Gun control is based on false premises - Excellent read

[WhiteFeather]

http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/160922

Gun control is based on false premises
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Bradford Wiles

Wiles is a graduate research assistant in the human development department at Virginia Tech.


A year has passed since the tragic events at Virginia Tech, and there are some assumptions upon which gun control is based that require investigation. Chief among them is the misplaced feeling that banning firearms somehow eradicates them.

When examining this notion, we can look for another example of a ban to give us a sense of the difference between banning and eradication. There are people in America known as illegal immigrants who are banned from being here. If the state cannot keep a person from coming into the country illegally, what possible hope does it have in banning a gun? What is to stop the illegal immigrant from bringing guns with him?

Contrary to gun control wishes, government bans do not equal eradication.

This leads to the next premise upon which gun control is based: Criminals obey the law. Compliance with laws is based on the honor system. Governments expect citizens to follow the law because they honor the society in which they live. The problem is, criminals do not honor the law.

Gun control advocates seem to believe that a criminal who is going to cause harm will not do so, not because murder is illegal, but because the gun he is going to use for murder is illegal. Gun control advocates expect, indeed require, criminals to respect and obey the law for their policy to work.

The third premise of gun control is based on faith in the police. The gun control position is that only the police should have guns. A central tenet of this position is that ordinary citizens do not need a gun because the police are there to protect you.

It was clear on April 16, 2007, that the police were nowhere to be found for more than nine minutes. When split seconds count, the police are long minutes away.

Even though police often arrive after a crime has been committed, the gun control slant is that police are highly trained professionals and thus know how to stop a violent criminal better than a law-abiding citizen with a gun.

A citizen does not need to be concerned about infringing on a criminal's rights and detaining the perpetrator, as required of the police. A citizen only needs to be able to defend him or herself. Often, just the knowledge that a victim is armed is enough to dissuade a criminal from continuing an assault.

Any number of highly trained professionals could be useful, but when they are not at the scene of the crime for minutes, an average citizen with a gun can be an effective counter to a violent attack.

Even more duplicitous is that the faith-in-the-police premise takes an utterly contrary turn when making the argument that they will not know whom to shoot when responding.

First, this position is spurious, as it has continually been shown that the police arrive after a crime has been committed, including here at Tech. Second, if they really were highly trained, wouldn't they know that the ones who are not pointing their guns at the police are not the criminals? Third, if given the choice between the possibility of being shot by the highly trained professional while shooting in self-defense and the certainty of being shot by an armed assailant while unarmed, I will choose the former every time.

Some have argued that even the First Amendment is not an absolute right, noting that one cannot shout "fire!" in a crowded theater. If we applied the same logic as the gun control argument, our mouths would be taped shut when we enter a theater because someone might yell "fire."

Those who would exercise their Second Amendment rights are subjected to prior restraint, and thus prevented from carrying their gun, because they might do something illegal with it.

Even with their flawed assumptions exposed, what is especially insidious is that gun control does not work. The results of their policies are abject failures. Whether in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, gun control does not work.

At Virginia Tech, gun control did not work.

Gun bans do not mean guns disappear. Criminals do not abide by the honor code. The police are not readily available to protect you. The Second Amendment declares an individual right to keep and bear arms.

These are truths that the gun control advocate disregards. Please consider the assumptions for their argument when deciding your own position.

[X-Man]

WhiteFeather; Excellent read indeed!! I just e-mailed my comments to Rep. Patrick Murphy with the website link to this editorial. Thank you for this info.

[Statkowski]

Better yet, e-mail it to Fast Eddy and Mayor Nutjob.

[Farbmeister]

ACT 120 certification is like a month of classes.. with maybe 40 hours for weapons. That includes baton and firearms.

In as little as a month you can be a cop. HIGHLY TRAINED MY ASS. State Troopers are much longer, but do much more.

I put more bullets on target in a month, probably a weekend than most cops do in their career. State troopers have to qualify shooting what, 40 -60 rounds? As a CO we just had to hit the paper. Even the edge where the printed the copyright for the target was a 'hit'.

The lie that we tell our children that cops are your friend and is here to help needs to end at about 13-15years... when Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny also get the heave-ho.

[Finleyville]

While I agree with the OP I also have to bring up another point. Many gun control proponents believe that ban laws help bring about another concerned reduction: accidental shootings. They believe that they can save people's lives from themselves by not allowing law abiding citizens to accidentally shoot themselves or others from negligence. Their biggest argument is children fatalities from guns.

[GunLawyer001]

I think the logic, to the extent that there is logic, is that fewer guns will mean less crime, the same way that fewer cars would translate into fewer car crashes, and fewer swimming pools would mean fewer accidental drownings. They think that every gun is evil, and every gun poses the same chance of harm to the innocent.

They would reduce the absolute number of guns in the hands of citizens and aliens within our borders, by making entire classes of guns illegal, or by enlarging the classes of prohibited persons, or by imposing Draconian barriers to purchases (pre-purchase permits for each gun, higher license fees, more unwarranted NICS rejections...). Instead of 500,000,000 guns in private hands (nobody knows how many we have, but let's say it's on that order), maybe there would be 5,000,000, a 90% reduction.

The fallacy of this is the assumption that reducing the absolute number of guns in the hands of citizens and aliens would proportionately reduce the number of guns in criminal hands. This is an unproven assumption. If a 500% tax were imposed on hammers, would it reduce the number of carpenters who own hammers? Obviously not, a hammer is a necessary tool of their trade, and they will do what it takes to obtain a hammer. Soccer moms would be deterred, apartment dwellers may find that they could get by without a hammer, but people who use hammers to make money will obtain hammers. Same with gang bangers and drug dealers and stalkers and troubled loners who want to take out their High School, they will obtain a gun somehow.

So instead of the 500 million guns distributed throughout society, we'd have 5 million guns concentrated in criminal hands. The non-criminals like you and me would be disarmed, except for the police, who have no legal duty or practical ability to protect each citizen from the army of armed thugs. How brain-dead does one have to be for this to seem like a good idea?

Cocaine and speed and pot are illegal in every State of the union. It's not like loose drug laws in Virginia are fueling the drug trade in DC and New York City. Yet somehow the drug dealers resupply the many tons per day of drugs that are consumed in the USA. Does anyone really believe that any level of gun control will keep guns away from the criminal market? Say we shut down S&W, Colt, Ruger, and every US gun manufacturer. Then some Chinese factory stops making Benneton knockoffs, and tools up to make revolvers instead, which are then smuggled in through Mexico by illegals. Would we be better off?

[Philadelphia]

ACT 120 certification is like a month of classes.. with maybe 40 hours for weapons. That includes baton and firearms.

It's 80 hours on firearms. Still not a whole lot but not exactly nothing for anyone with any prior firearms experience.

Whatever, that's not important.

What strikes me is something GunLawyer said not long ago that resonates. For every dangerous criminal a cop encounters, at least one citizen victim encountered that criminal first. More likely whole communities were vulnerable to that criminal.

Cops need guns to defend themselves. So does everyone else.