Some Gun Control Argument Resources

[AJMD429]

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To propose a public policy change and expect to be taken seriously, it has to:

1. Have a solid chance of accomplishing a public benefit.
2. Have a near-zero chance of causing public or individual harm.
3. Be in accordance with the Constitution - in this case, specifically the Bill of Rights.

So.....let's look at all three things:

1. Serious criminologists have REPEATEDLY demonstrated the complete lack of benefit of ‘gun free zones’, bans on ‘open carrying’, ‘universal background checks’ and ‘red flag laws’. See the law review journal article by (liberal) award-winning criminologist Don Kates and his physician co-authors, in which they boldly state “…Even more unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them. The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School…” Almost a third of the law review article consists of references and citations, proving the concept that ‘gun control’ makes the streets LESS safe.

https://guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html

2. Serious historians have REPEATEDLY demonstrated the potential harm of ‘common sense gun control’, in both domestic and foreign situations, in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. See in particular “Death by Gun Control” by Zelman and Stevens, in which they show how clearly the seemingly innocent ‘first step’ of ‘background checks’, which are used to justify the also-seemingly-benign creation of a ‘gun registry’, serve as a breach of the protection against genocide - which causes more deaths than criminal gun murders, gun accidents, gun suicides, guns deaths by terrorists, and even military wartime gun deaths COMBINED. ‘Gun control’ thus also makes sociey LESS stable.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gun-Contro ... 0964230461

3. So the above two objective analyses of ‘gun control’ demonstrate that it is FAR from the concept of a “balance between safe streets, a stable society, and the convenience of firearms hobbyists”,which is the way the ‘news’ media tends to portray it. Instead, the safety of our streets and the stability of our society are both ENDANGERED by ‘gun control’.
ALSO when you read things about 'gun control' or hear politicians posturing about their latest legislation, keep in mind that although the Kates article points out the “overt mendacity” on the part of the CDC and NEJM and other ‘gun control advocates’, in contrast, the National Rifle Association was cited by the Library of Congress as “along with the National Library Association, one of the TWO MOST CONSISTENTLY TRUTHFUL lobbying organizations” [emphasis added], again despite the way the organization is portrayed by the ‘mainstream’ news media.

3. Now the THIRD nail in the coffin for these mis-represented ‘common sense gun control’ measures is the fact that they are simiply in CLEAR violation of the Second Amendment. That means, in plain English, that EVEN IF THEY ACTUALLY SAVED LIVES, they would be illegal and not within the authority of the government to pass, even if a clear 'majority' believes the legislation would save lives and be a good thing - we are a Constitutional Republic, NOT a Democracy, because the creators of our government felt that history shows Democracies degenerate quickly into Dictatorships, once a charismatic leader appears who is willing to take money and power from 49% of the population and hand it to the other 51% in exchange for votes; pretty soon minorities and the economically powerless are doomed. To pass any 'infringement' on the right to keep and bear arms, would require a Constitutional Amendment, not mere legislation. And keep in mind that 'arms' were clearly understood to be such small arms (rifles, shotguns, handguns, etc.) as would be needed to assure that the general citizenry could indeed use those arms collectively and defensively to make it difficult or impossible for a standing army (which was also supposed to not even exist) to impose a dictatorship.

At the federal level such legislation would exceed the authority as granted, with clear limits, in the Constitution, BY THE PEOPLE to the federal government, and if passed at a state or local level, the federal government would have the duty to stop their enforcement, just as if a state or city banned the Quran or banned writing editorials critical of the Governor. The original intent of the Second Amendment was CLEARLY not that citizens have fireaarms ‘for sporting use’, any more than the First Amendment was written to assure citizens could write poetry, and it was CLEARLY not limited to licensure or membership in a government-run organization, any more than a license was intended to be able to write an editorial, speak out in public against a bad law or politician, or have to be a member of a government-approved editorial-writing group to be allowed to post something on the internet.

See among many others, the works of Stephen Halbrook -

https://stephenhalbrook.com/books/the-f ... amendment/

David Kopel -

[link > ] - "Guns Kill People, and Tyrants with Gun Monopolies Kill the Most"

…and many others…

https://guncite.com/2ndlawlib.html
https://guncite.com/

So….like many other complex social issues, the knee-jerk ‘feel-good’ impulse may in fact NOT be the best public policy, and may indeed ENDANGER lives, especially in the long-run, and we have ample empiric evidence to show this happens, and pretty solid mechanistic explanations for why it happens. So to pursue more ‘common sense gun control’ merely to feel good for out-machoing the NRA, or to virtue-signal to one’s peers, is a pretty despicable thing to do. I hope that anyone with sincere motivation to make our streets SAFER and our society more STABLE, will become thoroughly informed, and I think at that point, those with integrity will not only quit supporting symbolic and generally useless ‘gun control’, but will see the light, and ACTIVELY OPPOSE IT. The latter action may not win them friends, but the truly brave and sincere people care more about causing social benefits than they do merely appearinig to do so.

[AJMD429]

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Someone else posted this on Quora and I thought it worth sharing:

How flawed are America's gun laws?
Seriously flawed.

Most American gun laws are geared towards the point-of-sale through legal, licensed gun dealers, also called Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs). That is, when you purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer, you have to fill out and sign a form, provide ID, and wait while they run a “background check” on you. That can take seconds or it might take up to 3 days. Some states include “waiting periods” of up to 10 days before you can actually take possession of the firearm you’re holding in your hands.

All the paperwork done by the FFL dealer has to be kept by the dealer. Any small error on the forms can cause the dealer headaches with the authorities. A transposed serial number or the wrong model number can result in federal prosecution.

Some cities, and even a few states, require you to obtain a permit each time you want to purchase a firearm. In some cases, processing that permit may take months, even more than a year. Once you get that nice permit in hand, you can buy the gun. But then you need to have a different permit to keep it in your home in the city and the long process starts all over again. This is a serious infringement on the right to own a firearm.

While some of this may sound “natural” to people in other countries, the problem with this is that less than 1%-2% of gun purchases at gun dealers are done by people with criminal records. Criminals don’t obtain their firearms from gun dealers, gun shows, or pawn shops.

Illegal Sales

Most criminal acquisitions of firearms are black market sales or trades. Danny Dirtbag wants a gun so he might offer Rotten Richie a quantity of drugs for one he has. Or Rotten Richie “knows a guy” who will sell him a gun, which he will then give/sell to Danny.

Where do those guns come from? Most are taken in burglaries. Burglaries of homes, of sporting goods stores, gun shops, etc. Those are sold to a “fence” who gives the thief some money for the gun and the thief often buys drugs with the money. Other times, gang members get jobs with shipping companies that ship guns from distributors to retailers and they make a box “disappear” in-transit. Those guns end up on the black market.

Many years ago, someone documented how long it took for a criminal to obtain a firearm. A criminal could obtain an illegal firearm in as little as 30 minutes with cash. No questions asked. Out of 5 attempts, the longest it took was 29 hours. This was at a time when there was a 5-day “waiting period” on most handgun sales. So the desperate citizen who wanted a gun had to wait 5 days, while the criminal he feared could obtain one before the sun rose the next day.

So the existing gun laws have created an underground world of gun sales that offer easy availability and are “off the record.” A gun from these illegal sales is essentially untraceable to the person who possesses it or left it at a crime scene. Police can trace the legal sales from manufacturer to distributor to the retailer to the first purchaser of the firearm. If that firearm was reported lost or stolen police only know who the last legal owner was, not who actually used it in a crime.

Prohibited Persons

The laws list a number of disqualifying characteristics for purchasing or possessing a firearm. These include people convicted of felonies or certain misdemeanor crimes, fugitives from justice, people in the country illegally, those dishonorably discharged from the military, users of controlled substances (drugs), those with restraining orders against them and people a court has found to be mentally unfit or insane.

Yet, a study in the City of Pittsburgh, showed that 80% of people illegally carrying guns were prohibited from possessing guns.

The laws don’t seem to be working very well.

Bargaining Chips

Part of the problem is when Danny Dirtbag, with a criminal record of theft, robbery and burglary is caught with a gun, he may not go to jail for it. If he’s charged with other crimes — like robbery using the gun — his lawyer will offer a guilty plea to some lower offense like “aggravated assault” if the prosecutor will dismiss the felon in possession charge. There’s method in the madness here. A state charge for possession may not be quite as harsh as the Federal charge (up to 10 years in prison), but it will certainly add several years to the robbery charge. By pleading to a lesser charge it disposes of the case faster and Mr. Dirtbag is locked up for a year or two, instead of maybe 8–10 years.

The result is many criminals don’t fear many of the gun laws because lawyers will play Let’s Make A Deal with prosecutors.

A few “pilot” programs have been run in different parts of the country where felons are prosecuted in a Federal court for possession and plea bargains aren’t on the table. The results were encouraging. Violent crime was significantly reduced in those communities during the program. However, problems arose when lawyers alleged the programs were “racist” and impacted poor minority communities, where most of the violent crimes occurred, the most.

On The Other Hand

In some states certain rifles are restricted based on certain features of the rifle, not how powerful or deadly they are. One version of a rifle can be legal while a different version of the same rifle is a felony to own. The graphic below illustrates how easily one can violate the law.

[ - he posted a photo of a wood-stocked Mini-14, a stainless/synthetic one, and another with a flash-suppressor on it - ]

If an unaware gun owner purchases either of the legal rifles shown above in certain states and adds a device to the end of the barrel (e.g. a “flash hider” or muzzle brake) it becomes an illegal rifle. Such a device doesn’t change a thing about how the rifle functions or operates, doesn’t make it “more powerful” or more accurate. But it does make it a felony to have.

But what happens when someone is caught with one of these rifles? Let’s look at the difference between Danny Dirtbag and John Q. Citizen.

Danny Dirtbag gets a hold of the illegal rifle via illegal sales and uses it to hurt someone in a robbery or other crime. His lawyer plays Let’s Make A Deal so that Danny pleads guilty to “robbery” or even “armed robbery” if the prosecutor drops the “assault weapon” charge, the felon in possession charge and the possession of a stolen firearm charge. It’s easy for the prosecutor to dismiss those charges to get a fast conviction and Mr. Dirtbag is off to the State-run graybar hotel for a 3 year stay.

But John Q. Citizen has a different problem. Two men kicked in his front door and threatened his family, but he used his legally purchased, but modified rifle, to wound both criminals who terrorized his wife and daughters. Police investigate and determine the shooting was justifiable self-defense of his family. But they confiscate his “illegal” gun. The prosecutor decides to prosecute and Mr. Citizen is looking at up to 10 years in prison, all because of a cosmetic feature of his rifle. His choice is to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a lawyer to stay out of jail or try to work a deal that doesn’t involve jail time or bankruptcy-inducing fines. He may also lose his house, his wife, and his job or his entire career in the process. He will certainly lose his $800 rifle regardless. The bad news is the prosecutor doesn’t have to deal here. He can “make an example” out of Mr. Citizen and press for a trial and the maximum sentence.

What’s Missing?

Since certain people are the ones who the law says should not have firearms, one simple method could cut down on a lot of the nonsense everyone has to put up with when purchasing a gun. That is to provide an ID to the prohibited persons that has a distinguishing color — say red. A red ID card will stop them from buying a gun anywhere from any legal seller. And if caught with a gun and a red ID card, it’s an easy arrest for the police. For the prosecutor, it’s an easy conviction because we make that crime non-negotiable.

Some will claim the red ID card will “stigmatize” the person and make it harder to get a job or do other business. Well, it should. There should be serious consequences for serious crimes.

But we can also offer a “way out” of that problem. If the person rehabilitates their life and stays out of trouble for a period of time (5 years? 8 or 10 years?) they get their rights back and get a standard ID card (notwithstanding certain exceptions).

There are many more flaws I could write about, but I’ve written enough and dinner is now ready.

Thanks for reading.

[Grizz]

marxists lie and commit violent crimes, and the "judiciary" enables them. there is no controlling legal authority that can subject them to laws and policies, they use laws and policies to subject us . . . .

best gun control policy i know of is laser sights . . .

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[AJMD429]

Here's some other material I often post when there is a 'gun control' topic that comes up; I got tired of looking up the references all the time, so just keep it and re-post it most of the time, since it covers the usual 'gun control' bases.

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If you value innocent life, freedom, and citizens able to prevent governments from going rogue, you definitely will think owning politically-significant (i.e. ‘military style’) firearms is a ‘right’. On the other hand, if you are so obsessed against scary-looking guns so much that you are willing to accept unsafe streets, loss of freedom, and unstable societies prone to genocide, you will favor ‘gun control’. History makes all of that pretty clear, as does the U.S. and foreign experience with ‘gun violence’. Here’s a bit of reading material that might enlighten you and just might get you to change your mind:
If you look at the experience of the 20th century, it becomes clear that nations with ‘common sense gun control’ - which used ‘gun violence’ as a pretext to do ‘background checks’ and thus register firearms, were preciesly the ones committing genocide. Since genocide has consistently resulted in far more deaths than ‘gun murders’, ‘gun accidents’, ‘gun suicides’, ‘guns used by terrorists’ and ‘gun deaths during wartime’ COMBINED, any symbolic-but-useless ‘gun control’ does nothing more than prioritize virtue-signaling over keeping the streets safe or the society stable.

See R.J. Rummel on Democide - genocide, which is facilitated by ‘gun control’ - starting with the seemingly-innocent ‘first step’ of ‘universal background checks’ and/or restrictions on ‘military-style’ firearms - is used by governments with ‘common sense gun control’ to kill an average of 5,000 to 7,000 of their OWN citizens PER DAY in the rest of the world - not exactly something to emulate.

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM

See Zelman and Stevens - “Death by Gun Control” - on the connection between gun registration and the cascade to genocide

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Gun-Contro ... 0964230461

See David Kopel “The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy” - on internantional crime comparisons, and the intentional distortion often used to mislead the public

https://www.amazon.com/Samurai-Mountie- ... 0879757566

See Stephen Halbrook “The Founders’ Second Amendment - Origins of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms” - he reveals how clearly the Second Amendment only RECOGNIZED a fundamental Civil Right, and ‘grants’ nothing - plus it was inserted to provide teeth to the Bill of Rights, a monumental, world-changing document dealing with the timeless balance of power between citizen and government, not some side-comment meant to allow Bubba and Billy-bob to hunt ducks and target-shoot. The Bill of Rights essentially is a list of PROHIBITIONS LIMITING GOVERNMENT POWER. Thus it ‘grants’ nothing, but starts with the assumption that ALL fundamental rights (oddly called ‘negative’ rights, because they are not [positively] ‘given’ but are ‘protected’ - see the next reference below). The Second Amendment states plainly that the PEOPLE have the right to keep and bear arms, and explains that the reason it is necessary is NOT ‘sporting purposes’ or any such frivolity, but is the fact that as history clearly reveals, having the citizenry well and anonymously (no ‘registration’) armed with militarily-significant (‘military style’) firearms that would facilitate the calling up of a ‘well regulated’ (practiced, drilled, smoothly operating) ‘militia’ (the ‘great body of all adult citizens’ [males in that era]) is vital if one is to avoid tyranny and slavery and genocide. We didn’t get rid of the middle one due to political pressure from the Democrats until 70 years later, but the Bill of Rights was one of the world’s truly significant documents, and the Second Amendment formed the ‘teeth’ with which the words could be enforced if ignored.

https://stephenhalbrook.com/books/the-f ... amendment/

See this for more detail on the concept of “positive and negative rights” - and also comments on how the whole simplistic one-dimensional political landscape of “left versus right'' is not conducive to analyzing contemporary political issues

https://www.friesian.com/quiz.htm

See Kates “Guns and Public Health - epidemic of violence, or pandemic of propaganda?” - especially section XIII - and you’ll realize that so much of what you’ve been told consists of lies, distortions, and fabrications. That alone should make you a skeptic of ‘common sense gun control’.

https://guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html

Once you’ve read those, say again how great ‘gun control’ is…and….if you doubt the ‘integrity’ of the arguments against ‘gun control’ take note of the above law review journal article, where the criminologist and his fellow physician co-authors unequivocally state:

“… unfortunately, CDC and other health advocate sages build their case not only by suppressing facts, but by overt fraud, fabricating statistics, and falsifying references to support them.[261] The following are but a few of the many examples documented in a recent paper co-authored by professors at Columbia Medical School and Rutgers University Law School…”

The article is nearly a third citations and references, so may be a bit too ‘heavy’ for the average ‘gun control’ supporter who may be more interested in out-machoing the NRA or just virtue-signaling to friends, than actually doing anything constructive to save lives or make the streets more stable. ‘Gun Control’ does NEITHER.
It’s worth noting that the demonized National Rifle Association was cited, “along with the National Library Association, as one of the two most consistently truthful lobbying organizations” by the Library of Congress back in the 1970’s - a distinction never granted the anti-gun AMA, American Academy of Pediatrics, or their journal mouthpieces like NEJM or JAMA.
I think anyone who reads the above sources is likely to go from actively supporting ‘gun control’ to not only being ‘skeptical’, but if they truly care about safe streets and a stable society - they will become ACTIVE OPPONENTS of ‘gun control’ and actively point out to others what a sham it is, and how it may seem ‘common sense’ and compassionate, but it is instead illogical, dangerous and deadly.

[Ray]

Suppose for just a moment, in light of all of these mass murder news reports blinking on the telly, that there is a gun problem hence a need for gun control. Now look at the sheer numbers (hundreds of millions) of guns floating about out there. What new law is gonna make one whit of difference ? Even the inevitable future mass confiscations will only make a dent in the numbers and then only the formerly legal guns in the hands of well-adjusted normal folk. The larcenous and murderous and crazy when deprived of arms by the dystopian storm troopers will just go and draw from that inexhaustible well of source.....organized criminal fences/receivers. Sure those prices will inflate with ever decreasing supply but they (the brigands) will never be disarmed.

[Grizz]

the issue is called gun control by the extremist marxists religion of death and destruction . . .

the problem is that the solution is criminal control. violent anti-social criminals need to be confined to an island where they can only violate themselves.

the truth is that the "free the poor jailed people" impulse is in fact feeding the violence in the Nation, and this is intentional, coming from trained marxists via gsoros and other deep pockets, and includes most politicians . . .

the second violent felony should earn a one-way ticket to a remote island. it worked for Napoleon . . . let the violent violate themselves. this should include all the traitors who are destroying America. ship them all away away away

but as for me and my house, we remember the Lord Jesus, His last supper, his torment at the hands of sinners, and His resurrection. He will deal with all the perpetrators for all time, in His good time. Amen come quickly Lord Jesus..

†