Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 48

Contributing Editor Douglas Brooks: A Guide to Tactical Rifle Scopes

A tactical scope is going to be used for tactical purposes, as in the military or law enforcement. The needs here are clear, and they include great accuracy and control, sturdiness and reliability, and more. Take a look at this overview of tactical scopes and what you may want to keep your eye out for as you conduct your search.

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Magnification

One of the first things you’ll want to think about is of course the magnification and the kind of the lens that you want. This really will help to determine everything else, from size and price, to other features and options as well. Tactical scopes may come with magnifications from 2 to 20x. Many are also adjustable, with a range of magnification, for example, from 2.5-10x.

Adjustable magnification provides the greatest versatility and range of usages, but also means you will have to be adjusting as you go, which some individuals really don’t want to have to deal with. When you’re changing positions and looking at targets at different locations, you really need the adjustable capability, although for some more stable situations, you may be able to do without it.

The Lens

For the lens itself, simply put, bigger equals better, at least when it comes to letting in lighter. The larger the lens, in millimeters, the more light will enter, and the clearer the image that you receive will be. But larger lenses also equal more weight, more size and more bulkiness. So finding a good medium between image quality and light, and size and weight, is very important.

 

The Cost

Tactical scopes can quickly become rather expensive. Prices will always depend on the lens and magnification, the additional features and capabilities, and the manufacturer. One rule of thumb is that it’s better to pay for quality, durability and reliability than it is to find a discount, bargain bin scope. When your life, or someone else’s, could potentially be on the line, you need to be able to trust your scope unequivocally. Don’t sell yourself short and buy something that saves you a few bucks but then puts you in an unnecessarily precarious position down the road.

Not Just for Military or Law Enforcement

Finally, do tactical scopes have to be used only by the military or by law enforcement? Of course not, but this is really what they are designed for. You may want to use these high quality scopes for your own purposes, ranging from hunting to general marksmanship depending on your personal preference. When you do, you know that you’ll be getting a dependable product in return based on its design and intended usage.

Of course, this has just been a quick overview of the tactical rifle scope. There is much more information that you’ll need to consider as you plan your purchase. Just remember that magnification and lens size are the most important factors, and you want to focus on quality and reliability.

Do God And Guns Go Together?

Today’s Des Moines Register contains a Letter to the Editor that sums up everything that works and doesn’t work for people who are trying to figure out a way to reduce the violence caused by guns.  The author, who identifies himself as a practicing Catholic, comments positively on an earlier letter from a reader who did not understand how someone could be pro-life and, at the same time, be against ‘common-sense’ measures for gun safety.  To which the writer of this letter opined: “Anyone claiming to be pro-life but silent on gun safety is irrational.”

[image error]             What the author seems to be saying is that pro-life activists who also identify themselves as gun supporters are crazy, which means that there are an awful lot of crazy people wandering around. The pro-life movement has always found its message receptively received by people who consider themselves to be religiously and socially conservative; i.e., Evangelicals, many of whom, particularly white Evangelicals, also tend to be extremely pro-gun.

Does the fact that someone might hold religious and social beliefs which appear to be inconsistent to someone else make that person a nut?  Or is it possible that what at first glance seem to be inconsistent religious and social beliefs aren’t really inconsistent at all?

Evangelical preachers were wandering around spreading the gospel in colonial times (basically because most were tossed out of England because they criticized the Anglican Church) but the movement really came into its own in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in particular when Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell began to make common cause with the rightward shift of the Republican Party in the years leading up to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.  This period happened to coincide with the emergence of a much more aggressive, politicized NRA leadership following what is referred to as the 1977 Cincinnati ‘revolt.’

Although the Evangelical movement has now spread all over the country and has even shown surprising popularity with inner-city, new immigrant groups, its basic strength has always been in the South among whites who also happen to be the population that overwhelmingly owns guns. And while Evangelical belief is based on a literal interpretation of the Good Book, another strain which runs through the faith is the idea that family safety and security are basic cornerstones of the faith.  That being the case, how could the gun industry and its NRA allies not attempt to promote a narrative which linked guns to protection from crime?

The fact that someone believes in the sanctity of life doesn’t mean they are being inconsistent by promoting at the same time an argument which views owning a gun as a means of preserving life when or if that life is threatened by someone else. Ask any gun owner if he practices proper safety measures and he’ll always say ‘yes.’ Ask the same individual what he would do if someone tried to break into his home and he’ll unhesitatingly tell you that he’ll pick up his gun and blow the bad guy away.  What’s inconsistent about that?

At the beginning of this column I said that there were things which worked and didn’t work for advancing the idea that we need to make a stronger effort to reduce the violence caused by guns. What works is reminding people again and again that no matter how you cut it, more than 120,000 gun injuries each year is simply a cost we shouldn’t have to bear. And it doesn’t work to wait until after the injury occurs, then grab the guy who committed the injury, slam him into a cell and throw away the key.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that just because someone believes a gun doesn’t represent a threat to themselves or anyone else means that such an individual has no honest respect for human life. I long ago decided that what I believe may conform with reality but that’s only because I define reality in a certain way. Which may or may not work for anyone else.

 

Contributing Editor Stu Chisholm – How To Fix Nics.

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It’s hard to believe that a full decade has passed since the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign.  It seems like yesterday when presidential hopeful, John Kerry, turbocharged the term, “flip-flopping” with his statement to an assembled crowd at Marshall University that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it,” referring to his vote for funding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  That one still gets laughs at parties.  Yet very recently, during the debacle over so-called “universal background checks,” the same “flip-flop” charge was leveled at the NRA.  Why?

Back in 1999, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre testified before a panel of the House Judiciary Committee on behalf of the NRA that background checks were appropriate and should be done.  This stands in sharp contrast to their position in 2013, when the NRA’s Chris Cox called the expanded background check proposal “misguided,” and said that it would not reduce violent crime, “or keep our kids safe in their schools.”  The left-wing media is still crowing, “flip-flop!”

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

In 1998, the NICS system (National Instant Check System) went online, replacing the mandatory 5-day federal waiting period for gun purchases.  The NRA supported the idea overall, sometimes working with legislators to iron out some of the details.  NICS would replace the much hated (by gun buyers) waiting period.  Contrary to popular opinion and/or revisionist history, gun control supporters of the day opposed the idea, not only preferring the waiting period, but wanting to lengthen it.  In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, when it became apparent that records of prohibited persons were missing from the NICS database due to funding issues, the NRA once again worked with legislators to craft the “NICS Improvement Act of 2007.”  According to their website, “The National Rifle Association (NRA) worked closely with Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to address his concerns regarding H.R. 2640, the National Instant Check System (NICS) Improvement Act.  These changes make a good bill even better.  The end product is a win for American gun owners.”  Again, the anti-gun advocates took this as defeat.

To say, then, that the NRA opposes background checks defies historical fact.  Indeed, you might recall the many Sunday morning news pundits during the 2013 hearings and debates on expanding the checks thought that the NRA would eventually acquiesce and support the bill.  They did not.  Again, we must ask, why?

THE OBAMA ERA

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Obama administration has taken a decidedly anti-gun position, purportedly fueled by emotion in the wake of Sandy Hook and pressure from various anti-gun groups.  The NRA, therefore, rightfully views any changes to current gun law with suspicion.  This was especially true with the 2013 bill.

Crafted by senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), it contained many things that gun owners and the NRA found objectionable.  The first was backdoor gun registrations, which is illegal under current federal law.  The senators went to work on an amendment that blocked any such registry, and again you might recall how gun control groups howled in protest, a registry being a long sought after item on their agenda.  Another provision, however, was not removed: a de-facto tax on every private sale.

The bill would’ve forced all private sales to go through FFL dealers.  This places an undue burden on these businessmen, who would essentially be running transactions for their “competition,” not to mention the man-hours and paperwork involved, so they would naturally charge a fee which could add anywhere from $25 on up.  When another proposal to bypass FFLs and simply allow private sellers access to NICS free of charge was proposed, gun control activists held the line: the fees must not be eliminated!  The obvious reason is to price out buyers of more modest means – often the very people who need armed self-protection the most!  In the end, it came down to a choice between a true life saving measure being implemented or cutting off a small segment of gun buyers, and gun control zealots chose the latter.  As we all know, the bill went down in defeat, to the shock of anti-gun liberals.

CONSERVATIVE CONCERNS

Indeed, not only the NRA, but other groups were concerned about the potential of letting private sellers have access to NICS, citing privacy concerns.  It turns out that this isn’t an issue, since NICS only gives three results to every background check: proceed, denied or delay/hold.  It divulges no personal information to the seller at all.

Yet the attempts of the Obama administration to infringe on 2nd Amendment rights combined with the efforts of two new gun control groups, Gabby Gifford’s “Americans for Responsible Solutions” and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” (and their newly purchased astroturf group, “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America”) has solidified opposition by the NRA and other gun rights groups against any changes to the background check provision.  It has been characterized as “asking government permission” to buy a gun, targeting “you, the innocent gun buyer” rather than criminals.  But is this fair?

An unrelated hot-button issue is “voter ID,” the conservative push to combat voter fraud by requiring voters to prove they are who they say they are.  This seems like a reasonable way to combat such fraud with only a minimal inconvenience to innocent, law-abiding voters.  One might characterize such a measure as a “criminal control” law.  So what I find hard to fathom is why we don’t apply the same logic to background checks?

And that’s the answer: no, those characterizations above are not fair.  The goal is to stop convicted felons and prohibited mental patients from buying guns from legal sources, something we might also call “due diligence.”  Indeed, a determined criminal won’t let this minor roadblock stop him/her, but more apathetic (and less intelligent) criminals may well be stopped.  Additionally, I have to think that most gun sellers would like to know if the person they’re selling to is one of the “good guys.”  Pro-gun groups and responsible gun owners/sellers must, then, change their perspective – that background checks are not “gun control,” but “criminal control” – and demand a viable way to implement a truly universal plan that won’t infringe on access to firearms by honest Americans.

HOW CAN THIS WORK?

The best, most simple plan I heard during the debate reminded me of my local Sex Offender Registry.  I can go online and see the names and locations of all the convicted sex offenders in my neighborhood.  If NICS could also be put online and made accessible to any and all gun sellers, no matter where they were, it would make a true “universal” check system possible.  They could be done anywhere that phone, internet or cellular service is available.  Best of all, FFL dealers would be bypassed in all private sale transactions, so there would be no fees.  As long as the prohibition against a registry remains intact, there is every reason for we People of the Gun to lend our support to the idea.  I think that everyone who wants to see less crime would prefer efficacy over political theater.

For the more staunch among us, I’ll just say this: NICS is a fact of life and is not going away anytime soon.  While the figures might be debated, it’s also been successful in denying sales to criminals, so why shouldn’t we double-down on what actually works?  Hard-core opposition simply makes us look exactly like the inflexible, unreasonable types the media portrays us as being.  I say that effective solutions can ONLY happen when those who know guns best add their expertise and voices to the debate and their focus to the problem of keeping guns out of the wrong hands.  Otherwise, we’ll just end up with bad legislation written by the ignorant.  If you agree that we cannot let the Bloombergs and Giffords call the shots, then write your Congressman and put our plan in front of them.  Write a letter to the editor of your local or national newspaper, magazine or news website and be the voice of reason.  Let us take our place as the true champions of a safer, less violent America.

Until next time, share the knowledge!

Mike The Gun Guy Magazine.

I have been listening members of the gun violence prevention (GVP) community lament again and again that we need to engage in positive and constructive discussions with gun owners about the risks of owning guns.

[image error]So we have decided to make my website become a place where just such discussions can take place.  Accordingly, we have made the following changes to my site and hope that everyone who wants to create and sustain a discussion about guns from both sides of the argument will contribute their views here. This is what you will now find:

Contributions from people other than Mike.  We now have an outstanding group of Contributing Editors, and we will be adding more. These writers are free to contribute their thoughts on any topic they like without editorial control of any kind from me. If you would like to contribute your thoughts to this website, please contact me and I’ll explain the rules, except there are no rules other than sending us a brief bio and thumbnail pic so that you can be listed on our Contributing Editors page.
New and relevant readings. The publishing industry has changed to the point that many important and informative books are now self-published, or what is called ipress, including writers like Mike who can’t wait a year or longer for the trade or university press folks to get his brilliant texts into print. These books and important articles will be listed on the For Further Reading page, and we encourage readers to send us titles which they think should be on this page as well.  And every listing will include a link that will take readers to the place where they can actually buy the book or download the article. We will also be encouraging independent publishers and the trade press to send us notices about new books.
The Gun Forum.  This page gives everyone an opportunity to contribute their thoughts and ideas about guns, to share those thoughts with others and move from being passive readers to active communicators.  You can join an ongoing discussion or create a new one and you don’t need to be ‘approved’ in order to get involved. We are also going to keep edits to a minimum because we assume that everyone who participates wants the discussions to be intelligent, rational and devoid of insults or other childish rants
Gun Skills.  This page will be devoted to training in the safe use of firearms. It            will expose readers to both the positives and negatives of owning and using                 guns so that gun owners and non-gun owners alike can make informed                       decisions about whether they should own a gun. The contents of this page will           also provide both sides of the gun ‘debate’ with information that will better                 inform readers about the pro’s and con’s of guns.

You may also notice some advertisements on the site. We are partnering with WordPress in this venture with the understanding that the ads will all be for legitimate products or services and will not be intrusive on the site. If the ads become a bother or a nuisance, they will be curtailed.

Please feel free to send us feedback about our new site.

Reducing Gun Violence The New York City Way.

How should we go about reducing gun violence? According to The New York Times, we need to adopt a ‘public health strategy’ based on lessons we learned in reducing fatalities from accidents involving cars. The approach favored by the less-compassionate crowd; i.e., Vladimir Trump and the NRA, is to ‘get tough’ on crime and lock all those ‘street thugs’ right up.

[image error]              In fact, we seem to have a remarkable example of a successful drop in gun violence within New York City, where homicide numbers in 2017 might end up at the lowest level since the 1950’s, as well as representing nearly a 90% drop from the 2,245 homicides recorded in 1990, an all-time high.  To give you another perspective on these numbers, this year the city of Baltimore may finish with more homicides than New York, even though Baltimore’s population is around 650,000, whereas more than 8.5 million call the Big Apple their home.

To explain what’s going on, the Times turned to our good friend Frank Zimring, whose book, The City That Became Safe, attempted to explain the decline through a combination of more effective, data-driven policing focused on specific high-crime ‘spots’ rather than the more generalized ‘quality of life’ policing tactics such as looking for ‘broken windows’ or stop-and-frisk. But Zimring’s book only went through 2010, and homicides have dropped nearly 50% since that time. What’s driving the decline now? It’s “utterly mysterious” says Zimring, who is hardly alone in not being able to figure it out.

With all due respect to the criminologists and social scientists who have looked at New York’s crime stats again and again, I’m going to throw out a little theory based on an element of the urban landscape in New York and other places which appears to be overlooked. It’s a phenomenon I call ‘re-urbanization;’ i.e., the reclaiming of distressed, inner-city neighborhoods not through ‘urban renewal’ plans, but on a block-by-block basis by newly-arrived residents who move into cheap, marginal housing which they renovate, upgrade and slowly but surely create a stable environment where middle-class families can work and live. Know why New York is a ‘sanctuary city?’ Because it’s those new immigrants, those documented and undocumented ‘aliens’ whose presence brings many distressed neighborhoods back from the dead.

Several years ago I took a ride in Brooklyn all the way down Atlantic Avenue from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the border of Queens, a trip which took me through parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York.  When I was growing up in New York in the late 1950’s, these three neighborhoods comprised the worst part of the Brooklyn ghetto; going from the corner of Sutter and Rockaway Avenues to Times Square was like going from the Earth to the Moon.

The four police precincts covering these neighborhoods – 73rd, 75th, 79th, 81st – patrol a combined population of 246,050 which in 2000 racked up 289 homicides; last year the homicide total was 54.  These same four precincts made 458 arrests for illegal weapons in 2000; the 2016 number more than doubled to 979. Want to reduce gun violence? Get rid of the guns.

What really struck me as I drove and walked through these neighborhoods, however, was the extent to which I could see again and again the degree to which new pockets of residential housing and commercial enterprise were springing up all over the place.  Take a look at this apartment complex on Gates Avenue in Bed-Stuy.  The tab to live in what the developers call ‘historic’ Bedford-Stuyvesant begins at $2,500 bucks a month. Check out a rehabbed building at 1365 Fulton Street; no vacancies at the moment but if one comes up the monthly for a one-bedroom will only run you two grand.

People moving into those apartments don’t expect to be robbed or shot. And they won’t be because for all kinds of reasons as an urban environment becomes more prosperous, it also becomes crime-free. Want to reduce gun violence? Try upgrading a neighborhood where gun violence occurs.

 

 

 

Dave Buchannon – Make A New Year’s Training Resolution.

I hope you had a wonderful, peaceful and joyous holiday.  Now that you’ve digested all of those wonderful holiday treats, you’re probably ready to make some resolutions for the new year and I, for one, would like to see every gun owner make a resolution to train more frequently.

[image error]Now I’ve heard the complaint that it is expensive to practice your shooting skills frequently, but before you pick out your first class seat on the complaint train, let’s put “expensive” into perspective.

Back a few years I used to golf every Saturday morning with the same three guys.  We’d travel to different courses in our region because we’d always heard that some course “over there” was better then where we played “over here,” actually we just enjoyed playing different courses.  We didn’t play highbrow courses, we sought mostly nice municipal and private courses that were open to the public.  The point is, we usually paid around $35 each for a round of golf, which didn’t include the lost balls or the round of beers at the 19th hole.  We all considered thirty-five bucks a reasonable price to pay for a half-day of fun in the sun.  More importantly, our wives were all willing to pay that much just to get our butts out of the house for a while.

Today I can run down to my local sporting goods store or gun shop and pick up a box of 50 rounds of pistol ammo for about $12, and I do not live in an inexpensive region.  So for right around what I used to pay for a single round of golf I can buy 150 rounds of pistol ammunition… without any coupons or discounts.  Of course that doesn’t include the cost of my rod & gun club membership but that’s a sunk cost, meaning if I joined the club I’m paying for it whether I train once a year or three times a week.

So for about the same cost as a weekly round of golf I can get in at least two hours of training, even more if I’m pacing myself correctly.  The reality is that most of us get bored after an hour on the range, so in the future I’ll share some drills to help keep your range time interesting while building important skills.

But what if your limiting factor is time instead of money?  Or what if it’s difficult for you to get to the range, or what if you belong to one of those clubs with a range that’s so busy the only slot available is next week are at 2:30 am on Wednesday?  Find another club. Really.  Not all training though, has to involve throwing real lead downrange, there are some serious training alternatives you can use right at home.

If you want to improve your skills, laser pistols are great for training when you can’t get to the range.  There are a number of options you could cash those holiday gift cards on at one of your favorite online retailers for a reasonable price.  Avoid the temptation to go cheap.  As with all things in the gun world, you get what you pay for.  A well built laser trainer will give you years of service and you can even set up your own laser range with targets that respond to ‘hits’ and ‘misses.’  There are laser trainers that replicate the size and weight of most carry weapons fairly well.

You can get the same effect with a ‘laser bullet’ inserted into the barrel of your carry weapon.  These are like tiny laser pointers that fit into the barrel of your pistol like a cartridge would.  When you pull the trigger, the firing pin presses on a little switch and ‘fires’ the laser so you can see it ‘hit’ your target.

Want to practice your holster work?  Most ranges won’t allow it.  So spend a few dollars on a blue gun replica of your carry weapon and you can practice your draw and re-holster to your heart’s content without even the remote possibility of an accidental discharge.

So for 2018 resolve to train more, you really can afford it.

The Problem Isn’t Gun Violence – The Problem Is Violence.

It has long been a tenet of faith with the gun violence prevention (GVP) community that our homicide rate is far beyond the homicide rates of in other advanced (OECD) countries because we have so many guns. And study after study shows that although our overall violence is about the same as everywhere else, our violence is more fatal because so many people each year die from injuries caused by guns.

[image error]              This truism then morphs into a second truism, namely, that minorities, particularly African-American adolescents and young men, are disproportionately represented in the numbers killed each year with guns. This latter belief is bandied over the media because every weekend, it seems, Chicago is ablaze with guns, ditto other major urban centers with large minority populations and intractable inner-city poverty like St. Louis, Baltimore and New Orleans.

I have never felt entirely comfortable with this line of reasoning because it assumes that without all the guns floating around, we would be as peaceful and non-violent as most other advanced countries, an assumption which is simply not true.  If we compare our non-gun homicides to homicides in the rest of the OECD, we still wind up with a homicide rate that is 2 to 3 times greater than anywhere else. If America was a gun-free zone, we would also have to believe that some of the people who now commit gun murders would go about killing in some other way. In which case, our homicide rate without access to guns would be 4 or 5 times greater than what we see in Italy, Germany, Austria or France.

What concerns me about the public health research on gun violence is that I don’t see any of these scholars, whose work I support and admire, looking at why the U.S. is a more violent country, not just because of our access to guns, but just because we happen to be more violent pari passu (which means colloquially, ‘that’s the way we are.’)

Take alook at a story on the website of my friend John Lott, who analyzed county-level homicide numbers for all 3,100 counties and discovered that half of the murders committed in 2014 occurred in 2% of all counties, whereas more than half of all counties had no murders at all. Which counties were the worst when it comes to violence? Counties that contained cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, you know the drill. What John Lott told us in 2017 is what GVP scholars have been saying for the past 20 years.

There’s only one little problem with both points of view. When we think about community safety, we not only need to know the number of injuries, but the rate at which those injuries occur. It’s the injury rate, not the raw number which defines the relative safety or lack of safety in the place where we live.

Everyone knows that Atlanta has a high crime rate, in 2014 the homicide rate was 13. But take a outside of Atlanta to Bibb County where the 2014 murder rate was 11 – this year it will be 19 or worse.  New Orleans racked up a murder rate in 2014 of 40, but tiny Acadia Parish located in the rural, northwest part of the state, didn’t do all that bad with a murder rate of 26. For comparison’s sake, the per-100K national murder rate in 2014 was around 5.

There are counties like Acadia and Bibb in many states, and in case you are wondering, in many of those counties the majority of the residents aren’t minorities, they happen to be white. If you live in a toney, upper-class Los Angeles neighborhood you’ll never experience the violence that goes on in East LA or Watts. But if you live in Jefferson County, AR, where the murder rate is above 20 per year, you can’t avoid the violence unless you move away.

In this country fatal violence isn’t just a function of access to guns, something else is also going on. Figuring that one out might be a good New Year’s resolution for 2018.

The ‘Gun Rights’ Movement Is Ready To Save America From The ‘Deep State.’

Once the MAGA movement started showing up at rallies with AR rifles in full view, I knew it was only a matter of time until the alt-right/white media blowhards would jump on the bandwagon and begin pushing a hyped-up version of not just using guns for self-defense, but using guns to protect America from a counter-coup led by the ‘deep state.’ And this message finally appeared full-flower last week on (what else?) the Youtube channel owned by Alex Jones, with an hour-long rant, complete with shooting guns at a Texas indoor range.

[image error]             What makes this video appealing to the loony set is that it also features none other than Roger Stone, who is introduced as the ‘former head of the Trump campaign,’ although Alex forgot to mention that Stone was not only never the head of Trump’s operation, but was pushed onto the sidelines after he began taking credit for his alleged connection to Julian Assange when Wikileaks started dumping the emails that upended Hillary’s campaign.  Stone got his start as a dirt-digger under Nixon and is probably more responsible for the intertwining of Republican political messaging and conspiracy theories than anyone else.  Which gave him impeccable credentials to serve as a handmaiden for the Trump campaign where racism and nationalism have come home to roost.

The video starts off with Stone delivering a monolog about the worst, largest criminal-conspiracy of all time, namely the Clinton-Hillary uranium deal, and how it’s being covered xup by the ‘deep state.’ At some point Stone then says that he has taken up shooting both to protect himself and the Constitution, Jones chimes in about how Stone has been going to the range frequently to practice his shooting skills, and of course everyone knows that Jones is a long-time and frequent user of guns, right?

Now the action shifts to the range itself with Jones first shooting a 10mm, short-barreled carbine, which he claims to own but doesn’t even know where the safety is located on the gun and tells a range instructor to ‘come on over and show me how this works real quick.’ Stone is even less-informed, picking up a semi-auto Uzi pistol with his finger clearly on the trigger even though the gun isn’t pointed downrange, and as the range officer politely tells him to remove his finer from the trigger, a voice which sounds suspiciously like Alex Jones tells Stone that he’s about to shoot a ‘full-auto’ gun.

Neither Jones nor Stone have any real experience shooting guns at all. But that hardly prevents them from using a shooting motif, particularly one in which the picture of a person is then shot full of holes with a live gun. And if memory serves me correctly, the first politician to stoop to the lowest possible level and run a political ad which pandered to the dumbest of the dumb was a Democrat named Rob Quist who unsuccessfully ran in Montana for the Congressional seat previously held by Ryan Zinke. So before my friends in the gun violence prevention (GVP) community wring their hands in despair as Alex Jones and Roger Stone practice for the upcoming resurrection in an Austin shooting range, let’s just remember that when it comes to promoting themselves, those two jerks didn’t exactly invent the idea of building an identity by shooting off guns.

Talking about building an identity, the latest and even more stupid announcement about the politics of gun ownership comes from another egregious self-promoter, Steve Bannon, who says he’s creating a new movement which will be a ‘revolutionary force’ in American politics, growing out of a coalition of religious reactionaries, pro-life activists, union members (as if there are any union members left) and – who else? – the 2nd-Amendment gang.

What’s behind this overblown, delusional rhetoric is one, simple fact: two media companies known as Infowars and Breitbart, both vying for the same buck.  And now that gun nuts have stopped buying guns, all that spare cash which used to go to support gun ‘rights’ is up for grabs.

 

Does Concealed-Carry Reduce Crime?

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Today’s media will be carrying the story about NRA Board member and NASCAR team owner Dick Childress, who evidently frightened away three dopes who broke into his home by firing a gun at them, an event which Childress claims resulted in no loss of life to himself or his wife thanks to “the 2nd Amendment and God.” No doubt this story will be repeated when the Senate takes up a debate on the national concealed-carry reciprocity bill, with Childress becoming a poster-boy for the idea that we should all be going around armed.

If there is one cottage industry which has emerged and grown within the gun violence prevention (GVP) research community, it’s the continued effort to debunk the work of John Lott, whose book – More Guns Less Crime – has been the clarion-call for the concealed-carry (CCW) movement since it was first published in 1998. The book first appeared when the residents of nearly half the states still had to prove a need to walk around with a gun. As of today, only 8 states still give the authorities who issue CCW some discretion as to who shall and shall not be able to walk around armed; the rest of the country couldn’t care less.

Lott’s argument is based on statistical models which show that as the number of concealed-carry licenses increase in most jurisdictions, criminal activity shifts from in-person to anonymous crime; i.e., a decline in homicides but an increase in burglaries, his argument based on the assumption that criminals don’t want to confront potential crime victims who might be armed.

Lott’s thesis has been attacked by any number of GVP researchers, of whom perhaps the most prominent and prolific scholar is a law professor at Stanford, John Donohue, who has published two, very detailed critiques of Lott’s work.  The first paper was published in 2012, and basically argued that Lott’s argument was based on data which was, at best, incomplete. The second paper was released this year, and went further because it claimed that by using a more sophisticated modeling approach, the data actually showed that in CCW states that violent crime went up. Lott has replied in detail to both these critiques, so the battle wages on.

I recently began a study of murder from a forensic point of view, hence, I took the trouble to read Lott and Donohue again and find myself unable to subscribe to either point of view. The reason I am unpersuaded has nothing to do with the validity of statistical models employed in either approaches; rather, it is based on the assumptions that both Lott and Donohue make about the behavior of criminals versus the behavior of armed citizens, assumptions which I believe in both cases to be totally wrong.

Let’s go back to the three jerks who broke into the home where Dick Childress and his wife were asleep. Obviously, they didn’t do their homework in preparation for the attack because not only were the residents in their home, but the homeowner was certainly armed. I mean, a member of the NRA Board wouldn’t have been able to pull out a gun?

But let’s presume for the sake of argument that the burglary team’s collective IQ wasn’t below the standard of ‘dumb.’ The point is that anonymous crimes, crimes of stealth, usually involve some degree of thought and planning before the crime occurs.  On the other hand, what emerges from the brilliant, 1,000-page textbook on forensic homicide by Lester Adelson is the proven argument that of all crimes, murder is the one crime which is preceded by any planning or conscious thought at all.

Then there’s the question of the degree to which the population which commits the most violent crime – murder – has any degree of contact with the population that believes they need to protect themselves by walking around armed. Because if these two population groups don’t come into contact with one another, making some kind of causal connection between how the two groups behave regarding any issue is about as far away from reality as you can get.

Violent crime, particularly murder, is overwhelmingly an intra-racial affair. Blacks kill blacks, whites kill whites; for both races the intra-racial character is around 90 percent. And just as murder is segregated by race, it’s also segregated by income and where people live. Warren Buffet lives in Omaha, the only murder in Buffet’s neighborhood in the last couple of years was an elderly lady, living alone, who met some dope on the internet and then invited him to move in. He repaid her for her generosity and kindness by bopping her over the head and running off with her jewels. Meanwhile, a mile away from Buffet’s house is a small ghetto surrounding a ballfield and some swing sets known as Giffords Park. The neighborhood has about 5,000 residents but chalks up 8 or 9 shootings each year, the reason that most of the victims survive is because the park is located a block away from the Creighton University Medical Center and ER.

If we are really going to do something about the behavior caused by guns which will probably result in more than 12,000 murders this year, I think it’s time to stop indulging in arguments about statistics and statistical models and start paying attention to how, when and where these murders actually occur. And by the way, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the number of individuals who have concealed-carry licenses represents in any way, shape or form, how many Americans are walking around with guns.  Let me break it to you gently – in neighborhoods, both white and black, where most murders occur, everybody’s got a gun.

Have A Wonderful and Joyous Christmas Season.  

 

Will National Concealed-Carry Reciprocity Increase Gun Violence?

What would be the result if the national concealed-carry bill being considered by the Senate actually passed and was signed into law? According to the pro-gun gang, this law will allow every American to use a gun for self-defense no matter where he or she goes. The gun-control gang, on the other hand (I’m trying to be as even-handed as possible but don’t expect me to keep it up) says that such a law will unleash a wave of untrained people carrying guns from states that require little or no pre-licensing training to states which require some kind of safety certification before someone can walk around with a gun. Let’s start with the pro-gun argument first.

[image error]             By now everyone is aware of the ‘fact’ that people with guns prevent millions of crimes from being committed each year. This argument first burst out of the brain of Gary Kleck in the early 90’s, and continues to pop up on various sites here and there. Although Kleck doesn’t necessarily go along any more with his own nonsense, the idea that more guns equal less crime is a gun-nut refrain which floats around about as frequently as the idea that Trump and the Russians had nothing to do with each other during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Last month, according to John Lott, armed citizens prevented a whole, big 22 criminal attacks from taking place, which is a whole, big nothing.

Unfortunately, the reverse argument used to support the idea that concealed-carry laws (CCW) will lead to more crime, isn’t a study of CCW at all.  It’s a critique of how Lott analyzed data in his book, More Guns, Less Crime, which isn’t a study of the impact of CCW, no matter what his critics say. The fact that a particular jurisdiction makes it easier to receive a CCW license, or abolishes the CCW licensing process altogether, doesn’t mean that more people are necessarily walking around with guns. And it certainly doesn’t mean they are walking around in neighborhoods where most crime actually occurs.

My friend John Lott has taken it upon himself to track the increase in CCW licenses issued over the last few years, but even he admits that “the main focus from a crime prevention point of view should be whether people actually do carry guns.” Unfortunatrly, neither he nor anyone else can provide data which confirms that more CCW means more people are actually walking around armed. The Pew gun survey found that 40% of gun owners kept a gun within ‘easy reach,’ but only 10% carried one around all the time.

What seems to provoke the greatest degree of concern among advocates opposed to national CCW reciprocity is that someone living in a state which requires little or no training will be able to take a weapon into another state where training is mandated, thus creating a safety risk that would not exist if issuing authorities continued to set the requirements for CCW within their own state.  Last year some of our public health research friends published a survey of gun training, noting that only 60% of gun owners underwent training of any kind, findings that were turned around and immediately ballyhooed by the GVP media, proclaiming that 4 out of 10 self-defense handgun owners received no training at all.

What nobody in either the research team or the GVP media bothered to point out is that the so-called training received by a majority of CCW-holders is about as effective in preparing them to actually use a gun in self-defense as a driving course prepares someone to pilot a rocket module to the moon. The good news is that less than 1% of victims of violent crime actually use a gun in self-defense; the point being that the entire argument over national CCW has little to do with either gun violence or violent crime. A debate about guns not based on reality? No, I don’t believe it.  Can’t be true.