting Joan a’Shreakin’ is that “Gun Death” is being exposed as a ruse to confuse the issue, and to make gun control look more relevant. They want people to get the twisted view that somehow getting shot is the only way to die, and if we can just ban those pesky guns, the world would be a safer place. Only that’s just not true. I’ll end with a quote from one of Joan’s Coworkers.
I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime. For instance, simple cross-national comparisons of gun availability and crime do not control for the degree to which various countries impose legal restrictions on firearms. It also is difficult to sort out whether high levels of gun ownership lead to high crime rates or whiter high crime rates lead to high levels of gun ownership.
–Dennis A. Henigan: Brady Campaign
They know “Gun Death” isn’t a relevant metric, and by its very nature it is not a number that’s relevant to the risk assessment of normal people in their day-to-day lives. We all understand that guns are dangerous, and guns in the hands of bad people are EXTREMELY dangerous, but when a bad person attempts to kill you with a knife, or a pipe, the fear isn’t less because he isn’t armed with a gun.
My goals are to reduce ALL violence as much as possible. I’m a realist, as I’ve seen evidence of some of the first humans to walk the Earth committing violent acts, and I’ve seen animals kill each-other, we can never reduce violence and murder to zero. I’ve also spent a lot of time pointing out that if you remove tools for violence from society, violent people will use new tools. The UK banned guns to stop “Gun Violence”, now they’re banning knives to stop “Knife Violence”, one can see the futility of this given that a “Club” is a deadly weapon, and is nothing more than a tree branch, or a rock, or a piece of building materiel of appropriate size and weight, and certainly these heavy restrictions on freedom have not made the UK any safer than it was before.
Violent crime is a factor of violent criminals, not tools. I speak for reducing violent criminals by punishing them more severely. Settling differences without violence is easy, therefore we should have no mercy on those who choose violence over more civil methods.
This punishment must be done under rule of law with law enforcement and the judicial system. Still even a well funded Police force, generally the cops are (as the old adage goes) Minuets away, when mere seconds count. So I am in full support of arming good people. By definition these are not the criminals, they are not bullies, they are not thugs. They don’t want arms to CAUSE violence, but to RESPOND to it, legally, and preventativly.
These are my goals. Now what sounds more like Common Sense, to you?
Well, to be fair and accurate (which is more than we can say about Joan), all of those charts and graphs I generate up focus exclusively on firearm-related crimes and firearm-related fatalities – I make no attempt to consider the larger picture of “crime” in general. That said, those charts and data do more-than-adequately show that “gun control” has absolutely no bearing on firearm-related crimes or firearm-related fatalities, due to the simple fact that there is no causality between the number of firearms in civilian hands, and the number of firearm-related crimes/fatalities, and “no causality” means “gun control” fanatics are just pissing in the wind.
Unfortunately, as we all are already aware, this is one of Joan’s largest logical discrepancies:
No, they are not. Crime is crime, deaths are deaths, and both should be minimized by any means proven to do so. “Gun control” has been proven to do nothing to reduce the amoung of firearm-related crimes and fatalities here in America, but it has been documented to play a not-insignificant factor in the growth of non-firearm-related crimes and fatalities in other countries – simply examine the current violent crime situation in Once-Great Britain, and you will reach that conclusion very rapidly. A disarmed, cowed populace is left defenseless in the face of “chavs” who have successfully made England the most-violent European nation. Most violent, and four times more violent than we “gun-happy” Americans are.
Crime is crime, and it does not matter if it is committed with a firearm or a knife; however, it does matter if you remove one of the best ways to defend yourself from law-abiding citizens – history has proven this empowers criminals and leads to cultures we have no particular desire of experiencing. Unfortunately for us, Joan would consider 0 firearm-related fatalities and 10 times more knife-related fatalities to be a “success”, even though the total number of fatalities would be higher… Is that sick or what?
Joan is simply unable or unwilling to reason properly, and it’s gotten noticeably worse since people started trying to debate with her. At this point, she’s so far out of touch with reality that she’s not even good for illustrating to the “fence-sitters” how flawed the anti-gunners’ arguments are.
OTOH, that statement of hers amply demonstrates the premise behind your “Gun Death” category – she literally doesn’t care about murder as long as it’s not committed with a gun.
I had an interesting and related revelation-that-shouldn’t-have-been-a-revelation the other day, that I posted in a comment at Joe Huffman’s blog.
It seems that Joan and others like her don’t care if other violent crime goes up, as long as no guns are used – which means that when they say they’re concerned about public safety, they’re lying.
Tho Baldr deleted a comment of mine because I pointed out exactly that. He found it an offensive assertion. Hey, if you find it offensive to put “Gun Death” on a pedestal, while ignoring other forms of death offensive, DON’T DO IT!!
My poor dear, japete.
Does not understand analogy. She cannot see how a detail fits in the larger scheme. She willfully
appears to not think outside her box. She is emotionally invested in guns are evil. Joan is completely
unwilling or unable to understand and recongnize that the tool is not the cause. Read and evaluate
how she writes, “guns kill”. No guns propel projectiles, people kill. I have never seen a gun of it’s
own in any way self animate, move, or willfully kill someone. There is ALWAYS a person involved
and in the end responsible for that weapon discharging either directly or indirectly. She doesn’t get
that. To her the existence of a gun that isn’t entrapped in a locked safe is a mortal danger.
She cannot willingly accept that criminal are often that way before they kill with a gun. To do so
means confronting her personal demon so in her mind Lund was not himself bad but got one of
those amazing self animating guns that made him step over the line to criminal homicide. When
you add that she is involved in a cult that supports that irrational thinking from which only bad
things can ensue. If you look at cults and how they work I think that model is a good fit for
describing the behavior of their acolytes.
Rational thinking and argument will not change that and should it we witness a meltdown
if serious proportions. Several bloggers have noted this for many months. There is no point
in engaging her to change her mind, it is lost. There is great value in for the lack of a better words
exposing, embarrassing, and cataloging her misdirected thinking and those she mimics so that
other readers understand why it’s all propaganda and should be treated like all other cult thinking.
Eck!
Why do you think she searches far and wide for tales of dropped derringers and stories with sloppy reporting that make it sound like a gun discharged on its own accord? She honestly believes that guns do kill…how else can she live with herself letting her sister be married to that psychpath, and then when they were seperated she let her go to his house with nothing but her boyfriend for protection. That’s some pretty heavy guilt to live with, so she passes it off to us!
FEAR THE CAPS LOCK!!! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!
LOL!
I just posted this over there.. Let’s see if it makes the cut.
So one incident out of all the other shootings? And that’s why you think you need 30 rounds?
How many instances do you need before you feel it is statistically useful to believe one needs 30 rounds? Since you like to quantify numbers…
And let’s be honest. This isn’t about 30 rounds, since the bill would ban 11 rounds. Nice tactic.
That’s their shell game.
Now that we have hit capslock rage, how much longer until reasoned discourse breaks out?
That was day one. 60% of all comments are deleted from her blog. She hasn’t evaporated any posts yet.
She hasn’t really corrected any of them either. To see that she admits to her mistakes, one would really have to read the comments and many blogs, I don’t bother unless I plan to comment (and wonder if someone already came to my conclusion). No updates to posts. No deleting them. And even when she admits to having made a mistake, she will weasel out of it. “I was wrong when I said the sun is blue, but I still think it is and the gun guys are trying to distract the issue that the sun isn’t yellow”.
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