Moron Labe

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 Reason already did it, and did it better.

Read the whole thing, naturally – but here’s the lede, for my money:

So, what is the size of this problem, worth such cost in treasure, liberty, and domestic tranquility to the Times?

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2014, rifles—the entire category of rifles, of which the ones the Timeswants to ban at such great cost are but a subset—were 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.

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 targets, likely akin to the “assault weapons” that were banned moving forward in America for a decade, with no appreciable effect on public safety.

So the total number of those 248 (or slightly more) rifle murders actually caused using the ones the Times wants 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.

The move the Times proposes with such ceremony and passion is so purely symbolic, so driven by a superstitious desire to placate fate by acting as if it is doing something 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 is 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.

Worse than that?  While 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 as it proves to be ineffective at each step.

If, of course, we – the Real Americans – let them.

The orcs are coming.  Get ready.  This is going to be a very difficult year,

But if we work as hard as we usually do, it could also be our finest hour.

12 thoughts on “Moron Labe

  1. This morning on Fox News, they had Eric Erickson, one of their contributors, on.

    He used that article for target practice, posting it online. His reasoning? “The story was full of holes anyway. I just put some more in it”. Of course, the “tolerant” libidiots on the Twittersphere, went bat shit over it. Also said that he got the copy of the Slimes from a store owner for free. Apparently, when he told the him what he was going to do with it, the store owner gave it to him free.

  2. I can hear the liberal meme generators being warmed up. “But if it just saves ONE life!” Right. Which is the same reason for not admitting any more refugees from the Middle East or Africa and deporting the ones who are here now.

  3. If the NYT editorial were an 8D form completed in response to a customer quality issue, it would be returned so quickly it would make their heads spin.

  4. Actually, GolfDoc, the liberals make the counter-argument, not that a ban will save “just one life”, but instead that it is the conservatives who claim such weapons are needed, even if ultra-rarely, and that need outweighs the vastly more common harm.

    Mitch, I’m not sure where you got “call for the confiscation of assault weapons” from but nothing in the editorial directly says that. It says it’s time they be dramatically reduced, but then goes on to simply suggest supporting the current proposals like those in California and Connecticut (which grandfather weapons already owned). The balance of the points, though, are spot on. We do little and less to curb our gun culture hysteria here. It’s time to recognize guns aren’t a cure-all (not even close) for most social problems, certainly not for crime. We are one of the most heavily armed societies in the world yet have very high crime, so clearly they’re hardly the deterrent you claim them to be (by “you” I mean those of you on the right). While you may not agree with the editorial, it certainly seems to be making a point that many (including seemingly you) chose ignore, namely, that we’ve tried it “your way” and your way doesn’t work. These weapons are designed principally for warfare, not hunting, not home protection, and they have no place in civilian use. They aren’t needed for self-defense, they aren’t needed for hunting (despite the comment from the guy who said here that he needs a high cap weapon with the ability to shoot quickly to hunt feral hogs.. I mean, wow, really? So you need to shoot 28 rounds really fast at hogs? What kind of “hunter” are you, or should I say, what kind of killer? Because it’s not hunting when you needlessly wound animals to have them crawl off and suffer and die. Shooting a lot of bullets fast may feel good, but it’s not hunting, it’s reckless and irresponsible cruelty, nothing else).

    Today, the VERY conservative SCOTUS, declined to hear challenges to just such sorts of bans as exist in CA and CT (and in Chicago which was where the law was passed which was challenged). It upheld the “dicta” from the McDonald decision in which it said reasonable bans on weapons which are DANGEROUS or uncommon, are constitutional, no matter what the NRA, or you Mitch, say. No matter your bally-who or ranting about how stupid the people who propose such bans here in MN are, no matter how stupid you say the NY Times is, and especially no matter how many times you say that such bans aren’t constitutional, they are. I hear President Obama used to teach constitutional law, maybe it’s time you righties took one before claiming to be experts and asking dumb questions like “under what provision of the Constitution can the federal government levy a tax if someone doesn’t enroll…” Well, Ms. Bachman, it’s called the Commerce Clause, perhaps you’ve heard of it. The editorial by the NYT, but more importantly the DECISIONS by the underlying courts, made exactly the point I made here a couple weeks ago but was ignored (at least for the two days I waited), namely that these kinds of weapons aren’t necessary to fulfill your constitutional rights and “even if they save just one life” isn’t an adequate justification. You may not like it, you may call it stupid, but that doesn’t make it untrue.

  5. Um, “Head”, exactly how are you going to get rid of entire classes of weapons, as the column endorsed, without confiscation? People who tell you that they can have their guns when you pry them out of their cold, dead fingers are just going to walk over to the local precinct and hand them over?

    Honestly, you’re outdoing yourself in terms of stupid. Of course the Times supports confiscation, or else they’re further gone mentally than even I would have suspected.

    Same thing goes with your characterization of the Supreme Court—OK, so it’s “conservative” now to validate Obamacare? Seriously? What color is the sun on your planet?

  6. Say Charming Head? Let me make this simple as I can, so you can get it, maybe.

    The 2nd amendment isn’t directed to ensure our hunting pleasure, or our sporting requirements. It is meant to ensure that the free citizens of America are armed to defend not just their families and possessions, but our freedoms.

    It’s not reasonable to expect we be armed as well as the Army, but certainly we should be as well armed as civilian police are, being as we are protecting the same things.

    As to what that means, specifically, the SCOTUS has ruled that weapons in “common use” apply. It may make you wet your pants to know it, but the AR15 style, modular semi-auto is one of the most common rifles in the country. Sorry, but there it is.

    Also, you do yourself no favor touting Obama’s expertise as a Constitutional scholar. He has proved himself completely incompetent in every area of a President’s responsibility, and we have no reason not to believe he isn’t just as much a tool in the classroom.

  7. Head case:

    First, we only have the CLAIM that the Liar in Chief is a consitutional lawyer. Actually, it is most likely another left wing fraud against the American people. Since he bypasses the Constitution whenever it supports his meme and his transcripts have been sealed since he first started campaigning for POTUS, there is strong support for that conclusion. Tell me what other job, unless it belongs to an actual business owner, where if you claim to have ANY degree, much less from both Hahvud and Columbia, you don’t have to prove it? But then, you and your fellow gullible, low information slaves on the Democrat plantation, just believe it to be true.

    Second, you must have been sleeping during both U.S. and world history, because you apparently missed the parts where the first thing that despots do before they persecute their populace is disarm them. Since I’m sure it’s lost on you and your fellow true believers in the lie that government should run your lived, the first shots fired during the American Revolution, were because the British were coming to take the guns and powder of the citizens. Further, our founding fathers knew that corrupt governments fear an armed populace and that scares you elitists more than anything.

  8. One more tidbit for you Head case.

    You obviously have never hunted feral hogs. Despite the fact that they are hogs, they can run very fast. Hence, multi round magazines and semi automatic rifles are needed to prevent “wounding them and having them crawl off and suffer and die”. I know that it’s too much to ask for you to actually do some homework, but I’ll give it a shot. Please look into the problems associated with the large population of feral hogs in the U.S.

  9. A thought experiment for “head”. Hunting (big game at least) and war are both activities where the objective is for a man to put a slug of copper clad lead into a mammal weighing 100-300 lbs or so with the intention of killing it without killing or maiming others in the vicinity. Oddly enough, the targets in both hunting and war tend to take evasive action once they know they’re being hunted, which makes multiple shots more likely.

    Given that the goal of hunting is in some ways very similar to the process of war–with the obvious exceptions of the species and what you do with your trophy–exactly how are we to differentiate infantry weapons from hunting weapons? It’s worth noting that a number of popular hunting calibers–30.06, 308, 303, 30/40, and even .223–were originally developed for armies.

    You can harp, I guess, on the bayonet lug or a mount for an RPG launcher, but it’s hardly likely that these features make mass murderers more deadly.

  10. I constantly hear the terms “Assault Weapon” or “Military Style Weapon” used by proponents of “Common Sense” gun laws. Every time it’s used by someone that has a smidgen of gun knowledge, the purpose of the language is to scare the people in the middle into thinking that the shooter has a weapon identical to our Armed Forces in a War Zone. You can identify these people by the lack of superfluous and erroneous terms included in their description.
    The other type of person, Activists that know less than nothing about guns, tend to string a whole bunch of terms together into a run-on sentence that doesn’t actually make sense. “…High Capacity Military Ghost Gun with 50 round magazine clip that fires 1000 rounds a minute…” type of nonsense. The second type is usually the elected official.

  11. Honestly, you’re outdoing yourself in terms of stupid.

    bb, first, you can’t fix stupid and second, headless cannot get it through whatever passes for his head that black rifles come in more than caliber.

    Third, I have a question for experts here: in a hypothetical situation that confiscation comes to be, will government reimburse fair value of each individual piece of private property they will be taking? Them black rifles and hunting rifles and handguns ain’t cheap, you know. Confiscation with remuneration could bankrupt a goobernment if they could not print money to cover the expense.

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