Washington Post: Forget New Gun Laws

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When I was a kid we all either had a gun or knew where we could get one, yet nobody shot anybody and mass killings were unheard of. So access to guns isn't the problem, something else has changed. It's past time we started to look at the real underlying problems that promote violence, like the underground drug economy (didn't anyone learn anything from Prohibition?).
 
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That unfortunately having had to be said...This is a valuable bit of information for us on several levels. The Washington Post has published a well supported "the gun isn't the problem" piece instead of the standard "guns=bad => gunowners = evil". They do this from time to time to "show" they're even handed in their hatred for us and the 2A, but Hey, ya take what you can get. What's great about when they do this is we can keep the links and articles and the fact they were in the WaPo and use it to support our long standing contention that crime has to do with criminals and social and economic conditions and not whether someone in Chicago has a firearms or in Vermont or in Wyoming. It is about whether people are stranded in an socioeconomic desert where family is destroyed and unemployment is high and hope of improving your life is nearly non existent unless it is through crime or sports or music (and there's no middle class dream, just worship of fame/infamy and wealth). IOW, it isn't about guns, but about the tough problems of socioeconomics that are far more challenging than some politician wants to take on.

So, for every one of you with a Facebook page, share that article. If you don't have FB, send it to your friends. If you don't have friends then print it out and leave copies where people can see them. Email the article to your elected officials, pastors, doctors, dentists, would-be elected officials, pastors, doctors, dentists and anyone else you can point to. Put it on your phone and bring it up at any opportunity "I saw this article in the Washington Post from a detective who pointed out that the difficult to address root cause of violent crime are the socio economics of the high crime areas. It pointed out that there have been programs focused on dealing with the underlying causes of the violence in the communities that have reduced violence by 50% for participants. 50%! Remarkable!"...
 
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"ya take what you can get."

That is one view. But it needs to be noted that the article mentioned was not, and is not, the view of the Post, which remains absolutely and firmly committed to the strongest possible laws for the ban and confiscation of all types of firearms from all but the wealthy and powerful.

Jim
 
I agree. WaPo is one of the most staunchly anti news outlets and I consider anything that isn't anti to be an intentional attempt to appear to be equitable in their treatment of the 2A.

None the less, every time they allow such a pice we should seize it for our arguments.
 
"... the underlying social and economic problems that cause gun violence..."
also cause non-gun violence.

We should emphasize to fence sitters that the target should be violence, not this obsession with guns, and citable sources from sources that are not perceived as gun rights advocates can help persuade the fence sitters that gun control is not the answer to the problems that concern them.
 
hso

It is about whether people are stranded in an socioeconomic desert where family is destroyed and unemployment is high and hope of improving your life is nearly non existent unless it is through crime or sports or music (and there's no middle class dream, just worship of fame/infamy and wealth). IOW, it isn't about guns, but about the tough problems of socioeconomics that are far more challenging than some politician wants to take on.

Very well said, sir. I admire those who can hit the nail on the head; those who can express their thoughts in a clear and concise manner (something I seem to often lack).

Thanks, hso. This will go on my facebook page. (I try to stay off of fb but I'm there about three times per week these days, what with a new work assignment and a keen interest in my new reloading press).
 
It obviously isn't the mere presence of guns, this country has always been awash in firearms. But, it's also more than simple economics.
IMO, the root cause of the insanity engulfing this country is the hard left turn we took in the 1960's, where we tossed aside the Biblically-based moral foundation that used to largely permeate this country, and replaced it with any and everything but.
Sure, obviously not eveybody was a Christian, but that moral foundation, that mindset was very prevalent, in fact, it was pretty much the Political Correctness of it's day. Everyone from grade school teachers to politicians and military generals paid homage to it. It didn't matter if it was true or not, the country was still better off when we largely behaved as though it were.
Also, the recreational drug counter-culture is deeply intertwined with this societal decay, and is a large part of the influence that helped create generations of hopeless, lifelong welfare recipients.
The popularizing of recreational drug use ,along with the sexual revolution, and all the societal destruction they've both caused can clearly be laid at the feet of Liberalism, something they have never accepted blame for.
We don't have a gun problem, we have a morality problem.
 
So what do we do with the approach to counter Anti attacks on the 2A and gunowners? We've always had poverty and concentrations of the poor. How do we use the morals argument?

Note also we need to be careful in the economic and moral arguments in the face of the facts showing homicide and other violent crime rates have been dropping since their high in the 90's. Just as we point out "our more dangerous world" or "epidemic of violence" are lies counter to the FBI UCR showing violent crime and homicide rates are half of what they were 20+ years ago we have to be careful to realize there are ways to use our own argument that crime is down against is. We need to focus on the localized nature where he homicides are concentrated and how the socioeconomic or moral argument may clearly apply.
 
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"Americans need to think beyond guns, and to confront the underlying social and economic problems that cause gun violence."

This, in itself, is a misleading statement because it's symptomatic, not a root cause.

It implies that social and economic problems cause gun violence. They do NOT "cause" gun violence.

What causes violence, of any kind, are people. People respond to pressures based on their ingrained core values, values which they learn at a very young age and which are not subject to being easily changed afterwards.

People have endured incredibly harsh conditions without resorting to violence. The solution isn't to tackle the external pressures, but to tackle the underlying personal core values that have gone astray.

If people are raised with strong, moral core values, external pressures are far less likely to result in them taking unmoral actions.

Socio-economic pressures DO apply real pressures which can drive people towards poor social behavior. But, in the end, it's the people who commit the acts, not the external pressures.

Correct the PEOPLE problem and the other problems will correct themselves as a result.

Correct the external pressures and all you have are a bunch of ticking time-bombs left in the people who have not been changed. At the first sign of any kind of "pressure" they will crack again.
 
I think crime statistics are over rated when used in comparison with the morality argument.
Drops in crime follow rates of incarceration of those who always have been resistant to the effects of conscious, religion and morality.
The presence of good will always have a positive effect on the bulk of society and there is a guilt component that goes along with it.
Being rich or poor has nothing to do with how good or moral one is, it's the exposure and belief in goodness and morality that matters.

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When I was a kid we all either had a gun or knew where we could get one, yet nobody shot anybody and mass killings were unheard of.

  • 1933 Kansas City Massacre; four Federal law enforcement officers shot returning a fugitive to custody.
  • 1934 Kelayres Massacre; five people killed in a politically motivated shooting in Pannsylvania.
  • 1945 Utah POW Massacre; U.S. soldier guarding German prisoners in Utah kills nine of them and wounds twenty others.
  • 1965 Michael Clark shootings; Sixteen year old uses military style rifle to kill three people and wound 10 others along highway 101 in California.
  • 1966 Texas Tower Sniper; Charles Whitman used numerous weapons including an M1 Carbine to shoot 49 people; 16 of them fatally.
  • 1968 Orangeburg Massacre; Nine South Carolina police officers fired into a crowd protesting the Vietnam War killing three and wounding 27.

I could obviously go on, but this sufficient to establish that "when we were kids" (whatever generation that might be), mass killings by either criminals or law enforcement were NOT "unheard of". The fact we might not be familiar with our own history or may have forgotten it doesn't mean it didn't happen.
 
  • 1933 Kansas City Massacre; four Federal law enforcement officers shot returning a fugitive to custody.
  • 1934 Kelayres Massacre; five people killed in a politically motivated shooting in Pannsylvania.
  • 1945 Utah POW Massacre; U.S. soldier guarding German prisoners in Utah kills nine of them and wounds twenty others.
  • 1965 Michael Clark shootings; Sixteen year old uses military style rifle to kill three people and wound 10 others along highway 101 in California.
  • 1966 Texas Tower Sniper; Charles Whitman used numerous weapons including an M1 Carbine to shoot 49 people; 16 of them fatally.
  • 1968 Orangeburg Massacre; Nine South Carolina police officers fired into a crowd protesting the Vietnam War killing three and wounding 27.

I could obviously go on, but this sufficient to establish that "when we were kids" (whatever generation that might be), mass killings by either criminals or law enforcement were NOT "unheard of". The fact we might not be familiar with our own history or may have forgotten it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

You're taking the phrase "unheard of" a bit too literally. It doesn't mean "never, ever happened in recorded history". Your list covers 35 years and includes a military incident in WWII and a shooting by / of police officers, none of which are the type of random shooting under discussion. If you have to work that hard for examples I think it's fair to say that mass shootings were certainly far, far, FAR more infrequent than they are today, certainly rarer enough to validate my point that access to guns was NOT a primary cause.
 
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This one happened when I was a kid:

Kent State University, 1970.

Four killed, nine wounded. By the Ohio National Guard.

Which probably doesn't count. For some reason.

But it DOES show that similar problems existed at least that far back, with respect to government shootings of civilians.
 
When one looks back to the past, it always seems that at the time people always think that what they are experiencing is the worse civil unrest, or criminal behavior that ever happened, an that things were never as bad.
If you go back to the 60's -70's or before that to the 30's and 40's, Pre war, or the 1700's or 1800's we have always had times in our history, when we were tested. This is just one of those times. About every 20 years, something shakes society, it may be different, but that doesn't make it unique.
If we go back to the Crusades, people were fighting for hundreds if not thousands of years over religious freedom.
It's just the latest form of a never ending battle, Which will probably go on as long as man lives.
Look at the Civil War, we couldn't even agree amongst ourselves on the issues at the time. Would we ever think that brother would kill brother? I believe it's in our predatory nature, and unless we evolve to a point where we breed that character out of humanity, it will continue to present itself until the end of time in one form or another.
Gun laws will never stick at this point in time, and unless the next President wants to start more civil disobedience than the is now, they probably know that.
By the time the next President takes office, the majority of the Country will have a firearm. It is very Naïve to think that they are all going to give them back to some authoritarian government. Just the attempt at enforcement would totally throw the country into chaos, and possibly start a second civil war, I just can't imagine Police or Military going house to house looking for guns, there simply aren't enough people to do this, or enough who agree with the policy, "should it occur".
 
We should emphasize to fence sitters that the target should be violence, not this obsession with guns, and citable sources from sources that are not perceived as gun rights advocates can help persuade the fence sitters that gun control is not the answer to the problems that concern them.

Another good argument that we can use by tying into recent events. Antis fixate on modern rifles ignoring the publically available data from the FBI UCR showing that more people are punched and kicked to death than killed with all types of rifles (not just the ones inaccurately blasted into our homes by the news). The UCR shows more people are bludgeoned to death with blunt instruments than killed with rifles or that bladed tools are used in more deaths than rifles. We need to be able to point these facts out trying to get people to question why rifles appear to be an obsession with Antis and the news media when they're used in fewer homicides than blunt objects or hands and feet. If we can get people to question why these facts are being ignored we can get them to question the very veracity of the people trying to make them believe that they're somehow in danger. Remind them that fear mongers are interested in getting them to do what they want them to do and it might be something other than what they say when the facts don't add up.
 
We want to believe that the past was the good old days, but the data doesn't support it.

Mass killings just weren't spewed out of the screen every 30 minutes. Video with voice has much more emotional impact than black ink on a newsprint page. Combine the two with our tendency to want instant information more than factually accurate information and we have the problem of making people feel that days gone by were better than they were and better than today.

The frequency of random mass murders is up, but we also see cycles in the occurrences where we see copycats responding to the modern news cycle playing a role in the decision to become infamous. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XV4mZi3gYDgwx5PrLwqqHTUlHkwkV-6uy_yeJh3X46o/edit#gid=0

Homicides are down from the 80's (10.2/100,000 population in 1980) and first half of the 90's (9.8 in 1991), but the 80's were up from the 60's (~5) so the frequency of homicides in the 80's and 90's were really bad to the public and officials looking back. Now we have a homicide rate that is even less (4.5 in 2014) than the 60's.
 
If logic worked on the anti-gun group, they wouldn't be antis.

They're not the ones we're applying it to. It is the greater number of people that make up the voting public that the antis are manipulating that we are trying to reach. The more they question the facts of the Antis the more they question the motives of the Antis.
 
Is the world more violent, or are we more Informed? Maybe the "problem" has been there all along, but as a society we didn't have the communications we have today such as cell phone cameras and world wide Web. Only my oppinion, but the information age may have changed the way we look at things.
 
Is the world more violent, or are we more Informed? Maybe the "problem" has been there all along, but as a society we didn't have the communications we have today such as cell phone cameras and world wide Web. Only my oppinion, but the information age may have changed the way we look at things.

We've puzzled over that one as well. In the era of an otherwise isolated horrendous event a thousand miles away being repeatedly reported on every 30 minutes as if it had occurred right in your home town with greater and greater gore and drama to get your eyes and clicks on the news vendor it is difficult to remember that the emotional feed is intended to get your attention for sponsor dollars instead of actually informing you.
 
I wonder? If they could identify the 50 most likely killers, instead of paying them why not just take them out of society forever
 
Sarge,

The 50 highest potential killers AND getting convictions is different from identifying the suspects. If the problems were simple enough for simple solutions then they wouldn't be much of a problem.
 
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