“On March 5, 2016, Temple Beth Elohim’s Youth Community hosted an event to build community, raise awareness, and take action against gun violence,” the caption under this video informs. “Over 90 teens attended, eager to make a difference. As part of the programming at Club BELY, teens did research and made this video. Millions of people are affected each year by gun violence. We encourage you to watch this video and use it as an inspiration to lower the numbers and save lives.” Oy vey. As the antis feel free to distort the truth and make sh*t up, do the facts about guns matter?
If facts were not on our side, I would not be pro gun.
Look at it this way: do you really want a bunch of easily swayed emotional kool aid drinkers as your base? Or do you want people who came to your side after weighing the facts and coming to a logical conclusion? I know which ones I want.
Given that elections matter, I want both.
Every vote counts the same: 1 vote = 1 vote.
True fact: Ten out of ten people die.
Take Action! Post on Fakebook! I’d like to see the same test they did with the younger kids, ya know put a gun in a room and see what happens with the older kids.
“did research” = “went to the Moms Demand Action website”
Or one of bloomie’s websites, or Wikipedia, or New York times.
All you have to do to get these Jewish kids to reconsider is let them spend a summer in Israel. After they experience there first terrorist attack their attitude about guns will do a 180.
And yet there are anti-gun, pro-terrorist Isrealis…
Experience counter to their chosen reality means nothing idealogs.
Every vote counts the same: 1 vote = 1 vote.
Ideologies are not interested in reality. Utopia is their fantasy.
Spellchecker error: Ideologues not ideologies.
Facts matter to the intellectually honest. The others make them up as they go along.
I rather adults, who feed these lies to say statistically your murder, rape or assault does not matter in the quest to remove guns from our country. Tell them it happens to other people so you need not be concern with lawfully protecting yourself. Be a victim and further our unjust cause.
Facts must matter, because we’ve come a long, long way in the last couple decades with the facts on our side.
The facts do matter, because they can fool some of the people, some of the time, but they aren’t fooling nearly so many now…
Looks like comments aren’t disabled?
Lets pick this apart a bit.
11X more likely to die by guns than who? I would suggest going to Mexico, Brazil or similar places and trying that theory. I doubt it will pass muster.
90% is a highly disputed figure. Get a group of say 20 people together and see if you can get 90% of them them to agree on where to eat dinner, much less about a hot topic debate like this.
http://crimeresearch.org/2013/12/remember-those-claims-that-80-to-90-of-americans-wanted-the-senate-background-check-bill-to-pass-well-it-was-clearly-wrong/
7 “children” shot under 20 also includes teenaged gang bangers. The amount of children who die accidentally due to firearms is similar to the number who drown in pools. The death of a young person is a tragedy, but in many of these cases the tragedy started long before they were ever shot. Perhaps we should worry about gang violence not gun violence.
1/5 children has witnessed a shooting? There are 74 million plus children in the US according to a 30 second google search. That means that over 14 MILLION children have witnessed a shooting?
The “22 times more likely” survey is pure junk science. Not only is the sample size so small it is insignificant the number of Defensive gun uses is skewed because it only counts justifiable homicides vs incidents where a firearm is used defensively but not fired.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/03/bruce-w-krafft/lies-damned-lies-and-washington-ceasefires-statistics/
If you are not black and in a gang, your odds of being murdered by a firearm go down about 70%. Maybe life choices and culture have some play in this. As a point of reference obesity kills over ten times as many people daily and that’s a conservative estimate probably. We’d be worried about cheese burgers except the news headlines are far less dramatic.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/heavy-burden-obesity-may-be-even-deadlier-thought-6C10930019
Suicide is not a gun related issue by its self. Other countries such as Korea and Japan have very strict firearms laws and much much higher suicide rates than the US. Japan has forests where people go to kill themselves, and it has a problem of people jumping in front of trains. Countries such as Australia and Canada that have implemented gun control have a drop in gun suicides but an overall similar suicide rate due to other forms becoming more popular.
Think for yourself. Question Authority.
“1/5 children has witnessed a shooting?”
Let’s pick that further apart.
All 3 of my kids have witnessed a ton of shootings. Every time we went to the range.
You forgot this one “Millions of people are affected each year by gun violence”
(These numbers are very rough, but a good way to get within an order of magnitude)
30k total deaths, inc a few hundred accidental, 18k suicide/12k homicide, so there is a direct number to start with. “affected” is nebulous, but lets go with nuclear family to start, so now we are at 120k. Circle of friends and secondary family, maybe 20 so now we are at 600k. We would need to say that each death “affected” 33 people just to get to 1m, and obviously double that to get to 2m, and be able to reasonably say “millions” each year.
You forgot to define “gun violence.” It doesn’t just mean deaths. To antis, it means every time some hoplophobe wet their pants at the sight of a gun.
Multiply the 12,000 deaths due to homicide by seven or eight, and you get to an approximation of the number of people shot (either as the intended victim or more usually as a bystander) but who survived. That number is rarely mentioned, but is valid in this context. The true cost of “gun violence” (or gang violence to be more accurate) is the tens millions of dollars spent to provide medical care to these mostly indigent victims.
Good point. I fell into the anti trap of it only counts (for dgu’s) if there is a body.
I am one of those millions affected by gun violence. Every few days, some loudmouth nutbar starts yelling nonsense about supposed “gun violence”, and it often makes me want to puke. See? I am affected. Claim is meaningless.
The person who replied to me put a link to Brady’s web site as where they got their facts. Authoritatively the answer to this question is no.
Speaking of facts: Is TTAG going with the more ad’s, less content business model?
Seems there about half as many posts these days……
Half as many posts is a good thing, provided they use their extra free time time to improve quality by proofreading and editing.
If bloggers in general would put an article in the queue and let someone else proofread it before it sees the light of day, it would be a great improvement to the blogosphere.
I can tell you that as a “conservadox” Jew, Reform Jews with their guitar-welding cantors and gilded bat-mitzvahs are about as close to Judiasm as Taco Bell is to Mexican Food.
Reform Jews don’t worship G-d. They worship liberalism. They skim the surface of Judaism as “culturally Jewish’ so they can pretend to not be white people and get the in-jokes of a Woody Allen film.
These are not my people.
Take action by posting on social media… Sigh… Don’t set the bar too high, otherwise we cannot pass out participation awards.
But, no trophies. Trophies are rasicst. If you disagree, clearly, it’s because you’re racist.
The problem is these kids probably have no knowledge of basic statistics or causality or research, yet. Give them that and then see what happens. Until then it’s just the blind leading the blind on parade.
YouTube comments are NOT disabled on this video. I would hope gun owners and pro Constitution peeps would leave a courteous comment disputing their “facts”.
Facts trump feelings. It’s called reality, and I dig it. Tend to make most of my decisions based on facts. Love to debate stuff… facts help until you get hit with my favorite inarguable non-sequitur: “I just don’t believe that.” You’re done when they say those words, because they are now talking feelings.
In the end, facts matter.
The question, in the end, is one of timescale: how long can belief in falsehood persist before that belief is unsustainable? And how much damage happens before that occurs?
If you choose to not believe in gravity, for instance, and pull a Wile E. Coyote off the Burj Dubai, you’ll have around 13 seconds (not counting air resistance) to persist in your disbelief before it kills you. But not a lot of damage until that time.
On the other hand, persistent cultural beliefs can last for generations and cause untold damage during that time. The belief that, for instance, people shouldn’t be accountable for their actions is obviously not sustainable over the long term, but an initially wealthy society can support the façade for a while before collapse. And a lot of people will get hurt along the way.
Facts are important, but rarely affect decision making in humans. We need to have a better story to share than the gun control opposition.
No, facts are entirely unimportant in the context of the gun banning debate. To prove it, all you have to do is go to any committee hearing on any anti-gun bill proposed int he California Legislature. If the bill results in fewer guns available for sale, fewer gun dealers available to sell, fewer “assault weapons” on the streets, higher costs all around from licensing and security fees, and promote a gun-fr3ee utopia, it will pass, facts being unnecessary to validate the end goal desired..
Numbers are wonderful things. You carry an unlimited number of them right there in your ass and you’re free to pull them out anytime you need them.
The relevant adage is “(i)t is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
A credible argument cannot be built on emotion. Full stop. You cannot have a rational discussion-let alone reach a logical conclusion-about anything if emotion is given a say in the matter. In that sense, facts absolutely matter.
Unfortunately, facts aren’t going to reach the vast majority of the people who have already identified as anti-gun. These people have fetishized-anthropomorphized, even-an inanimate object. It’s no longer about rational thought; they have an emotional investment in this cause, and the thing-the firearm itself as well as the cause it represents-takes on this quasi-religious nature that is essentially undefeatable.
Any threat, be it real or imagined, to the sanctity of their beliefs kicks them into what amounts to a positive feedback loop of emotional masturbation and virtue signaling. The very foundation of their thought process is fundamentally unsound. It’s basically an adult spin on “I know you are but what am I.”/”Lalala I can’t HEAR you!”
For those on the fence, facts are going to be weighed against their own experiences and the subjective opinions of friends, family, the news media, etc. As I see it, which side they cross over to is ultimately dictated by their critical thinking abilities and the data they’re exposed to-i.e. if all they see is the “GUNS BAD” garbage on the news, they’re liable to buy it hook, line, and sinker.
On the other hand, if someone puts actual numbers in front of a fence sitter of reasonable intellect and presents that data in a sane, logical fashion, the anti-gun movement doesn’t have a chance. Which is why they seize every possible opportunity to exaggerate and reinforce their narrative while trying their best to exclude credible, hard data from the argument.
Well I’ve done my part and taken a lot of action; bolt action, single action, double action. Took all that action out to the range this morning and I can tell you I’m gonna sleep great tonight knowing I did my part.
I’m all about taking action against gun violence – with support weapons if possible, by direct return fire if not.
Just stick to the fax. Facts have been such an overwhelming winner for you, so far. I mean, we in the gun sense movement have a terrible mountain to climb. I mean, there must be at least 75% of the public (and voters) who support virtually unlimited freedom for people to own and carry firearms. But all social justice “wins” were done because people’s emotional center was energized to right obvious wrongs. So it is with guns.
We will redouble our efforts to win over the vast majority of the populace who let facts sway their decisions. Who let facts stand in the way of doing the right thing. Eventually, emotion will prevail. So go ahead, depend on your precious facts (all the better for our side; makes you overconfident, lazy, satisfied). I trust the hearts of people to ultimately make the changes society needs in order to have a brighter, safer future for everyone.
Using emotion bare of facts to “right obvious wrongs” has a nasty tendency to result in equal or even greater “wrongs”. BTW, why do you call yourself the “gun sense movement” if you rely on emotion rather than intellect (ie “sense”)? Just more of the deception that is the very life-blood of your ‘movement”?
– why do you call yourself the “gun sense movement”
Because it just makes sense that if guns were taken completely out of circulation, there would be incredibly fewer deaths due to the use of guns. And it is just moronic for people who crave guns to say that if there are less guns, there will be more gun violence. What gun violence exists exists among the “law abiding gun owners” will continue at its current rate because we haven’t yet come up with the right emotional campaign to force lawmakers and police to launch gun confiscations in places where the majority of gun violence among the non law abiding clusters. First we get the “good” guns away from the public (because it is less difficult to deal with law abiding people), then we mount the effort to take on the really tough population. Don’t expect a campaign to engage everything, everywhere, at the same time. Small steps, small steps until you can focus on the last holdouts.
“Don’t expect a campaign to engage everything, everywhere, at the same time. Small steps, small steps until you can focus on the last holdouts.”
‘Nudge’ as a political strategy in action championed by Saul Alinsky, author of ‘Rules for Radicals’.
We are also using that strategy, gun rights are ascendant in America.
Concealed guns nearly everywhere and vastly larger numbers of guns in circulation while ‘gun violence’ has dropped by half since its peak.
Good thing we have the facts and Constitutional protection on our side…
“Good thing we have the facts and Constitutional protection on our side…”
Yeah, that “facts” thing resulted in an overwhelming public approval of private gun ownership, like maybe 53 to 47; well withing margin of error. But, OK, facts always win the social argument. Emotion never carries the day. That constitution thing can be handled (and it already is in so many places). Every day, the “emotional” argument gets one or two major retail brands to restrict gun presence, or at least publicly announce to customers the retailer “would prefer” no guns, all people feel safe and secure while visiting the retailer.
We of the gun sense recognize a losing campaign when we see one. Woe is us. All the pro unrestricted gun rights crowd has to do is sit back, open a beer and just wait on it.
Thank you for making my point. If you take away the “good guns” because emotionally it is “the right thing to do” you open the door to the “killing fields”–which makes even the gun-toting gang bangers look like pikers. And voila’ : “solving” a problem with purely emotion-based actions has created an even bigger problem. But you guys just keep on operating on the basis of your “feelings”, you aren’t actually out to solve any problems anyway, you just want to make yourselves feel morally superior.
There is no evidence that gun violence in the hardcore criminal element will increase at all, or by very much if non-criminal/gang people do not possess guns. And even if there was a slight uptick, your side already loudly announced that at least up to 500 new deaths would be statistically insignificant. So, if 500 or so innocent lives lost to negligent gun use is cause to improve gun handling safety, then an additional 500 or so people dead (whether they are all members of the bad element, some members, all innocents, some innocents), the rise in gun deaths due to criminal behavior would have to be more than 500 above whichever benchmark year you want to use since 2010.
The idea that there would be blood in the streets if non-criminals did not have guns does not play out. Was there blood running in the streets in “nice neighborhoods” in the 1990s? The 1980s?
The potential, speculated, lacking-evidence cry that somehow innocent people will be slaughtered if not for guns has no basis. Remove guns from non-criminals, and you have criminals remaining. We agree on that. What I also presented was the need for lawmakers and police to invade the domain of the criminal gangs and groups to forcefully take away those guns.
There will always be a black market, but the more guns removed, the higher the price for a black market of guns, the fewer available. But even if we don’t address the criminal element, the deaths, robberies, etc will not result in a statistically significant rise in crimes against the otherwise law abiding.
Actually you make some pretty good arguments if you don’t mind living in a police state so you can feel safe (except from the police and the state, of course). But you do ignore the evidence from countries where your wet dreams have been implemented (England, Australia) which have in fact seen significant upticks in crime, violent and otherwise.
Where did I mention living in a police state? If you do not live in a high-crime area, your safety generally would not change with gun confiscation. There would be no police knocking on your door (metaphorically) every day to search for guns. In high-crime areas, a police state might need to exist until the crime rate goes below, say, 5%. Given the total US population, and the population of gun toters, it is not privately carried guns that are keeping the crime rate falling (there simply are not enough concealed guns to make a difference on the whole). Where are the thousands of interviews of former criminals who stopped being criminals because they feared armed citizens?
“if guns were taken completely out of circulation, there would be incredibly fewer deaths due to the use of guns.”
If you took planes out of the sky and cars off the streets, there would be incredibly fewer deaths from accidents and crashes.
Take away legal firearms and all you’re left with is illegal ones. Also criminals with pointy objects wouldn’t be worried about getting shot when they try to rob or rape those that are smaller and weaker.
Please read my comments carefully. I noted that once the so-called legal guns were removed (a tough job in itself), then politicians and lawmakers have no excuse for not taking-on the criminal element with a campaign to remove guns from the toughest districts, by force if necessary. Question: how many reports have you seen where someone tried to rob a bank, a grocery store, or whatever, using something other than a gun? Are non-gun weapons a statistically significant sub-group of armed robbery/assault attempts? Yes, criminals will always find weapons, even guns, but just because something is not 100% perfect is no reason to not try to get there.
I already asked, but here it is again….how many arrested criminals have been deterred by the possibility their intended victim would be armed with a gun (or any sort of weapon)? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. But your side is absolutely convinced that having a gun somehow translates directly into deterrence of crime (which rate declines almost every year, for some reason or reasons, undetermined).
If you stay out of circumstances most likely to result in an attack, your chances of being attacked become statistically quite small, even less likely that 20yrs ago, when gun ownership was lower than to day. Fact: if I apply the frequency of an incident to the entire population, I get one rate. If applied to a sub-set, I get another. If the number of crimes are spread across the population count of the nation, I get one rate. If the number of crimes is spread across a sub-set that lives in low crime districts, I get a different rate. In short, look at the likelihood of crime in low crime areas, identify the population of those low-crime areas, then see what the rate of crime is. The result would be that the likelihood of crime in low crime areas becomes statistically insignificant (unless the number of armed attacks is above 500 per year, then maybe it would be significant). Your group is fond of “Stupid people, doing stupid things, in stupid places”. Don’t be stupid, and your chance of needing to defend yourself with a gun drops to almost nothing.
If. Should. Would. Ought. Could.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
For being on the supposed inevitable winners’ side 2asux sure does waste a lot of time over here whining at people. You think once guns are banned he’ll turn his concern tyranny on the scourge of food borne illness that kills about 3000 people a year,and be all for dragging off people for preparing raw oysters and sunny side up eggs?
Once guns are banned (or very much more tightly controlled), it will be time to push the politicians to get serious about eliminating the threat of sanctuaries for truly criminal people. Once we get the guns out of the hands of non-criminals, politicians can no longer use gun control as an excuse for not wiping-out the criminal element in so many large urban areas. It will be time to declare true war people who prey mostly on the poor. Once you eliminate all the excuses, then you can hold politicians accountable for not making cities and towns safe from criminals.
I spend some time here because it is useful to read what the pro-gun crowd spends time on. I would spend even more time here (because there are some here who seem open to reason), but being a community organizer takes more effort and resources than you might imagine. It ain’t for sissies.
“Community organizer”? I don’t believe it for a second, I’m deciding you are just trolling a bit.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion. When I go to meet with clubs and affinity groups who are concerned about the run-away proliferation of guns in private hands, and they ask me what they can do, and I give them the information to make their voices heard, I consider that organizing a community. Moms, Gun Sense, Eliminate Gun Violence, etc are “communities” that took action to change their condition. So maybe “Community Educator” would be a better descriptor.
Again with “troll”. The meaning of that word is singular…any one whose opinion in an online forum does not comport with your particular prejudices. At least I give you guys the respect that your statements here are actually your positions.
Haha. I laughed at this – thanks. Laws should definitely be based on emotion – not facts. Haha. Thanks man.
I made it to 1:13 in the video. From what I saw in that long minute of my life that was waisted, no facts do not matter to some people.
Sad. The children of that temple should listen to the third verse of Zog Nit Keynmol, the Partisans’ Song, in the original words. They might learn something. Mit Naganes in di hend (with a Nagant in the hand).
“Millions of people are affected each year by gun violence.”
My educated guess, based on research and statistics, is that most of these peoples’ lives were preserved by common peoples’ right to bear arms. So most of those “affected” were of a positive nature.
One of my masters is in media communication and I have long been very interested in this topic. There is a “dangerous trio” at work here: Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. They are really three dimensions of that same thing. We live in a world of contradictions, big and small. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort people feel when their beliefs and the facts don’t match up. Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are ways of coping with that. Confirmation bias is when people tend to believe facts that support their beliefs and discount or ignore those that don’t. Motivated reasoning is similar. That describes people’s tendencies to put arguments that agree with their beliefs under much less scrutiny than those arguments that don’t.
The thing is, we all fall victim to these factors, in some ways, whether we realize it or not. The bottom line for the POTG is that to get people to agree with our facts, we must first change their hearts and minds. I think that is where we don’t do as good a job as the anti-gunners. They go for hearts and minds and then feed those hearts and minds BS facts, which they believe because they want to. We hit them with true facts, but we don’t have their hearts and minds, so they don’t believe us. It’s something we need to get better at.
Apparently one of your own who gets it. Fortunately, it is only one voice amidst the clamor. Not a threat to those seeking common sense solutions to violence where a gun is used (’cause ya’ll really never learn).
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