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2015-10-08 -Land of the Free
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What no politician wants to admit about gun control
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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."
I saw a graphic that points out that under Obama, mass shootings are on the rise. Is there a correlation? Dunno.
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.
Woo hoo! Arsenal of democracy, baby. That's America!
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.
I am sure federal and state security forces will get right on that.
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.
The writer wants to turn America into a penal colony like Australia, a road which we are fairly well along.
Think about it this way. In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total — or 2.3 gun deaths per million people.
To get to UK levels, we'd need to reduce gun deaths by nearly 98 percent. Even if we wanted to reach the same levels as Finland — another developed country with a relatively high rate of gun deaths — we'd need to drop from 106.4 deaths per million to 35 — more than a 67 percent reduction.
Forgive my interjection, but, seriously, who gives a flying f*ck how many Finns or Brit are killed by other Finns or Brits? As a matter of fact, who cares about government statistics, which are routinely twisted into a meaningless pretzel which has lost all resemblance to its original form, like our Constitution and how it should be interpreted.
And here's the truth: Even the most ardent gun control advocates aren't pushing measures that could close the gap. Not even close.
Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate. Countries with more guns have more gun homicides. States with more guns have more gun homicides. Individuals with guns in the house are likelier to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.
As I have said repeatedly, the more guns that are in the hands of people the higher the criminal instances of their use. It's just demographics. Freedom is messy and dangerous, and it always has been. You want to turn America into Nerf World, where no one ever gets hurt and everyone pulls down $40k per year without lifting a finger. Good luck with that.
So Australia's 1996 gun control was based on a simple idea: They took away a bunch of guns.
And Australia is a lesser nation for it.
After a 28-year-old man killed 35 people at the Port Arthur historic prison colony in Tasmania, Australia, a popular tourist destination, Prime Minister John Howard and his right-wing Liberal Party banned the importation of all semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns, instituted a mandatory national buyback program for such guns, and convinced state governments to ban the weapons outright. In total, about 650,000 weapons — 20 percent of the country's total arsenal by some estimates — were seized and destroyed.
Every Australian who believes in liberty and freedom should be ashamed by what happened in 1996.
Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. While gun control opponents have tried to rebut those results, those responses have been riddled with methodological flaws, and even some of the study's critics have conceded that the laws likely cut down on suicides.
I won't rebut those claims, except to say those claims are, or at least should be irrelevant to a free people. A suicide only matters if it is someone close or a relative, and even then, I don't demand a hostile government take away firearms as a response.
| Determined suicides will choose the most congenial of those methods available to him. If guns are unavailable, other methods will be found. In Japan they regularly jump off mountains and in front of trains. |
The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant. Supporters of Australia's policy often argue that no mass shootings have occurred since, which is only true for a certain restrictive definition, as last September a man shot himself, his wife, and their three children in a murder-suicide in rural New South Wales.
There have also been a number of non-gun massacres in the years since the Port Arthur massacre. This past December, a mother in a suburb of Cairns, Queensland, allegedly stabbed to death seven of her own children and one niece. In 2000, a man burned a backpackers' hostel to the ground in Childers, Queensland, killing 15.
But the homicide and mass shooting results are almost beside the point.
First thing this author got right.
Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides. If we can reduce them by 74 percent, we'd be saving more than 15,000 lives every year. That doesn't get us to where most developed countries are, but it gets us in the ballpark of Finland.
If you like Finland's ball park, plane tickets are cheap, I hear.
The NRA's Wayne LaPierre, a prime reason Australian gun laws could never fly here.
So could it happen in the US? The legal scholars I talked to suggested that an Australia-style program would probably pass muster. If we went further than Australia and also banned handguns, that might cause problems; the Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC's handgun ban in 2008. But Australia's actual system is probably constitutional.
A lot of unconstitutional garbage has been signed off by American courts since 1996 (Obamacare and same sex marriage to name but two), so much so, that their approval of laws that fly in the face of the Constitution makes the laws themselves meaningless.
"Courts have consistently upheld bans on military-style semiautomatic rifles because other firearms are equally useful for self-defense," Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, says. "Gun control isn't stalled because of the Second Amendment. It's stalled because elected officials won't pass effective new laws to reduce gun violence."
Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas Austin and author of the landmark article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," concurs: "If such an extraordinary law actually got through Congress (meaning with necessary Republican support), then I find it impossible to imagine that there would be five votes on the Court to say no," he says. "But the real problem, of course, is that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of Congress actually passing any meaningful legislation re guns, let alone this kind of quite radical legislation."
And there's the rub. President Obama occasionally cites Australia in discussions about gun control, but proposals he and congressional Democrats have put forward stop far, far short of what Australia's done. Obama's plan to tackle gun violence focuses on universal background checks for gun sales, banning assault weapons again, and increasing criminal penalties for illicit gun traffickers. That's nowhere near as dramatic as taking 20 percent of America's guns off the street.
But no more dramatic than the image of the bodies littering the homes of people who try to take those guns.
Australia provides strong evidence that a form of gun control can save lives. But it's a form of gun control that's too dramatic for most mainstream American politicians to embrace.
Background checks aren't enough.
Milder, easier-to-pass changes would probably also save lives. But the effect sizes are, unsurprisingly, smaller, and vary considerably depending on the study you're looking at.
For example, researchers have found that:
After Connecticut passed a law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, gun homicides fell by 40 percent and suicides fell by 15.4 percent.
Again, irrelevant. The loss of freedom is a far more important measure than gun registration laws, which are being ignored by gun owners.
When Missouri repealed a similar law, gun homicides increased by 23 percent and suicides increased by 16.1 percent.
Both firearm homicides and overall homicides are lower in states that check for restraining orders (13 percent fewer firearm homicides) and fugitive status (21 percent fewer) before selling guns, and firearm/overall suicides are lower in states that check for fugitive status (5 percent fewer), misdemeanors (5 percent fewer), and mental illness (4 percent fewer).
All meaningless because of the loss of basic rights that are supposed to be guaranteed in the Constitution.
The national assault weapons ban did not decrease gun deaths in the US, though if it had existed longer it might have made certain shootings less lethal. The end of the assault weapon ban did meaningfully increase homicides in Mexico.
A Maryland law banning cheap, crummy handguns might have reduced gun homicides, but this effect was offset in part by customers rushing to purchase the guns before the ban took effect.
There are a few promising items there, especially when it comes to gun licensing. But taken together, this doesn't look like an agenda that can get the US to European rates of gun deaths.
More drivel using statistics that do not address the loss of personal freedoms and liberty. This comes down to resources. The writer wants to government to take as much as they dare: money, guns and lives in order to help growing the size of government; the loss of liberty means nothing... 
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Posted by badanov 2015-10-08 00:00||
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