Every time some nutbar inflicts his mania upon the world with a firearm, you can practically count the seconds until the left will start to try to jam the round pegs of this nation’s law-abiding gun owners into the square holes of the “nut with a gun” meme.\u00a0 It’s also good sport to predict exactly what they will lie about to try to make that happen.<\/p>\n
Alex Gerber in the Washington Times<\/a>\u00a0takes a high-profile whack at it. Indeed, it might be safe to say you can tell Gerber is lying whenever his fingers are moving above the keyboard:<\/p>\n Ours is a country, unique among industrialized societies, that has become insensitive to murder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Nothing unique about our “insensitivity” – murder rates in Russia in the past decade, and Brazil for most of the past several decades,\u00a0dwarf US rates.\u00a0<\/p>\n How else to explain the “American gun culture” that tolerates some 14,000 firearm murders, including 400 children, in 2005 — the last year statistics are available?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0“How else to explain”?\u00a0 Simple:\u00a0 a lie and an out-of-context statement.<\/p>\n In few areas is John Edwards’ “Two Americas” meme so accurate as this; there are indeed “Two American Gun Cultures”.\u00a0 One – the law-abiding gun-owning citizens, the NRA, the people who hold legal concealed carry permits in 40 states – are intensely<\/em> law abiding, less than 1% as likely to infract the law as the general public.\u00a0 The other – drug dealers, gang bangers, criminals in general, self-declared islands of immunity to the niceties of American law.\u00a0<\/p>\n The “gun murders” in this country are committed by the latter, condemned and in many cases thwarted by the former.<\/p>\n \u00a0Guns are easily purchased despite laws about waiting periods and background checks. The Seung-hui Cho story indicates the restrictions posed by the 1968 Gun Control Act are enforced only in the breach.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, cynical buncombe.\u00a0 The system in\u00a0Virginia had a fatal flaw that didn’t put his involuntary commitment for mental\u00a0health issues on the public record\u00a0so that his “Permit to Purchase” could have been flagged.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Firearm murder rates 100 times higher in the United States than, for example, in Britain or Japan, are stark evidence our gun control laws are a joke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No, that’s evidence that our murder-control laws are a joke.\u00a0 And rates of other violent crimes – assaults and hot burglaries, for example – have risen past\u00a0 US levels in the UK since…<\/p>\n …they banned guns!<\/p>\n Japan is indeed a tranquil country;\u00a0it\u00a0is also intensely homogenous, and their people tolerate police brutality on a level that would set the American media and the ACLU aflame with righteous rage were it transposed here.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gerber takes a break for lying to be merely stupid:<\/p>\n What is not a joke is the absurd contention of the NRA gunslingers that if the Virginia Tech students had been armed there would have been far fewer victims. When would this powerful gun lobby have our students start arming themselves — at the high school or college level or in kindergarten? No civilized nation legitimizes packing a pistol while attending school.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Untrue, of course; Israeli teacher routinely “pack” pistols at school, to prevent precisely this\u00a0form of crime.<\/p>\n Gerber’s brand of “logic” is worthy of the Minnesota Monitor, of course; college\u00a0students are adults, <\/em>not kindergartners.\u00a0<\/p>\n Repeated polls have shown the majority of our citizens favor much tougher gun control laws.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Untrue, of course.\u00a0 Over the past twenty years, when asked\u00a0the hopelessly broad question “do you\u00a0favor\u00a0tougher gun controls”, a majority answers “yes” – but when asked to go into specifics – the actual “tougher gun control laws” Gerber\u00a0bleats about – the numbers drop into the cellar.\u00a0<\/p>\n President Clinton attempted gun control in 1994 when he banned military type assault weapons that have no sane civilian use, but President Bush allowed this modest gun control measure to lapse in 2004.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And with good reason; in a world\u00a0where any self-respecting cocaine trafficker can get\u00a0fully-automatic <\/em>submachine guns and assault rifles for a black-market song, and where illegal\u00a0“hot” weapons on the street are available to any punk with $50, the ban was yet another superfluous feel-good measure for bureaucrats who didn’t dare <\/em>address the real issue – a failed war on drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Early detection and treatment of the mentally ill is important but is not an adequate answer to firearm shootings gone amok. Mental health specialists are far outnumbered by the mentally disturbed and depressed youth of our country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0Gerber states this as an absolute.\u00a0 OK, Alex – why <\/em>is it not an adequate answer?<\/p>\n The debate over gun control is dominated by the interpretation of the Second Amendment to our Constitution — widely acclaimed as “the finest document ever devised by man.” In the one-sentence Second Amendment, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms should not be infringed,” the key word is security, but not the kind of security that is now relevant to our nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most rational constitutional scholars, including Sanford Levinson and Laurence Tribe<\/a>,\u00a0are deserting that interpretation<\/a>, with the Supreme Court likely soon to follow.<\/p>\n As voiced in the Federalist Papers, the Second Amendment was concerned with the tyrannical kingdoms overseas, which would be “speedily overturned” were the people allowed to bear arms — an “advantage the nation would possess — and serve as a barrier to the despotism of the Old World.” Again – as usual – patent rubbish.\u00a0 While the world has changed, the colonists, living as they did mostly in rural areas, were on their own\u00a0against most of whatever\u00a0disorder did <\/em>spring out at them –\u00a0much as a typical homeowner,\u00a0downtown office worker or driver is against today’s burglars, rapists and carjackers.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Alex Gerber, a clinical professor of surgery, emeritus, at the University of Southern California, is a former health care consultant to the White House and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ah.\u00a0 Good to see the WashTimes can find a real expert to speak up for the totalitarian case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every time some nutbar inflicts his mania upon the world with a firearm, you can practically count the seconds until the left will start to try to jam the round pegs of this nation’s law-abiding gun owners into the square holes of the “nut with a gun” meme.\u00a0 It’s also good sport to predict exactly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","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=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy today’s standards, crime was no problem in the largely rural New World whose inhabitants seldom locked their doors. Aside from rifles for hunting, firearms played a minor role in everyday life. Unknown in Colonial days were rival gangs engaged in drive-by shootings, drug-related homicide, road rage gunfire and, certainly, students shooting other students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n