What do you think the big issue will be that will bring women into the Libertarian front?
Great video
I ran similar numbers which got me to switch sides in the whole gun debate. Also he’s not noting the scandal where the Home Office of the UK was altering the number to make the violent crime rate look less than it really is.
h/t ENDO
More politicians pushing Doctors to push their agenda:
More than 30,000 people die from gun injuries each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gun injuries account for nearly 1 in 5 injury deaths in the United States. More than 96% of those deaths are due to suicide and homicide.
In an editorial published in Annals, a publication of the American College of Physicians (ACP), on Monday, Dr. Christine Laine, editor-in-chief of the journal and a general internist, calls on physicians to use their voices in this gun control debate, just as doctors have done regarding other issues that threaten public health, such as smoking, air pollution, drunk driving and vaccinations.
Laine points out that the American College of Physicians, which is the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States, identified gun violence as a public health issue back in 1998, but says the subsequent response from fellow physicians – whose mission it is to prevent, detect and treat illness in adults – is “lackluster” when it comes to their involvement in preventing gun injuries.
“Lackluster” because they know its bullshit. Hell my wife had the whole “Gun Talk” with her PCP during a checkup. She pushed back, and the doctor quickly admitted she personally knew nothing about guns or the issue of safety.
“It is almost impossible today to get federal funding for firearm injury prevention research,” says Dr. Arthur Kellermann in a December 19 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kellermann, now with the Rand Corporation, treated (among others) gunshot victims during his 25-year career practicing and teaching emergency medicine, most recently in Atlanta. He’s referring to how federal funding for gun studies dried up because “the (National Rifle Association) strategy of shutting down the pipeline of science was effective.”
Good old Dr. Kellerman! An Anti-gun activist pushing his agenda in the name of psudo-science! I wonder how he’d feel about federal funding to show the BENEFIT of firearms? No, we should only pay taxes to REMOVE our rights!
And there’s this angle from Reason
Psychiatrically informed policies aimed at controlling people rather than weapons are popular in the wake of mass shootings, especially among those who rightly worry that gun restrictions will unfairly burden law-abiding Americans while failing to prevent future attacks. Yet treating gun violence as “a mental health problem” presents similar dangers…..In any event, mental health professionals are notoriously bad at predicting which of the world’s many misfits, cranks, and oddballs will become violent. “Over thirty years of commentary, judicial opinion, and scientific review argue that predictions of danger lack scientific rigor,” notes University of Georgia law professor Alexander Scherr in a 2003 Hastings Law Journal article. “The sharpest critique finds that mental health professionals perform no better than chance at predicting violence, and perhaps perform even worse.”
So even if the mental-health criteria for rejecting gun buyers (or for commitment) were expanded, there is little reason to think they could distinguish between future Lanzas and people who pose no threat. Survey data from the National Institute of Mental Health indicate that nearly half of all Americans qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis at some point in their lives. That’s a pretty wide dragnet…..Even under current law, mental illness can become a label for unconventional political beliefs. Remember Brandon Raub, the Marine Corps veteran who was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Virginia last summer based on his conspiracy-minded, anti-government Facebook posts?
The malleability of mental illness was also apparent at a 2007 debate among the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. After seeing a YouTube video in which Jered Townsend of Clio, Michigan, asked about gun control and referred to his rifle as “my baby,” Joseph Biden said: “If that’s his baby, he needs help….I don’t know that he is mentally qualified to own that gun. I’m being serious.”
Yep, they want to “Limit Crazies From Having Guns” by calling us all Crazy!
h/t Mrs. Weer’d
Gunmen on motorcycles sprayed a van carrying employees from a community center with bullets Tuesday, killing five female teachers and two aid workers, but sparing a child they took out of the vehicle before opening fire.
The director of the group that the seven worked for says he suspects it may have been the latest in a series of attacks targeting anti-polio efforts in Pakistan. Some militants oppose the vaccination campaigns, accusing health workers of acting as spies for the U.S. and alleging the vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile.
Who do we blame? Guns? Muslim Radicals? Or Jenny McCarthy?
A crowd stampeded after leaving a New Year’s fireworks show early Tuesday in Ivory Coast’s commercial center, killing 61 people — many of them youths — and injuring more than 200, rescue workers said…Thousands had gathered at the Felix Houphouet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan’s Plateau district to see the fireworks. After the show, the crowds poured onto the Boulevard de la Republic by the Hotel Tiama at about 1 a.m., said Col. Issa Sako of the fire department rescue team.
“The flood of people leaving the stadium became a stampede which led to the deaths of more than 60 and injured more than 200,” Sako told Ivory Coast state TV.
What the Hell?? No fire, no panic, no odd incident mentioned…just thousands of people gathering in one spot and 61 people dying. Not their first instance of this either.
This is not Ivory Coast’s first stadium tragedy. In 2009, 22 people died and over 130 were injured in a stampede at a World Cup qualifying match at the Houphouet Boigny stadium, prompting FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, to impose a fine of tens of thousands of dollars on Ivory Coast’s soccer federation. The stadium, which officially holds 35,000, was overcrowded at the time of the disaster.
A year later, two people were killed and 30 wounded in a stampede at a municipal stadium during a reggae concert in Bouake, the country’s second-largest city. The concert was organized in the city, held by rebels at the time, to promote peace and reconciliation.
The recent shooting in New Town Connecticut is a horrible event, but this body count just pales in comparison. And this isn’t an isolated event!
Hey, but let’s just focus on “Gun Death”, because that’s the only way dozens of youths can be killed in one place!
Horrible.
h/t Barron
This is a very interesting article. The wife and I had a great discussion about it this morning. Let’s have a look!
Gun safety laws have been deadlocked for many years, largely because the options on the table are zero-sum — either gun control advocates win and gun rights advocates lose, or vice versa. But there may be a way out if we re-frame the question and the solution.
This is what got us both hooked on the article! Let’s read on!
What if we sought not just a regulatory solution, but also created a profit-making opportunity? Specifically, what if the government partnered with business to create a new category: a $100B gun safety and enjoyment industry?
Government partnership? You’re losing me again!
The automotive industry is a useful analogy, for both safety and enjoyment. Car owners segment into two camps. At the highest level, you can divide car owners into those who “need cars” (e.g., Utilitarians and Safety Seekers) and those who “want cars” (e.g., Driving Enthusiasts and Tinkerers. Similarly, gun proponents can be divided into two camps. First are “Protection Seekers” — consumers who want the protection of guns and hope to never use them. Second are “Enjoyment Seekers” — consumers who may also want protection, but are more focused on guns as a hobby — perhaps they enjoy hunting or target shooting, or perhaps they just dig the guns themselves. The good news is that “protection” is a close cousin of “safety”, so Protection Seekers are the easiest to align with gun control consumers also seeking safety.
To satisfy the gun control (Safety Seeker) group and the first group of gun owners (Protection Seeker), requiring innovations in product safety is the first opportunity.
OK I like that he’s looking at the self-defense people, not the “Deer and Ducks” people, that’s a fresh look.
Both the automotive industry and the government can pat themselves on the back for increasing automotive safety through innovation (seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, lane departure sensors) and sound regulation (seat belt requirements, age restrictions, etc.) But one key factor is the legal requirement to have auto insurance if you drive a car (vs. just own a car). Government could require gun makers to layer in similar safety/protection innovations into the products themselves, which both gun safety and protection seekers should support. As Farhad Manjoo has pointed out on Slate, technology has advanced to the point where we can go far beyond the safety catch. If the gun is there to protect your family, I’m sure Protection Seekers would welcome safeguards to ensure their kids don’t get into the guns and play around with it. This might both greatly reduce the number of deaths caused by guns (as it is now, just having a gun in the house increases the risk of a fatal shooting) and create an opportunity for gun manufacturers to charge a premium for the safest guns, the way Volvo charges a premium its safe cars, and grow through innovation.
Ok first up you’re citing the Kellerman study! Can we get beyond this? The study was junk! It equated drug dealers and gang members with lawful people owning guns for self-defense. He also links an very biased, an inaccurate article on gun safety, and “Smart Gun” technology. The bottom line is guns are VERY safe, and the handful that aren’t are recalled by the manufacturers at their own expense. Everybody who is into guns is well aware of this…it appears those who aren’t into guns are blissfully unaware.
Further his problem is false to begin with. Look at this:
n 2000, 174 children (0-18) in the United States died from unintentional firearm-related injuries. Unintentional injuries are usually caused when children play with guns or are hunting.
Looking at the CDC data you see that there are many more pressing threats when it comes to accidental death. Poisoning, Motor vehicle accidents, and drowning seem to be the leads in any age range well above guns. (Interesting given his love for the auto industry, and his feelings that the gun industry has a problem).
And of course he ignores the key reason for this group OWNING a gun. PROTECTION! If you disassemble a gun, and lock away the ammo…or don’t keep ammo in the home you won’t have an accident…you also won’t have a gun if you need one.
Requiring gun insurance is the second opportunity. Again, cars provide a useful analogy: if you drive, you are required by law to have insurance to protect yourself, your car, and anyone else directly affected by an accident. Insurance companies charge more for riskier cars and riskier drivers. They invest significant dollars in actuaries to ensure all risk factors are accounted and charged for.
What are these risks? Accidental death? Its nothing statistically speaking. Theft? Well my guns are under my home owner’s policy, and before that my renter’s insurance. Are we talking crime? Well we’ll get to that later!
Not surprisingly, I checked with a few friends who are gun proponents and this idea didn’t go very far — it was viewed as burdensome regulation and an infringement on Second Amendment rights. After all, health insurance and even car insurance — as much as most of us don’t like paying for them — do offer us a benefit. And all that firearms insurance would do is take some of the costs for gun violence out of the taxpayer-supported criminal justice system, and the health insurance system we all pay for, and ask gun owners to pay for them.
Here’s the kicker. See he wants gun owners to shoulder the cost of gun violence, not the general population. But let’s look deeper into this. We know that accidental death and injury is very small, we also know that while it gets a LOT of news coverage, spree killers, and other crazy people with lawfully owned guns killing people is equally as small.
The real “Gun Death” number is inner-city criminal-on-criminal crime. Most of these violent offenders are well-known to police, and neither own their guns legally, nor posses them for lawful commerce reasons.
Is he trying to tell me that the gangs in the inner cities are going to pay the insurance money on guns they technically don’t even own? This is nothing but a shell game. He doesn’t want to pay the cost, so he’s willing to point a finger at an equally blameless party to get THEM to pay what he doesn’t want to.
Sorry bud, this isn’t a GUN problem, its a DRUG problem. These shootings aren’t happening because of lawful gun owners, its because of UNLAWFUL drug dealers who can’t use our justice system to uphold their business contracts.
At the same time, insurance could benefit “Enjoyment Seekers” in a few ways. Some of the profits from the insurance could help hunters transport and preserve their game so they could more easily feed their families. Other revenue could go towards conserving hunting preserves and ensuring a healthy, abundant wildlife population. If it becomes too expensive for individuals to adequately insure military-style assault rifles, perhaps the industry could take a page from the sports car driving schools, where you can go to a race track and drive hot cars fast. Perhaps gun enthusiasts could still fire such weapons at gun ranges, safely.
Well hunting preserves and that stuff is already being protected by the NRA and other groups. Also the whole “Closed Course” stuff does exist at gun clubs, you can rent anything from target pistols to machine guns.
Still you’re doing that finger-pointing thing again. You think we own semi-auto rifles for the thrill? These are the very guns people looking for personal protection want, and there you go throwing them under the bus.
This is yet another smart person thinking they have a solution for a problem they know nothing about.
I like Sebastian, he’s a nice guy and I’ve enjoyed my social times with him, as well as read his blog daily. Still my one big issue with him is I often see him as a Republican Apologist.
Then he writes this:
Anyone still want to argue we aren’t in grave danger? The GOP can be counted on not to be counted on….That’s exactly what’s happened to gun voters in New Jersey. They’ve just given up, because neither party will do anything for them. They are largely not a factor in politics in New Jersey. Does the GOP nationally just want to surrender a huge voting bloc? Personally, if the GOP throws us under the bus. I’m done with the issue. At that point it’s got to be a third party.
This is why I voted for Gary Johnson in the Presidential election, and shed no tears to Scott Brown’s well-deserved defeat. I’ve given up on the GOP as a block (there are still individuals worthy of my support, but the party as a whole is only slightly less horrible than the Democrats), years ago. Sebastian is willing to give them one more chance….and if they don’t fuck this one up, he’ll be at this point again in the future.
My line in the sand got crossed ages ago, his is just up the road in a few months.
Got the day off work, and just so happens to be my birthday, so I’m going to be celebrating for the better part of the day.
Still have a few blog posts to hammer out, so stand by, I’m having fun! 🙂
Use this post as a thread to talk about your views on the new year, and what you’ve done for fun.
I still have a cold so last night was relatively low key. Played some video games, had a nice dinner, and passed out sober around 9pm.
We’ll see about today!
I was really shocked by this one:
Twenty-one tribal policemen believed to have been kidnapped by the Taliban were found shot dead in Pakistan’s troubled northwest tribal region early Sunday, government officials said.
Officials found the bodies shortly after midnight in the Jabai area of Frontier Region Peshawar after being notified by one policeman who escaped, said Naveed Akbar Khan, a top political official in the area. Another policeman was found seriously wounded, said Khan.
The 23 policemen went missing before dawn Thursday when militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons attacked two posts in Frontier Region Peshawar. Two policemen were also killed in the attacks.
What a mess.
Obama is making gun control a priority:
President Obama pledged Sunday to make gun control a top priority in his second term and vowed to put his “full weight” behind such legislation.
Besides getting elected president I don’t think I’ve seen Obama put his “full weight” on anything in his life. I’ll even say that for his second presidential run.
Obama said Sunday he would not prejudge recommendations. But he said he was skeptical about the only answer being to put armed guards in schools, as the National Rifle Association has suggested.
The president instead vowed to rally Americans around an agenda to limit gun violence, adding he still supports increased background checks and bans on assault weapons and high-capacity bullet magazines.
And have any of those things “limited gun violence”? The numbers say “No”, but it won’t stop them from saying it. Gun control, like many other “Progressive” agenda items is more of a religious fanaticism, than actual reason.
What do you think?
