So now a terrible shooting rampage in the Indianapolis FedEx facility may actually be the camel’s straw that gets one of Joe’s gun-control bills through the Senate and onto his desk. Which is all fine and well, but I hate to be a spoilsport and remind my friends in Gun-control Nation that none of those measures passed earlier this year by the House will really do very much to reduce gun violence in the United States.
Yesterday the State Senate in Alabama passed a measure called the Alabama Second Amendment Preservation Act. The law makes it a crime for any gun law from the Biden Administration to be enforced anywhere in the state. This effort is nothing more than an attempt by the state GOP to buy loyalty from local voters in the wake of Orange Head’s demise. But it also is a reminder of what gun-control laws represent.
What such laws mean to supporters of Brady, Everytown and the other gun-control groups are nothing more than ‘reasonable’ measures aimed (pardon the pun) at gun owners to behave in a ‘responsible’ way. What these laws mean to most gun owners is just another bothersome thing they have to put up with in order to play around with their guns.
Know all those surveys which purportedly show that most gun owners support comprehensive background checks? Those surveys are nonsense because they never ask gun owners to state what they believe would be effective measures to reduce gun violence. If they did, the same ‘responsible’ gun owners who have no problem with only transferring a gun following a background check would overwhelmingly support a national, concealed-carry law as a better way to reduce gun violence and crime.
In 1959, the Gallup Organization did a national poll which asked respondents whether they would support a ban on the ownership of handguns. Not stricter licensing, mind you, but an absolute ban. The result was that 60% claimed they would support such a ban.
If the finding of this survey had been transformed into law, we wouldn’t have gun violence at all. The reason our gun-violence rate is 7 to 20 times higher than any other OECD country is because we are the only country which gives residents access to what I call ‘killer guns.’ You can see how I define a ‘killer gun’ right here.
In 1995, our friend Gary Kleck published research which stated that individuals who used or brandished guns were responsible for preventing millions of crimes every year. His thesis that more guns meant less crime was then taken up in the research of our friend John Lott.
These research efforts have been critiqued and discounted by the most respected gun-control researchers like our friends David Hemenway and Phil Cook. But their arguments have never gained any traction at all among the majority of Americans who believe that a gun is more of a benefit than a risk. By 1993, before either Kleck or Lott had published anything at all, the support for a national ban on handguns had fallen to 39%.
The last time Gallup asked the handgun ban question in 2020, the percentage of handgun banners has now fallen to 25%. And even with the terrible rampage shootings committed with assault rifles since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, only 47% of Gallup respondents want to see assault rifles outlawed.
Want to blame the continued existence of a strong gun culture on the NRA? Go right ahead. Want to blame it on research published by Gary Kleck and John Lott. Ditto. You happen to be wrong on both counts.
At best, the NRA membership maybe counts 6% or 7% of the people whose households contain a gun. And the last thing that any gun nut is going to do when he flips on his computer and goes to buy some crap on Amazon is to order John Lott’s book.
Has any gun-control scholar ever attempted to figure out how and why so many Americans believe they need to protect themselves with a gun? Nope. Not one.
Apr 16, 2021 @ 10:22:59
I think a question that needs to be answered is why, with all the gun owners there are in the country, do a tiny fraction of them commit violence? I am not in favor of gun owners owning assault weapons and I signed your petition, but I do think we need research on why some people use the weapons for violence and how do we address that.
Apr 17, 2021 @ 10:56:42
Stop me if you heard something similar before: The asshole teenager Brandon Scott Hole had a history of mental issues, was known by police and interviewed by the FBI last year and yet nothing happened to him. (Seems like I’ve heard this before)
Do we need to check if there were Broward Sheriff Deputies outside the FedEx facility doing nothing during the shooting?
And by the way, what 19 year old has ZERO Social Media presence?
These are just some pre-coffee morning thoughts.
Jun 30, 2021 @ 02:32:42
From the article – “In 1959, a Gallup poll revealed that 60% of respondents favored an absolute ban on guns. The last time Gallup asked the handgun ban question in 2020, the percentage of handgun banners had fallen to 25%.”
What happened between then and now? Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. The voting and civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Watts. Detroit. Block busting and white flight and Black Panthers. Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. And then Barack Obama, along with Geoffrey Holder, along with rap and hip-hop and “Souls to the Polls”.
If anyone disbelieves that a huge swell of racism underpins much of the rhetoric and outright flaunting of hardware in support of gun “rights”, they’ve done a very good job of insulating themselves from American history.