Bump-stocks and Bimbos

Before a timeline for the Las Vegas tragedy is established and with no motive known, shameless opportunistic creeps (politicians) are hard at work screwing around with the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment, yet again. The Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 as unconstitutional, determined that handguns are "arms" for the purposes of the Second Amendment, found that the Regulations Act was an unconstitutional ban, and struck down the portion of the Regulations Act that requires all firearms including rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock".

McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that found that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" as protected under the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the states. The decision cleared up the uncertainty left in the wake of District of Columbia v. Heller as to the scope of gun rights in regard to the states. For the last seven years, McDonald v. Chicago has been the law of the land.

It always was the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs, and firearms ownership is not a privilege, but a right. Government's job is to protect rights, not to steal or diminish them. The oath of office for elected officials normally includes “ . . . will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” How much actual defending is going on here?

The parade of lies should bother everyone. Machine gun ownership by private citizens is not banned by the Federal Government and never has been. Silencers (properly called suppressors) do not make firearms silent and any round that is hyper-sonic makes a loud crack. Indoors, most all firearms are extremely loud. A Slide-fire stock does not make a firearm unusually dangerous, nor is a slide-fire stock “military style.” Neither the military or law enforcement bother with them. They also don't bother with suppressors for the most part.

You've also heard that things like the slide-fire stock makes a gun run at 800 rounds per minute. California Sen. Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, said the devices can enable a gun to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute and “inflict absolute carnage.” That's a truly stupid statement, for you aren't going to get 400 - 800 rounds per minute out of anything unless you have a 400 or 800 round magazine. There is no such thing for most firearms: that is the domain of belt-feeding.

Lots of things can inflict mass carnage if misused and have done just that: planes, trucks, fertilizer, gasoline, and so forth. There is no enumerated right to these items, however.

Drug overdoses killed 64,000 Americans last year: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/02/upshot/fentanyl-drug-overdose-deaths.html . There are scant few Constitution protections afforded to fentanyl, heroin, or cocaine, yet they make comparatively few headlines and you rarely hear politicians clamor for more laws. Suicide in the United States has surged to a 30 year high, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-surges-to-a-30-year-high.html , yet apparently there is little opportunistic political gain by addressing it.

It doesn't take (or shouldn't take) much in the way of deep thinking to instantly understand that anyone with several guns perched in a shooting nest on the 32^nd floor firing at 22,000 people huddled together can do a lot of damage, and you sure don't need a slide-fire stock or even semi-automatics to accomplish it. Mass murder / suicide is difficult to always defend against, anywhere in the world. Slide-fire stocks have never been used to commit a crime before that I'm aware of. Banning them or taxing them is unlikely to save a single soul. The harassment and taxation of law-abiding citizens does no good: the countless gun laws we have are not enforced. Consider Chicago, every week. Yet, in Illinois, you cannot so much as hold an unloaded gun legally without an Illinois State Police issued Firearms Owner Identification Card: the FOID card. To get a FOID card, you undergo a background check. Everyone in Illinois that possesses a gun legally has gone through a criminal background check. Does anyone think that gang-bangers have FOID cards?

Guns save lives, something that can hardly be claimed for illegal drug use or suicides. Those that commit crimes with weapons belong in jail and it is enforcement that improves things overall, not political jousting over the odd, outlier tragedy.

Guns are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. [1] This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. [2]

Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.[3]

As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.[4]

Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of “Guns in America” — a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.[5]

Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).[6] And readers of Newsweek learned that “only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The ‘error rate’ for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high.”[7]

[1] Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun,” 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):164. Dr. Kleck is a professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has researched extensively and published several essays on the gun control issue. His book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, has become a widely cited source in the gun control debate. In fact, this book earned Dr. Kleck the prestigious American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang award for 1993. This award is given for the book published in the past two to three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to criminology. Even those who don’t like the conclusions Dr. Kleck reaches, cannot argue with his impeccable research and methodology. In “A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed,” Marvin E. Wolfgang writes that, “What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator…. I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence.” Wolfgang, “A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, at 188.

Wolfgang says there is no “contrary evidence.” Indeed, there are more than a dozen national polls — one of which was conducted by The Los Angeles Times — that have found figures comparable to the Kleck-Gertz study. Even the Clinton Justice Department (through the National Institute of Justice) found there were as many as 1.5 million defensive users of firearms every year. See National Institute of Justice, “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms,” Research in Brief (May 1997).

As for Dr. Kleck, readers of his materials may be interested to know that he is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to any advocacy group on either side of the gun control debate.

[2] According to the National Safety Council, the total number of gun deaths (by accidents, suicides and homicides) account for less than 30,000 deaths per year. See Injury Facts, published yearly by the National Safety Council, Itasca, Illinois.

[3] Kleck and Gertz, “Armed Resistance to Crime,” at 173, 185.

[4]Kleck and Gertz, “Armed Resistance to Crime,” at 185.

[5]Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms,” NIJ Research in Brief (May 1997); available at http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt on the internet. The finding of 1.5 million yearly self-defense cases did not sit well with the anti-gun bias of the study’s authors, who attempted to explain why there could not possibly be one and a half million cases of self-defense every year. Nevertheless, the 1.5 million figure is consistent with a mountain of independent surveys showing similar figures. The sponsors of these studies — nearly a dozen — are quite varied, and include anti-gun organizations, news media organizations, governments and commercial polling firms. See also Kleck and Gertz, supra note 1, pp. 182-183.

[6]Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.

[7]George F. Will, “Are We ‘a Nation of Cowards’?,” Newsweek (15 November 1993):93.

 

Copyright 2017 by Randy Wakeman. All Rights Reserved.