Carolyn Maloney is a House member who chairs the House Oversight Committee and is today chairing the hearing on banning assault rifles prior to a House vote on a bill thar will die in the Senate. Since 2013, she has been pushing a bill to criminalize gun trafficking, parts of which were incorporated into the gun-control bill just signed by Joe.
Maloney didn’t do groups and individuals who are concerned about gun violence and mass shootings any favors in the way she led this hearing. The witnesses were from two companies that manufacture assault rifles – Daniel Defense and Sturm Ruger – versus Ryan Busse from Giffords and a staffer from the Brady Campaign.
The fifth panelist was a young, African-American woman from the Gun Owners of America (GOA) nut-job gang, who claimed that Black women were the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, a statement for which there is absolutely not a shred of real data but so what? Who needs facts to back up an argument about guns, right?
The other side, of course, has its own interesting deployment of data to bolster its point of view. In particular, there’s this whole thing about all the so-called ‘new’ gun buyers who have armed themselves over the last couple of years. The numbers come from both the gun industry and from public health research.
There’s only one little problem, however, with this argument about how the Pandemic has increased the number of Americans who own guns. Has anyone bothered to figure out how many gun owners died from Covid-19 who otherwise might be alive if China hadn’t sent us the ‘kung flu?’ And let’s not forget to mention that this virus is particularly virulent among older people, who just happen to be the demographic most likely to own guns.
Anyway, back to the hearing.
So, the Democrats on the panel tossed easy questions to the panelists from Gifford and Brady, the POS/GOP members tossed softballs to the guys from the two companies that manufacture the AR-15. Nobody on either side said anything that hasn’t been said before – the gun-control people want to ban assault rifles; the pro-gun advocates want to toss all the potential bad people with a gun into jail.
What struck me as I watched the proceedings, however, was the degree to which none of the House members nor the panelists tried to say anything that might be of interest to the other side. These two groups – gun ‘rights’ versus gun control – never (read: never) ask themselves to come up with an argument that might resonate with even one person who doesn’t agree with what they are always going to say.
I’m not expecting to hear a rational or defensible argument from the pro-gun side, because there is no rational or reasonable argument to be made for keeping an AR-15 or a hi-capacity, semi-automatic pistol like a Glock or a Sig around the house.
The reason I have those kinds of guns around my house is very simple: I like guns. Maybe it’s a case of arrested mental development, maybe I want to believe that I can be a real, tough guy if I walk around with a gun. Maybe I’m just full of shit.
Anyway, it really doesn’t matter what I think as long as I have the GOA protecting my 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’
Several years ago, an old man came into my gun shop and bought a gun. He had trouble filling out the background-check form and started cursing ‘that goddamn Kennedy,’ even though Ted Kennedy never promoted gun-control measures in his public remarks.
Finally, I got pissed off at the guy and said: “Hey Mister, if you had two brothers who were shot to death by men who used legally purchased guns, wouldn’t you be in favor of more gun control?”
The guy stopped filling out the form, looked down, then looked at me and replied, “You know, nobody ever said that to me before.”
I am still waiting for one of the gun-control groups to come up with a meaningful way to explain gun risk to gun owners without lecturing them on being ‘responsible’ with their guns. I am also still waiting for the public health researchers to discuss the same thing.
How come it’s so hard to figure out something to say to gun owners that they haven’t already heard?
Jul 28, 2022 @ 09:25:31
A couple days ago at my legislature some guy from the Bloomberg School testified as an expert witness that a permit to purchase system would reduce NM gun violence by at least 28%. I have a short fuse on a purported academician pulling that kind of number out of his ass and offering it as fact, which it is not. It is model based conjecture at its most optimistic, based on those shaky synthetic state models. Meanwhile, the same two sides otherwise said the same things they always do. Blah blah blah, Ginger, as the comic strip once said.
The day before, I read a story in the Santa Fe New Mexican about a couple in jail for almost killing their baby after he got hold of and ate one of their fentanyl pills. According to the news, they were in the middle of trying to trade drugs for a gun. You don’t suppose they would apply for a permit to purchase, do you?
The reason we have so much gun violence in NM is because we have so many guns, so many drug salespeople, so many teens that think a 9mm diameter hole is the universal problem solver, so many dysfunctional adults, and an educational system that just made dead last in the United States. Permits to purchase? Dream on. Maybe the kid from Bloomberg was misquoted. I sure hope so, because if he said what the paper said he said, I would consider it unprofessional at the mildest. Scientists are supposed to know where the boundaries lie.
Jul 28, 2022 @ 12:23:39
Wouldn’t it be nice if our representatives in D.C. would start dealing with the real issues? Wouldn’t it be nice to have hearings in Malony’s committee, as well as others, holding people responsible in cities and states for being soft on crime? I wonder when they will have hearings to do away with the ridiculous policies of defunding the police?
The AR-style rifles have been around since the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. For over 40 years very little to nothing was said/discussed on how evil these black guns are. It’s only been the last 20 years society has been vilifying the AR-style rifle. Even ABC news reports that most US homicides are not an AR-style gun.
Do you think it has anything to do with the erosin of personal responsibility?
Speaking of personal responsibility, several months ago I was reading a blog that the author wrote “…when you don’t know how to define what you are trying to figure out, is an exercise in what Grandpa would call ‘bupkes,’ (read: nonsense)…” Maybe someone should define “Assault-Rifle” and if they know what they are talking about they would be truthful and say that on the average less than 2 people are killed in the US each year with an “assault-rifle” and those are military personnel in training exercises.