Useless Boondoggle

The city of Chicago spent $49 on Shotspotter, costing the city a quarter of a million bucks for each Shotspotter arrest, with the system missing 99% of the shots fired. Even when the system DOES work, it takes Chicago PD more than half an hour to respond to one of their own being shot and killed.

In a city where it takes cops a half an hour to respond to a cop being shot, how long will you have to wait when you call them to report the killer breaking into your home?

Answer: The rest of your life.

Just for Me, Not You

Andrew Wilkow has a theory that the only reason why the left is opposed to capitalism and rich people is because they can’t stand knowing that ordinary people have access to luxuries that only the important people should have. After all, what’s the point of being a VIP if anyone with money could do it? He calls this theory his “Everyman a King” theory. So what’s an elitist to do?

Advocate for laws that restrict the poor from having things while leaving yourself exempt. Check out Taylor Swift, a gun control supporter.

Now check out her $3 million a year worth of armed security, including hiring off duty armed cops. Even in Australia, she is accompanied by armed guards. Guns are only illegal in Oz if you are poor, I guess.

She is so paranoid about security that she admits to carrying what she calls “Army grade QuikClot bandage dressings” for gunshot or stab wounds. She uses facial recognition at her concerts to help weed out security threats.

So she hates guns- unless they are to protect her. Even then, this airheaded, paranoid moron fires her security guards for doing their jobs. It may be a well paid gig, but I wouldn’t be interested.

Not Conflict Resolution

The author of this piece is Dr. Tom Hastings, the conflict resolution coordinator at Portland State University. Portland. Enough said, but let’s look closer at his nonsense anyhow.

It is long past time to repeal the Second Amendment.

Why?

To strengthen democracy.

I don’t want democracy. With democracy, 50.1 percent of the voters would be able to legalize slavery. The voters could easily vote to euthanize everyone over the age of 65, or even confiscate the property of everyone who has a net worth of more than $500,000 so that it can be redistributed. The beauty of our system of government is that, while they are democratically elected, our representatives can’t violate the rights of the individual.

Already in 2022, as of Sept. 25, there have been 32,643 gun deaths in America from a variety of causes, including murder, homicide, accidents and suicides. Many of these deaths were in places that attempted strict gun control, including a ban on assault rifles, but were successfully sued by the NRA or other gun rights groups and their local or state laws vacated by rulings prompted by the Second Amendment.

Let’s start with the “gun deaths” metric. First, a “gun death” is a stupid metric. An early death is no more tragic if carried out by cancer, diabetes, being tossed out of a helicopter, or simply beaten over the head with a hammer.

Second, more than 26,000 of those “gun deaths” were actually suicides. A person intent on killing themselves could, if guns were outlawed, simply step in front of a train, leap from the window of a tall building, or overdose on sleeping pills. Getting rid of the Second Amendment would not save the lives of anyone intent on suicide. The fault in logic here is stunning- the left contends that people who wish to take their own lives would not do so if there were no guns in the home. Ridiculous and easily demonstrated as a false premise. In the United States, over 48,000 people take their own lives each year, and there is no reason to believe that things would improve with the outlawing of guns. Take Guyana as an example, where the government has passed every single dream of gun control proposed by the left.

In Guyana, Category B firearms are only available to sport shooters who hold a license to practice for at least 6 months, with a medical certificate, without a criminal conviction, and additionally require at least three shooting sessions with an instructor. Specific purchase and possession permits can then be applied for from a local police department, are valid for 5 years and can be extended. These weapons can then only be used for sport shooting in shooting ranges, never for hunting. Category B includes all assault rifles such as AK-47/AKM, AK-74 or AR-15/M16/M4, as well as all similar weapons, even if they are chambered for rimfire (.22 LR) cartridges. These can only be semi-automatic. All handguns, including those using rim ammunition, are classified as Category B. It is illegal to possess these Category B weapons after the expiry of a specific non-renewed license: the weapons must be disposed of (e.g., sold to a firearms store or otherwise destroyed).

Meanwhile, Guyana has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the world: 40.8 suicides per 100,000. That number represents a suicide rate three times that of the United States. So gun laws have no effect on suicide rates, which are more of a mental health issue than they are a firearms issue. In Guyana, the suicide problem is related closely to alcoholism, not guns.

Civilized countries enact laws that actually protect their children. Unlike every single other developed or large country in the entire world, the number one cause of death for children in the US is firearms. 

Wrong. Homicides don’t even come close to being the number one cause of death, even including homicides by all mechanisms. Unless you consider 15-24 year olds as being children.

The simple fact is that more than half of the homicides in this country are actually due to street gang activity where one gangs are resorting to violence in order to protect their drug dealing turf. I don’t need to go any further- this guy’s post is filled with enough factual deficiencies that we already know he is lying to support his agenda.

To prevent Civil War 2.0.

With approximately 400 million guns floating around US society and an armed MAGA-driven polarization met by an increasingly armed leftist radical wing, along with evermore virulent rhetoric and escalating numbers walking around open-carrying war weaponry in public, half of America believes that civil war is coming. Tossing out the Second Amendment would free legislatures and city councils to begin seriously ending such belligerent displays of combat weapons. 

During Vietnam, the left thought they were clever by asking “What if they threw a war and no one showed up?” The more important question is “What if they threw a war and only one side showed up?” The answer to that is, of course, genocide. Disarming one side allows the other side, still armed, to do with the unarmed as they please.

It’s as if he thinks that getting rid of the Second Amendment would cause the 600 million plus guns already in US hands to simply disappear. Instead, the repeal of 2A would cause many of those 600 million guns to be used against the very people who would be attempting to confiscate them, guaranteeing the onset of an American civil war.

This guy, who is supposed to be interested in conflict resolution, is advocating for the one thing that is guaranteed to cause more conflict than any other single thing that the government could do. Clueless, but the left’s ideas usually are.

Guns, Crime, and Statistics

I get so tired of people moving the goal posts. Every time you talk to someone from a country which has banned guns, you always hear this argument (or a version of it):

As guns are banned here, we don’t face that reality. Although there is some gun violence in the UK, however, it is very rare.

But does that really pass the smell test? They always put the “gun” qualifier on the front of it. Taking away the guns from the equation doesn’t stop the violent criminals from being violent. It just makes the potential victims defenseless.

The violent crime rate in the UK is 9,360 per 100,000. The United States has a violent crime rate of 381 per 100,000. This means that you are nearly 25 times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in England or Wales than you are to be one in the United States.

What about homicides, though? It’s impossible to compare the homicide rates of the US to other nations, mostly because definitions of homicide differ between the US and other countries. In the United States, there are three ways to die: Natural causes, homicide, suicide. If there is a death that wasn’t natural causes or a suicide, then it is a homicide. For the US, that comes out to about 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people.

Other nations don’t do that. In Australia, a death isn’t a homicide unless someone is arrested and charged with the killing. So if the killer commits suicide or is shot by law enforcement, the people that he killed are not considered to be homicide victims. This means that we can’t directly compare Australia’s reported homicide rate to the US, because the methodology is different.

In the UK, a killing isn’t a homicide until the crown court has ruled it to be a homicide. There is a substantial legal process to determine cause of death in suspected homicides, and the court must complete that process. If the court doesn’t find that there is compelling evidence that one person killed another, it isn’t a homicide. Since 1967, homicide figures for England and Wales have been adjusted to exclude any cases which do not result in conviction, or where the person is not prosecuted.

In short, the outlawing of guns doesn’t stop violent crime. There is no evidence that it stops people from killing each other, either.

Sell Outs

Another dancing monkey, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana fame, proves that if it weren’t for double standards, the left would have no standards at all. Grohl used to attend concerts at “Rock Against Reagan” in the 1980’s, he was a staunch critic of Donald Trump, and has frequently complained and protested against Conservatives for being religious zealots, often in a profane and obnoxious manner.

He called the J6 protest “the craziest fucking shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” A classic Fudd, Grohl is an advocate for gun control. Shortly after the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks, he stated in an interview that the attacks were “an indication of the direction the country’s heading in if we don’t get tougher with gun laws… People need to realize that our country has to get tougher on gun laws, it just does, and I grew up in suburban Virginia going hunting in season. I grew up with a firearm myself. But I’d be willing to give it up, if everyone else would.”

Proving that most anti-gun celebrities are criminals, he famously admits to using weed and LSD. He was also a huge supporter of Barak Obama and of Biden, even playing at his 2021 inauguration.

He has also famously protested the right, calling them religious fanatics.

It’s easy to stand up to the man when you live in the US. What happens when you go to countries that don’t have the freedoms we do here? You bend the knee, of course. Here is this asshat playing in Abu Dhabi:

I guess principles are easy to set aside when there is some money to be made.

I Have Questions

Internet rando Eddie, claiming to be an “Alpha male” says that he is tired of waiting for Congress to act, so he going door to door and confiscating guns. Anyone who resists will be placed under citizens arrest.

  • Under what legal theory or authority will this be carried out?
  • Will Eddie and his fellow gun grabbers be armed?
  • If not, how many houses will they enter before finding out?
  • If they are, will they place themselves under arrest?

Oh, wait. He is Canadian.

Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Figure

Interesting article in the Guardian on FBI crime statistics. The left is pissed because crime is going down, and this will make it harder for them to pass laws that are soft on criminals while still allowing them to outlaw guns. They can’t have that, so they are going to blame Ron DeSantis.

“The issue of crime is deeply weaponized and politicized and we see that come up especially during election cycles. Florida has very incomplete data but Governor Desantis’s campaign is stating they’ve made Florida the safest state.”

In Florida, only 8% of the police departments are represented in the 2022 data, according to the Marshall Project.

The real money quotes are located towards the end of the piece.

  • Black Americans, who make up 13.6% of the population, accounted for 56% of the more than 16,000 homicide victims in the US.
  • of the 19,200 weapons used to kill someone in 2022, 15,000 – or 77% – of them were a firearms, usually a handgun.

Let’s take a look at the FBI Report and see the data for ourselves. The FBI numbers themselves seem to have some confusion in them that isn’t due to spotty data.

First, race. There were 8,694 homicides committed by blacks in 2022, out of a total of 16,724 homicides.

Let’s look at just homicides. Of the 16,724 homicides, 5,803 (34%) of them had handguns listed as the means. That’s on the “crime” page with homicide selected as the crime.

Now look at the “expanded homicide data” page, and you see that 7,937 homicides were committed by handguns out of a total of 19,200 homicides (41% of homicides). Why the discrepancy? Why are there 19,200 homicides on one page, but the same dataset on a different page says there are 16,724? How can we trust these numbers?

Even so, looking at the data. There were 542 rifles (<3%) of all types and 186 shotguns (<1%) used as homicide weapons. More people were killed by “unarmed” assailants than were killed by assailants with rifles.

The obvious answer here is to make it illegal for black people to own guns. That would have prevented far more homicides than banning concealed carry or banning “assault weapons.” Wait, you say that’s ridiculous? I agree. Gun bans won’t stop evil people from doing evil things.

Three Times is Enemy Action

As I reported earlier, there is now a shortage in the ammunition market. The old saying goes: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. This shortage is therefore looking like it’s being caused by government fiat. In the past month:

We know that Biden said more than a year ago that he wants to cut off ammunition sales to the public. He tried last year to cut off the funding to the plant, but was stopped by Congress. So, it appears that he is trying a new tactic.

Mr Guns and Gear has some information on this:

This is not the end. Expect things to accelerate. I think that 2024 is going to be a rough ride.