Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Finally, an honest debate about gun control

Obama has triggered what is looking to be a debate about gun control where people actually tell the truth for a change:
President Obama is clearly fed up. His speeches after mass shootings — speeches that have become a bit of a morbid ritual, given how regularly the shootings occur — have grown angrier, more emotional, and more disgusted at America's gun violence problem and Congress's unwillingness to do literally anything to stop it. "This is a political choice that we make," Obama declared Thursday night, after the 294th mass shooting of 2015, "to allow this to happen every few months in America."

But let's be clear about precisely what kind of choice this is. Congress's decision not to pass background checks is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What's behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

Other countries have done exactly that. Australia enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn't get us to where many other developed countries are.
That's Vox, a reliably leftie new media site.  It doesn't shrink from calling for confiscation:
The US doesn't just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not. That, combined with Australia's experience, makes large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach for bringing US gun homicides down to European rates.
But what's interesting is Vox's conclusion:
Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That's no reason to stop advocating it.
So finally we have an honest debate.  This is about confiscation.  Even the Left doesn't think that's going to happen.  But at least we can reject the grotesque lies that have been put up as a smoke screen ("common sense gun control").  Truth is a Very Good Thing Indeed.

9 comments:

knirirr said...

It's an interesting admission, indeed.

By the way, this also turned up in my RSS feeds today, and may be of interest to you.

Guffaw in AZ said...

I suspect and fledgling attempts will be met with compliance.
Until they are not.
Then it will get bloody very quickly.
And scary.

Sigh.

gfa

parascribe said...

I think it's interesting that they're finally being honest about their intentions. Not surprising at all, it's been obvious behind the doublespeak for years. It's hardly an honest discussion about violence though, guns continue to be a red herring to draw away from the real causes that no one seems to want to discuss.

knirirr said...

@parascribe, may I ask what you would consider those causes to be, if you don't mind?

Anonymous said...

The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.

Here in Virginia, we like to call that, "Freedom", and we are for it. We are not in any way opposed to other countries wanting to catch up. They can even buy them from us.

parascribe said...

Different causes for different events, but off the top of my head; the religion of peace that has a fantastic propaganda game, a mental health system that would be a joke if it wasn't hurting so many people,an administration that apparently believes the whole sale importing of people from third world shitholes with high rates of violent crime is a good thing, and of course, the race issue.

Jay Nix said...

They aren't being honest yet. That's evident in the fact that they continue to cite Australia as a potential example for the U.S. to follow. One problem though, America has a Bill of Rights that precludes the criminality of gun possession. To tell the real truth the left would need to state the following:

We support the repeal of the 2nd Amendment and are willing to do significant damage to the 4th and 5th Amendments to eliminate private gun ownership in the U.S. It's for the children.

Unknown said...

They are being quite dishonest (I'll pause a moment for everyone to put on their shocked faces).

The article, which cites the debunked "294 mass shootings" number (a significant number of these are gang-related); but it then proceeds to bounce between advocating for European-level "gun violence" (because the other kinds of violence are okey-dokey), and after citing Australia's resounding success, instead of quoting "gun violence" numbers for Oz, they quote "firearm suicides" as dropping. What about GUN VIOLENCE down under? Did that not fall as expected (news reports I've read suggest the opposite, as gangs failed to submit to confiscation schemes-- still got those shocked faces on?).

So this is the usual bait-n-switch bullsh*t that these numbskulls have been preaching for years. They use a "gun violence" metric because a true violent crime rate completely shatters their utopian European image. It's why Once-Great-Britain is now seeing knife-buy-backs.

I for one, am tired of arguing with these idiots. As Joe Huffman says, They have crap for brains. You cannot present them with any rational, lucid, fact-based arguments to make them go away. I advocate for a less-stressful reply. A simple "F*ck off. I'm keeping my firearms," is all they will get from me anymore.

Paul Bonneau said...

To me it looks like desperation. They just can't figure out any way to disarm us; nothing works any more. Even their own constituencies are out at the gun shops, buying.

It's pleasing to see one's enemies in a panic.