{"id":56537,"date":"2015-12-07T12:15:35","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T18:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56537"},"modified":"2015-12-07T11:32:45","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T17:32:45","slug":"moron-labe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=56537","title":{"rendered":"Moron Labe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was tempted to fisk the NYTimes’ deeply stupid editorial<\/a> – their first front-page editorial since 1920 – calling for confiscation of “assault weapons”.<\/p>\n

But Brian Doherty at\u00a0Reason\u00a0<\/em>already did it, and did it better.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing, naturally<\/a> – but here’s the lede, for my money:<\/p>\n

So, what is<\/em> the size of this problem, worth such cost in treasure, liberty, and domestic tranquility to the Times<\/em>?<\/p>\n

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2014<\/a>, rifles\u2014the entire category of rifles, of which the ones the Times<\/em>wants to ban at such great cost are but a subset\u2014were used to commit 248 murders. That’s in a country of around 319 million people. That’s around 2 percent of the total number of homicides that year.<\/p>\n

While the official figure, it is doubtless a bit too low. The numbers for Alabama and Illinois are known to be too low, because of reporting gaps. That said, the FBI figures there do not break down the category “rifle” to the specific ones that the Times\u00a0<\/em>targets, likely akin to the “assault weapons” that were banned moving forward in America for a decade, with no appreciable effect on public safety.<\/p>\n

So the total number of those 248 (or slightly more) rifle murders actually caused using the ones the Times<\/em>\u00a0wants to expend all that effort into banning is much smaller than 248. Since the effort could not actually succeed in removing all such rifles from the hands of people with propensities to murder, and even if it did those murderous types would have other means to murder if they chose, the effort would not actually save all of that subset-of-248 lives.<\/p>\n

The move the Times<\/em> proposes with such ceremony and passion\u00a0is so purely symbolic, so driven by a superstitious desire to placate fate by acting as if it is doing something<\/em> to stop grotesque acts of terror like in San Bernardino, and so motivated by a desire to sock it to a huge proportion of their fellow citizens over a contentious and heated political and constitutional issue, and is being offered with such emphasis (first front page editorial in nearly a century) that one could imagine the Times<\/em>\u00a0is only proposing such a move as a stalking horse for seeing if the government can get away with successfully banning and confiscating a class of weapon, by starting with one with such a tenuous connection with public safety on a national level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Worse than that? \u00a0While the “proposal” is the worst, most cynical kind of “security theater”, it’s also the camel’s nose under the tent; since “assault weapon” is an utterly malleable term (also intrinsically meaningless), it can (and will) be slid inexorable up and down the continuum of firearms\u00a0as it proves to be ineffective at each step.<\/p>\n

If, of course, we – the Real Americans – let them.<\/p>\n

The orcs are coming. \u00a0Get ready. \u00a0This is going to be a very difficult year,<\/p>\n

But if we work as hard as we usually do, it could also be our finest hour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was tempted to fisk the NYTimes’ deeply stupid editorial – their first front-page editorial since 1920 – calling for confiscation of “assault weapons”. But Brian Doherty at\u00a0Reason\u00a0already did it, and did it better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,130,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-gun-control","category-tc-media-bias","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56537"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56572,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56537\/revisions\/56572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}