OK, I’m being hyperbolic. David Frum is not an idiot.
But he is no more accurate than any other liberal on Second Amendment issues – as we see in his Daily Beast insta-opinion on the Navy Yard shooting, which is chock-full of enough ripe inaccuracy to be a Heather Martens piece.
He tries to diagnose gun violence in America:
Yet the gun enthusiasts do have one point on their side: for all the horror of these massacres, they are only a small part of the story of gun violence in America. Most casualties of gun violence will not die at the hands of a mentally disturbed killer seeking random victims. Most gun casualties occur in the course of quarrels and accidents between people who would be described as “law-abiding, responsible gun owners” up until the moment when they lost their temper or left a weapon where a 4-year-old could find it and kill himself or his sister.
It’s a convenient theory. It fits nicely with the narrative – that it’s the presence of guns, not the people, that’s the problem.
It’s utterly wrong.
“Most” gun casualties, as in “the vast majority”, are suicides. All of which are tragic; seeing to peoples’ mental health and preventing suicide is important. But it is in no way the same as street crime.
Of those? Most occur as a result of “quarrels”, all right – quarrels between rival gangs, or between drug dealers arguing over turf, or adolescent gang wannabees who feel “disrespected”, or small-time hoods who lose their temper or their control and turn crimes of convenience into crimes of passion.
While Frum isn’t Heather Martens or David Bloomberg or Doug Grow, he does share some of their congenital illogic about the issue:
As David Hemenway notes in his study Private Guns, Public Health, Americans have experienced similar debates in the recent past. “Cars don’t kill people; bad drivers kill people,” could have been the slogan of the auto industry when it resisted safety regulation in the 1960s. The garment industry could have argued: “Flammable pajamas don’t kill children; careless smokers kill children.” And so on. Every accident has many causes, of course, and public safety progresses by addressing each one. To reduce car fatalities, we both installed seat belts and cracked down on drunken driving. Child deaths by fire have been reduced both because pajamas are safer and because adults smoke less.
Are we supposed to believe that David Frum, a leading public intellectual of the center-center-center-sorta-right, doesn’t know the difference between “making a product do its main job – carrying people, clothing children – safer against the vagaries and tragedies of normal life” and “misuse of a product that is designed to violently poke holes in things”?
I’d certainly hope so.
Likewise, better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America’s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.
“Addressing guns”, like “we have to doooooooooooo something”, is one of those vague, generalized blandishments that shows the writer is out of ideas.
And after this past year, I suspect the anti-gun movement is exactly that.
Along this line, Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, announced yesterday, that he’s caving in to his lefty moron customers and asking gun owners to leave their guns at home. Although he hasn’t banned us, IMO he is sending this message; “My alpaca wearing, low information voting, fact deficient left wing customers are scared to come in and buy their lattes, so I’ve gotta turn my back on the 2nd amendment and dooooooo something.”
Along this line, Howard Schultz announced yesterday that he was caving in to his left wing anti gun customers and asking legal gun owners not to bring their guns into their stores, unless they are law enforcement of course. Although he isn’t banning us from bringing them in, IMO he is telling us that he is no longer supporting the 2nd amendment, because his alpaca wearing, fact deficient, low information voter left wing customers are getting scared when they are buying their lattes, so he has to doooooo something.
Sorry. Forgot to ID Starbucks in my previous post.
Once again the left wing media has been exposed for their lack of journalistic integrity. They rushed and fell all over themselves to report that Aaron Alexis, the shooter, had an AR-15, tried to buy one in Virginia, but was denied because he was from out of state, none of which was true. He bought a shot gun and that’s what he used to commit his crime.
They are just now focusing on his mental issues, the one common denominator is all of the most recent shootings, that is ignored to fit the narrative for gun control!
Maybe instead of describing Frum as “center-center-center-sorta-right,” it would be more descriptive to describe him as “Republican who repeats/says awful things about Non-Democrats to get himself on television” or “Person who repeats/speaks the conventional (and usually wrong) wisdom about an issue to remain relevant to the low information world of the Left” or even “Republican who says exactly what Democrats say about Non-Democrats that will allow television news producers to claim they had a mix of opinions from both Right and Left on an issue”.
Like the Matthew Shepherd story relevations and the true story of how the University of Texas Clock Tower sniper was taken down, you have to ask yourself whether or not what you believe or understand is actually true. When the true story doesn’t fit the narrative the Democrat-Big Media-Massive Government Industrial Complex wants out there, it’s buried or at least hidden and the true story is relegated to something spoken of only at K.O.O.K.S. chapter meetings between packing their survival gear. The fact that people like Frum continue to get paid while wholesaling whole untruths is testimony to the idea that only Republicans who say bad things about Non-Democrats will continue to get gigs on the TV.
I’m all for the general idea of getting guns out of the hands of the wrong people: minors, convicts, the insane. But as usual with grand ideas, the devil is in the details.
The stretch of St. Paul along University Avenue between the Capitol and Lexington Avenue is the Frogtown neighborhood. I’d guess that half of all St. Paul shootings occur there, a large majority of them committed all by Black men shooting other Black men in a predominantly Black neighborhood. And a majority of those shooters were ineligible to obtain, possess or carry a firearm.
Now tell me, what’s your plan to take guns away from people who shouldn’t have guns but are living Frogtown? Stop-and-frisk every Black man? Door-to-door searches with gunpowder-sniffing dogs and metal detectors?
Rev. Jackson, call your office. Dave Frum, go back to the drawing board.
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I was thinking about this last night; it’s worth noting that gun control laws seem to have an “alpha error” of well over 99%–you infringe on the rights of over 99 law-abiding citizens for each criminal impacted. I would be curious to know what the false positive rate would be if you took a series of factors like paranoid delusion with history of violent incidents involving guns, along with a strong fascination with “first person shooter” video games and separation from family members. I’m guessing it would be quite bit lower.
Oh, and for the record, it was Ford, Volvo, Saab, and Nash that introduced the seat belt prior to the federal mandate of 1959, and the shift was prompted by a study by Hunter Shelden, a neurologist in private practice. On the flip side, the deathtraps of the 1970s and 1980s were attributable to CAFE regulations, as were thousands of deaths due to air bags. So the “automakers oppose safety when government supports it” mantra gets the facts exactly wrong.
Isolated incidents such as this do not significantly affect the statistics on gun deaths. If you’re going to change the gun laws, you should do so because too many young black men kill each other with guns, mostly in large cities. Primary school students and employees of large companies or agencies with security systems are at very low risk of death due to gunshot. If, in fact, no policy changes result from the Navy Yard, it will be that rare moment where policy making follows logic rather than emotion. The reason to enact more gun regulation is in the nightly police blotter in the poor urban areas of the country, not on the front page of the newspaper.
There is a large minority in the US, mostly living in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, for whom shooting is an important recreational activity, or who feel a duty to have the means to protect themselves from violence without recourse to the state, or who have an infrequent but regular use for a gun (typically rural residents). They are not idiots or ideologues, merely practicing democrats. This problem is intractable because the group that wants more regulation is largely unaffected by the regulation (most don’t have guns), and the group that wants little regulation is largely unaffected by the violence (they don’t live in centers of gun violence). The US system protects minority rights very well; I don’t see gun laws changing soon, because I see little chance of a consensus.
Frum did coin the term ‘Axis of Evil’ to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
A few years ago (okay, maybe ten) Frum wrote a blogpost about some piece of legislation that had a racial aspect, and he concluded with the phrase ‘nobody here but us chickens!” I emailed him a note reminding him that the term had an ugly, racial connotation for many people in the US. He replied promptly and was quite gracious — he hadn’t known the pop-cultural history behind the phrase.