As Breitbart first reported yesterday, a Bloomberg School of Public Health (heh) study has found that “assault weapon” bans do nothing — zero, zip, zilch, nada — to stop mass shootings. It must have been difficult for the school’s primary gun control advocate, Daniel Webster, to approve publication of that press release.
But Webster did as much as possible to bury that information. The finding appeared near the end of an announcement of the study, long after the part where they claim that gun buyer licensing laws and “large capacity” magazine bans reduce mass shootings.
Here’s the sentence that must have given Webster a bad case of indigestion . . .
…the study did not find an independent association between assault weapon bans and the incidence of fatal mass shootings after controlling for the effects of bans on large-capacity magazines.
But then there was also this . . .
The study did not find significant associations between the incidence of fatal mass shootings and concealed carry laws, comprehensive background check laws without licensing requirements, or firearm prohibitions for violent misdemeanor convictions and domestic violence restraining orders. Although researchers did not find a clear association between firearm restrictions for domestic abusers and reduced fatal mass shootings, other research has shown these laws do reduce intimate partner homicides.
Gosh, this should change everything! No one is going to claim that the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School is in the pocket of the the gun industry. Even the gun-grabbing community doesn’t have the stones to try to make the case that they’re spinning the study’s results to go easy on firearms owners.
We already know that rifles (of any kind) only account for about 3% of all homicides in this country. And ARs and other scary-looking versions are a fraction of that small number.
So we’re good, right? With the Bloomberg School’s results and the fact that these kinds of guns are rarely used in any crimes, let alone mass shootings, we can do away with the “assault weapons” bans in California, New York, Maryland and other states, right?
Dream on.
The push to disarm Americans is a never-ending effort, one that is assiduously and stubbornly fact-free. That ARs constitute only a handful of the crimes committed every year and banning them doesn’t impact mass shootings won’t matter to the Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex one whit.
They are committed to reducing the number of firearms in civilian hands in the United States any way they can. And the low-hanging fruit in that gun-grabbing battle — the type of guns that is easiest to demonize and scare non-gun owners into opposing — is the one they’ve spent so much time dishonestly disparaging as “assault weapons” and “weapons of war.”
Does anyone really think that an ignorant know-nothing like Virginia’s Mark Levine will withdraw his “assault weapons” ban bill from consideration in because of findings like these? Will Maryland’s House Speaker Adrienne Jones pull HB 1261?
As if.
No, the fight to defend and extend the right to keep and bear arms is a never-ending one. Gun rights opponents aren’t about the let little things like facts get in the way of making it as difficult, expensive, or outright illegal to own as many types of firearms as they possibly can.
Its a shame that nobody in the debate tonight is likely to challenge him on this.
I could swear I heard something like that from the FBI.
More likely you heard it from the DOJ and the CDC (after a report prepared at Obama’s request).
Yup. John Lott read the research. It’s on his web site: The Crime Prevention Resource Center.
I’ve had a hard day and I just can’t make myself think of Bloomberg right now so here’s a totally OT question for the machine gun aficionados and historians.
I just sat down and read my email. Apex has 1919 L3A3 parts kits and the example has a “Border cities Ind, Ltd” mfgr stamp on it. I thought I knew all the contractors who made guns during the war but I’ve never heard of this company and there’s not squat on the web except a few pictures of other MG’s with that makers stamp.
Literally like 4 web hits.
Anyone ever heard of this company?
Sorry, I couldn’t find anything about that company. I looked at the APEX ad and noticed that the Original “Browning” makings were lined out and the new name was then struck. I had something similar many years ago. It was a Reising Model 50 that was “torch cut” to deactivate it and was then restruck with a new manufacturing name.
Canadian subsidiary of GM that made them for Commonwealth countries.
Awesome. I’ll see what I can dig up in Canada.
Thanks.
Aah Hah!
From http://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/General%20Motors/gm-canada.htm
(This may be what you found – if so – nice work)
Border Cities plant in Windsor, ONT – This was a Canadian government owned plant managed by GM of Canada. Built in 1942, the plant produced Browning machine guns. The caliber of the weapons is not clear. Only one source states that the weapons were .50 caliber; other sources say do not give a caliber. Photos shown below in the “The Motor Car Industry Makes Victory its Business” also do not reveal the caliber, claiming it is a government secret. There are no photos showing the actual finished product allowing the weapon to be identified as either a .50 or .303 caliber machine gun. The plant built 25,000 of the machine guns.
Gun control is a lie. It’s never been about keeping folks safe. It does the opposite. It makes those that cannot go hand to hand with a gang of thugs victims. Period. It makes the brutal and the strong lords of all they can rape and pillage.
Gun control and those that push it are at best, criminals. Their crimes are against humanity.
It is interesting to note that nobility and the knightly class were the first to find firearms offensive.
Not because they were so effective but because they were effective in the hands of just about anyone. The idea that a lowly commoner could unhorse/kill a knight, a noble knight (!!), with nearly no training and a handheld firearm was just… unseemly.
Blocked again. ARRRRGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am not going to bother trying to re write my blocked post. I will just list a few facts from before Thomas Jefferson was born.
In 1549, Oda Nobunaga ordered 500 matchlocks to be made for his armies as firearms could be manned effectively by farmers or non-samurai low-ranking soldiers. (Why the elitists fear an armed citizenry, Strych9 states)
The Japanese developed serial firing technique to create a continuous rain of bullets on the enemy. (so much for the anti2A musket argument.
In the year 1567, Takeda Shingen announced that “Hereafter, the guns will be the most important arms. Therefore, decrease the number of spears per unit, and have your most capable men carry guns.” (so much for the anti2A militia argument).
In the year 1584 Ikeda Sen led a troop of 200 women armed with firearms at the Battle of Komaki and Nagakute and in 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, rare example of Teppō unit, or musketeer unit consisting only of women. (so much for the white male supremacist argument).
I was unaware of portions of the Asian history you provided.
Thanks for those.
Firearms make women equal to men. Yet the feminazis preach against firearms. Convoluted world we live in.
I knew some of the asian history you talk about. I know that Swedish horse soldiers were trained to ride up in relays, discharge their pistols and then let the next relay take their place. Serial fire from I believe wheellocks.
Has anyone analyzed this paper in depth to see if their claims on standard capacity magazines have validity. The fact that they state standard capacity mags are associated with more fatalities doesn’t bode well for us. I already know a few WA legislators touting this study. I intend to go through it next week, but would like to know other’s thoughts. If you know stats and literature analysis like I do then please sound off.
Small sample size is the bugaboo. If you can find one homicide in Washington state in the last 20 years in which magazine size in a rifle was a major contributor please let me know. Of course since rifles kill fewer people every year in WA than the Skagit river does, it is a pretty small universe. In handguns, magazine size is immaterial as long as 80+%* of all homicides are gang/drug related. If your legislator brings up magazine capacity ask him or her to name 3 cases in the state in which that was important. It brings to mind a Parliamentary debate in England a number of years ago in which a PM was going on and on about second hand smoke killing thousands of children every year in England. An opposition member stood up and demanded: “Name one”. Silence. (They put in lots of restrictions on smoking anyway, because…..well, jeez, because).
*90% in Seattle according to the city’s own research
If you have a link to that 90% number, would you post it?
I spent some time trying to search for it, but I can’t find it.
I don’t doubt what you are saying, but I would love to show that to my state reps.
“Does anyone really think that an ignorant know-nothing like Virginia’s Mark Levine will withdraw his “assault weapons” ban bill from consideration in because of findings like these?”
“[I]gnorant know-nothing” True, but redundant. Just saying . . ..
Sadly, he is my elected representative in the Virginia House of Delegates.
Never let those pesky “FACTS” get in the way, the unwashed masses won’t understand them anyway…
The fight is not about facts, it is about feelz. John Stuart Mill explained 150 years ago that “so long as an opinion is strongly rooted n the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction, but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh entrenchments of arguments to repair any breach made in the old.”
In other words, the more evidence you throw in their face that they are wrong, them more they will dig in their heels. This is precisely why the “evil black rifle” argument is so successful: it relies on how “dangerous” the gun looks, how many bullets it holds, and how many people are wounded and killed when it is employed criminally. These attributes are scary, and scared people will do anything and everything to reduce their fear, no matter how unreasonable that fear is.
You can make it about facts but first you have to deal with the feelz.
A huge part of that is how we present ourselves to the people we need to win over. Increasingly it’s looking like that’s going to require a “whip” or we’re going to be forced to start burning our own at the proverbial stake.
” The fight is not about facts, it is about feelz. ”
I’m not arguing with this statement. But I have been pondering lately just what “the fight” is all about.
For a long time now I’ve been much puzzled over how much effort is going in to gun control. While it grabs our attention and focus on this website, in the wider population it is not all that much of an issue. The amount of money and political capital that goes in to the anti-gun crusade is far, far greater than the issue is actually worth. This is especially true from a return-on-investment perspective — the more the anti-gunners push the issue, the less of a return, politically speaking, they get. And yet, they continue to pour ever greater amounts of time and money in to disarming the public.
So, I gotta ask, why would anyone keep pouring resources into something which, on its face, is a losing proposition? We all know none of this has anything to do with public safety or the common good. We all know it’s about some kind of control. Well, that’s all pretty general, and control can be gotten is subtler and cheaper ways. In order to justify the expense, then, gun control has got to be not an end in itself, but an essential piece of a much grander, and perhaps more sinister plan. But what?
The best answer I can come up with is one-party control with a state-run economy — essentially the party platform of the Democratic Party. Everything they say and do points to a re-make of America into something along the Chinese model (which is itself starting fall apart).
Unfortunately, I can’t use this line of thinking when I get in to some absurd gun-control discussion without being accused of being a crazy conspiracy theorist (which is better, I guess, than being called a child killer, which has happened). But, crazy or not, conspiracy or not, that’s where I see “the fight” as being, something much wider than just “muh raghts” under the 2A. If we lose this one over the 2A, however, I think we lose everything else along with it.
Just some rattling thoughts from a (almost) septuagenarian brain. Discuss.
Life likes to imitate art; Often the best ‘hiding’ place is in plain sight, simply by hanging a lantern on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5GIaoRCQp4
Listen to Bloom’berg talk, do you believe he has any respect for the way people want to run their lives?
It was open knowledge he was a tiny tyrant, just how much was revealed this week, and he wants to be President.
The average citizen doesn’t see the man behind the curtain, nor do they necessarily much care. What they care about is feeling free of fear. Fear comes in many forms, fear of death, fear of being brutalized, raped, robbed, fear of the unknown, and mostly, fear of all of the things we cannot control. A mass shooting is one of the latter, it is unexpected and it is difficult if not impossible to defend against. A man with a gun is bad enough, but a man with “high powered assault weapon with a 30 round clip” is fear incarnate. When he starts shooting, all bets are off as to whether you will see tomorrow. That is what is being sold.
Just like sex, fear sells, and in fact has always sold throughout human history. Fear of eternal damnation was pretty popular not so many centuries ago, and when the power of that ploy wore off, it was replaced with fear of the other, fear of invasion, etc. etc. What fear buys is political power. So yes, there is a bigger picture behind the veil of all of this, a game for political hegemony, and if it takes fear to obtain and protect that hegemony, politicians promising freedom from fear will keep peddling their wares.
“For a long time now I’ve been much puzzled over how much effort is going in to gun control.”
Scalia explained this in his piece Common-Law Courts in a Civil-Law System.
One of many relevant quotes: “If courts are free to write the Constitution anew, they will, by God, write it the way the majority wants; the appointment and confirmation process will see to that. This, of course, is the end of the Bill of Rights, whose meaning will be committed to the very body it was meant to protect against: the majority.“ (emphasis mine).
This is all part of the game of creating a “Living” Constitution. That is, one that means whatever they say it means today, which is to say, whatever is convenient in the moment.
UpInArms,
Is it really a losing proposition? Especially in the long term?
Try this on for perspective:
(1) Today, thousands of laws restrict firearm ownership, storage, transfer, and possession in the United States, versus 130 years ago when there were at most a few dozen such laws.
(2) Democrats — the political party championing laws which unconstitutionally restrict our inalienable right to keep and bear arms — have maintained a virtual stranglehold on basically all urban population centers for the last, what, 70 years? And Democrats have controlled much of our nation’s state and federal legislatures, executive seats, and courts for the last 90+ years.
(3) There is no indication whatsoever of any significant trend of Democrats occupying fewer seats in local, state, and federal governments. In fact many people are projecting that Democrats will gradually increase the number of seats they occupy.
(4) Democrats rarely experience any significant loss of seats as a direct result of enacting laws which restrict firearm ownership. Sure, Democrats occasionally lose some seats. And they seem to recover them sooner or later.
When you look at all those FACTS, at best Democrats advancing firearm laws is neutral and at worst Democrats advancing firearm laws IS a winning proposition.
BREAKING! Mass shooting incident in Germany. So far 8 dead and 5 wounded.
Didn’t Obama say this only happens in the USA and never in enlightened Europe?
And what’s more Repugnant to the Constitutional,as repugnant as any petty tyrant who would propose one.
Expecting that dishonest people with an agenda are going to argue in good faith is a fools’ errand. So is assuming that the ignorant bulk of the public will do their homework and call out those dishonest people.
The reason this is as problematic as it is at this point is because we’ve been slacking. Regular maintenance keeps things pretty easy but we haven’t been doing that. We’ve been farming it out to people who didn’t give a shit and so we’ve fallen behind and must do the regular maintenance plus the catchup work.
We’re paying the steep price of that procrastination. And it sucks, but the choices are to pay the price or lose.
^ This!
Meanwhile in Vegas…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35cj7KHNTQY
So what importance have facts ever had to leftists?
Does anyone really believe that Stalin gave a shit that the Holodomor was caused by his attempt to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority?
Does anyone really believe that when the facts started rolling in that his policies claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population, that he cared about facts and said, “Oh crap, I fucked up, sorry!” No it was in no way a hinderance to advancing his plans. He told the Ukraine, “You fucked up and YOU could not keep up with production as I asked you to do.”
To make matters worse, as no leftists are ever wrong, it is always the other side’s fault, just ask the Hildebeast, Stalin used the grain shortfall as an excuse for even more intense anti-Ukrainian repression.
Wake up people, this is what is coming. I know; this is what I was running away from when I arrived here.
+ 1 Hannibal!
Countless people do not care about facts. They simply want what they want and demand it whether or not it is constructive or destructive, whether or not it is right or wrong.
The real danger comes in the fact that many/most such people have no timeless standards of right and wrong. History shows us without any doubt that such people always have and always will cover the planet — and will take over to do whatever they want if no one stops them.
Iz to think they are this, “Assault weepons ban no good, ban all gunms .” Iz proper way to reading dictatorship propaganda
In the 1980 film “The Shining” Stanley Kubrick used vague incongruities rather than overt shock to unsettle the viewer.
One of these incongruities was after the Torrances arrive at the Overlook hotel in their small VW Beetle, trolleys stacked with a large amount of their luggage are wheeled into the hotel. Obviously there was no room in the VW for this amount of luggage, so where did it come from? This incongruity wont even register with the average viewer, who if pressed would explain it away as having been shipped seperately by truck, or some other means. But that would be an unsatisfying answer to the incongruity.
All gun control arguments are incongruous, yet can still be explained away by those unsettled by reason.
Where’d this picture come from? The sights are backwards…HK is that you?
There’s only one reason why a government would willingly flood the country with illegal ALIENS and try to disarm the actual citizens of that government….
It really doesn’t take a genius to think about what happens in 20 years….. once the citizens are disarmed and the citizens are a minority in their own country….
It’s a soft coup… and you’d have to be FKN BLIND NOT TO SEE IT…… OUR GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN INFILTRATED…A SLOW INFILTRATION ALONG WITH DISARMAMENT AND SOFT GENOCIDE…..
C’MON PEOPLE, WAKE THE FK UP BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!!!!!!
Comments are closed.