By LC Judas

Reading one of the posts at TTAG today, I had an epiphany. If gun grabbers claim that places like Chicago and California suffer from seepage of guns from other states that causes their crime rates to rise, then why do the places the guns originated from have lower crime rates? Here’s why: it doesn’t matter where a gun comes from. Chicago and California have higher rates of crime because those areas are more conducive to criminal activity. Slow police response (if any at all in certain areas of the South Side of the Windy City) and unarmed civilians make those places criminal-friendly zones. The laws there keep people who abide by them unarmed and helpless, but they don’t stop bad guys . . .

Criminalizing the ownership, use and carriage of firearms increases crime to those areas. It’s proven that an inability to resist criminals is what they seek when looking for a hunting ground. Chicago makes it so difficult to arm and defend yourself that criminals have no trouble finding victims. It’s a simple equation.

Marching on Capitol Hill will not stop criminals. Laws passed with emotional fervor and tears won’t stop criminals. Making law-abiding citizens into criminals will not stop criminals and actually creates MORE of them. Yet that’s exactly what’s being proposed in so many ways with new gun control legislation.

Is the math not clear? Law abiding gun owners aren’t part of the problem. They’re one of the elements of the solution. Trying to disarm millions with gun propaganda designed to smear firearms owners as unstable psychopaths and declaring that carrying a gun “escalates a situation” are ludicrous propositions. A situation where you need a gun is already a matter of life and death. I doubt anyone is worried about additional ire from their attacker at that time. It can’t escalate any higher and isn’t the fault of the victim. You don’t have a duty to care about or reason with someone who’s trying to harm you.

Many of the people arguing for more gun control laws are asking for “real solutions” but don’t seem to understand that there’s not – and never will be – a substitute for lethal force when lives are at stake. The main reason that police are effective at all is that they’re armed and travel in groups. It’s standard procedure for any call with any possibly armed threat.

Bloodshed is not stopped with words, declarations or edicts. Not even the presence of badges stops bloodshed. The imminent threat of bodily harm and inflicting said bodily harm is all that there is, has been and will be when faced with people bent on harming others senselessly. If there was another solution then calling the police wouldn’t be needed.

There’s no reason to deny the innocent the ability to protect themselves to the best of their ability. No matter how many people claim women on the whole can’t use guns to prevent rape, no matter how many people claim that weapons need limitations, none of it is justifiable. It only takes away from the fact that bad people hurt good people. Guns don’t make good people go bad, or bad people any worse. They’re the only thing that a good person can count on when faced with a deadly threat. Begging won’t work and police rarely arrive in time. When seconds count, it feels like an eternity. I wouldn’t force that on anyone but taking away weapons in common use claiming its commonsense is exactly what that leads to.

You can’t decrease the lethality of a gun. You can’t strip it of features, lower its ammunition capacity, pad it with foam and declare it safe for the masses. That only makes it less effective but still just as lethal because bullets cause trauma wounds that cause organ failure, exsanguination and nervous shutdown to ultimately kill whomever it’s fired at. They have done that since the invention of the musket and will not change anytime soon.

Certain firearms do it more often than others. Any firearm fired at someone can do it. That’s why they’re useful to those who serve and protect, why only state of the art firearms are used by security personnel protecting politicians and why we as citizens (because everyone is a citizen) deserve access to the best. Trying to legislate firearms advances back a century or so won’t make this country any safer. It will only make armed self defense less effective by forcing the law abiding to use inferior tools. It won’t stop criminals, it will only impede those bound by the law who choose to comply. Which will not be cops, soldiers, politicians and their security details, or criminals. Just your average citizen.

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53 COMMENTS

    • I made up two charts a few months back, each having four squares with opinions as to high/low homicide levels in high/low civilian disarmament areas. Empirically, this is tricky to explain. Rationally, “gun control” is nonsense. I have yet to enter responses to the following into a spreadsheet, but it would be nice.

      Chart A is the disarmament person’s explanation of:
      1. many homicides in low legislation populations and few homicides in high legislation populations (which does not require explanation)
      2. few homicides in low legislation populations and many homicides in high legislation populations (for which they do have some rational explanations)

      Chart B is the non-disarmament person’s explanation of:
      1. the same as above (and there are indeed rational explanations)
      2. the same as above (which does not require explanation, especially amongst this crowd)

      If we rely on rational arguments or simple empirical arguments, the grabbers will just drown people (who have low attention spans) in countless, essentially redundant examples of the same limited empirical arguments for the effectiveness of gun legislation.

      Being well versed in contrary explanations of these statistics gives one an instant simple argument against whatever their simple argument of the moment happens to be.

  2. Once again, we make the mistake of projecting logic upon our opposition.

    Ultimately the foundation of “Homo Hoplophobicus” is emotional in nature. They employ facts and stats to present the appearance of legitimacy, but when their stats and cooked polls fail it falls back to “I feel guns are too dangerous”.

    This is why Chicago is the lawless town it is. The citizens fear taking arms to defend themselves more then they fear being killed in a criminal act.

    • Unfortunately I don’t deal in much other than logic. Does not mean it will take hold but at the same time I’m not finding that one can’t do much else. I’m not going to devolve to shouting and name-calling. If enough facts are out there eventually it’ll make a solid enough ground to push the irrational agenda back a notch or two.

      That’s what I imagine most of us are betting on. What else can we bet on? The emotional connection of a grandmother defending herself with a gun? As heartwarming as it is, no one seems to really bond with the idea and as horrible as it is I severely doubt anyone not closely related to her would care if that home invasion had went south for the resident. The Gun Control Lobby would use it as ammunition if she had been victimized with her own gun just like we use it as ammunition that she prevented crime to her home and person with her own gun.

      If logic won’t work what else can we try?

  3. There is another elephant in the room when it comes to gun violence. Most of the gun violence in LA has and will continue to be in SOuth Central and the far east counties (where the gang-bangers were paroled in the 90’s). The same thing is true in Chicago, New York, Atlanta and most other big city. Blacks account for 60% of the gun violence while only 13% of the population. Even blacks will admit that theres a problem WITHIN their communities and it’s not the lack of gun laws. It’s the lack of fathers! At the very least. I really wish there was some way for us to help them with this problem, but I’m afraid it’s a really big elephant that we no longer have any control over.

    • Great point. Speaking of elephants, we see rogue behavior in that species where the elder males in the herd are killed by poachers. In the black commmunity, they are driven away by money. A woman can’t get welfare if there is a capable man in the home.

      • The war on drugs has instituted a well-orchestrated campaign by which young men in poor minority areas are systematically pulled out of school and thrown in prison for victimless drug offenses. Apart from the temporary removal of these young men from society, the prison system both serves as a sort of criminal apprenticeship program and stigmatizes them for life so as to make re-entry into the mainstream job market all but impossible.

        The net effect is to grossly skew the sex ratios for the prime marrying age brackets in poor minority communities. Like the one missing chair in a game of musical chairs, even a modest imbalance can drastically alter the dynamics of these markets. Notably in this case, young women have take whatever relationship model is being offered, which in general will not include things like sexual fidelity or lifelong support.

        Unlike the “welfare mom” hypothesis, the “marriage market” model explains the surge in black women’s pursuit of higher education and level of workforce engagement.

        So in a word, yes. We can do something to help them with this problem. We can end the war on drugs.

        • Thank you. I get sick of hearing people blame the lump in the bed on the sheet, so to speak.

    • You are mostly right. But South Central has been ethnically cleansed by an invading army. You won’t see much in the media about it, but there has been a brown/black war in Southern California for a few years now.

    • Don’t close down the city sponsered boxing gyms etc because there is no f’n money & some of the kids can be helped. The bradys could help with this instead of dragging us through their gun control maze. They want to save one life? They can save hundreds or thousands, Randy

    • This is a really terrifying thing for many people to contemplate, and it’s a political hot potato in just about ANY company… but it’s popped up recently, and I’m gonna flop it onto the table…

      No. Not that! It’s the unsettling fact that, however complex the actual causes, the disintegration of the black American family began in the same era that desegregation began!

      HOT! DON’T TOUCH!!! But we need to gather around and discuss it. Because, if we won’t, WHO WILL?

      • William,

        Honestly, as incidental as the facts seem to set on that matter, I doubt addressing it would do any good. As a black person raised in a black neighborhood I severely doubt you, as a non-black person, can understand what a century of of violence does to a family structure. The stories are just as bad as the actual horrors to children. Desegregation may have been the first of several factors that have been connected to the relatively weak nuclear families of black people but there isn’t a black person alive that can say they would trade dinners at six pm with mom, dad and little sister with the chance of being assaulted, killed or denied food, work and housing simply because “common etiquette” per someone else isn’t being followed.

        Correlation is not causation, even if there is a connection. What is more, the law of unintended consequence is hard to predict when dealing in things as abstract as history affecting the present and future. Trends in music glorifying violence, unfilial behavior and lingering racism purported on both sides in traditions, cultures and the words they communicate them with to this day have more to do with destroying the quality of the black family than the liberation of an entire race from what was relatively direct subjugation.

        Then, it’s a gun forum. It’s already a hotbed of political rhetoric and highly opinionated parties on enough issues that adding race opinions would probably be unproductive to put it lightly.

  4. If the criminals couldn’t get guns, they’d make them. A firecracker, a piece of pipe, a cap with a hole in it, and two cotton balls makes a mean zip gun that is deadly at shortrange.

  5. With all due respect, I’m surprised it was an epiphany. You must never have specifically pondered the question before. I always thought it was obvious.

    • The word “epiphany” refers to the simple nature of the tunnel vision used by the gun grabbed. They say “lax gun laws” without saying “victim rich environment” but worry about the “victim rich environment” they call school zones. That somehow no one debating it has ever said “people go to Chicago to commotion crimes” as well as “people go to Chicago to sight see” is what baffled me.

  6. I saw in the WSJ today that Chicago crime is down 40% YTD. But they just made handguns legal in Chicago? All those new legal guns and crime went down??

    Seriously, I’d like to know the gun murder rate in the US not related to gangs or if you live in an urban war zone. Probably safer than Western Europe.

    • Far safer, especialy for blonde women who suffer a horrible % of rapes perpertrated by non-christians (who are 90% of the rapists)

  7. Gun grabber logic operates on more than domestic activity. Show me a gun grabber and I will show you someone who wants to disarm free nations so as to set an example that will shame tyrants into acting in peaceful manner. You can see this logic at work in the current crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Kim the third threatens the United States with nuclear attack and those with international gun grabber mentality call us out for responding to his threats. We are said to be escalating the situation by showing that will defend our nations and our friends from nuclear blackmail. Arms control doesn’t work on the Southside of Chicago or north of the 38th parallel.

    • He wouldn’t be able to threaten us if we didn’t have troops on the 38th parallel. Bring our troops home and leave Asia to the Asians.

        • Tdi I would hope you’re not advocating foreign occupation and excessive military spending, in the process putting the lives of tens of thousands of servicemen at risk, in the name of mindless American consumption. Technology is fun, but I’d rather be stuck in the 1930’s than be a thrall of multi-nationals.

        • So you would rather live in the 1930s? Middle of a depression and you would be getting ready to go off to die in a World War that in part was caused by people like you. Are you that historically ignorant? You don’t have to answer that it is obvious that you are.

          FYI I was responding to your “useless peninsular” statement. South Korea is a developed nation at the forefront of technological advancement. I dare say that if we have reached the state where people like you typify American culture South Korea is now a more advanced nation than the United States.

        • No, Tdi, I meant 1930’s from a technological standpoint, as I could live quite nicely without an iPhone and an Xbox.

          And remind why we are obligated to protect a nation just because they are developed? If anything, shouldn’t we at least focus on “protecting” the weak and the poor nations if we want to take the moral high ground? If South Korea is as advanced as you stated (and I agree that it is) then I don’t believe our tax dollars need to be spent on their behalf.

          I’m tired of talk from Washington about protecting our “foreign interests” when we damn well ought to be looking after our domestic interests and those of American citizens.

        • You are slow to grasp aren’t you. Even in the days of sail we live in an interconnected world. What happens in one place say Europe in 1805 eventually has an impact right here at home. The primary if not the only purpose of the Federal government is to take care of our interests overseas. It is not the role of Federal government to take care of the American people or their domestic interests. The governmental entities that are charged with “taking care” of America’s domestic interests are state and local governments, and of course the peoples themselves.

      • I am sure that a nuclear war in Asia would have absolutely no impact on the United States just as the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had absolutely no impact on the young third rate power and agrarian nation separated from Europe by 3000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.

        • Tdiinva, you lose credibility in your arguments when you resort to insults. Starting a post with “You are slow to grasp,” or ending it with “how stupid gunnies most are” does nothing to strengthen your position. If anything, it shows that you are petulant. Especially if someone does not agree with you. You seem to think that you’re the smartest person on the planet; however, your etiquette in cyber space proves the opposite.

      • He wouldn’t be able to threaten us if we hadn’t given him the nukes he’s now waving about!

        • and how did “we give him the nukes?” It is an internal program that was started by Kim Il Sung. Reading these posts makes me wonder if the gun grabbers are right about how stupid most gunnies are.

  9. “Most people respect the badge… Everyone respects the gun.”

    -Robert DeNiro in Righteous Kill

    Also, interesting read if he actually said this.

    They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.
    I can’t even talk the way these people talk:
    Why you ain’t,
    Where you is,
    What he drive,
    Where he stay,
    Where he work,
    Who you be…
    And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
    And then I heard the father talk.
    Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
    In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

    People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around.
    The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
    These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.
    $500 sneakers for what?
    And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

    I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
    Where were you when he was 2?
    Where were you when he was 12?
    Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol?
    And where is the father? Or who is his father?
    People putting their clothes on backward:
    Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong?
    People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something?

    Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?
    What part of Africa did this come from??
    We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a thing about Africa …..

    I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.
    I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don’t have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany , Scotland , England , Ireland , or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already! ! !
    With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ……… And all of them are in jail.

    Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.
    We have got to take the neighborhood back.
    People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now.
    We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
    We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.
    Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.
    We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..
    We cannot blame the white people any longer.’

    ~Dr.. William Henry ‘Bill’ Cosby, Jr., Ed..D.

    WELL SAID, BILL
    It’s NOT about color…
    It’s about behavior!!!

    • Holy sh!t, that was amazing. Never heard anybody put it so well and so simply. Even if that didn’t come from Bill, whoever wrote that has an excellent handle on the world.

    • You should hear the local black radio guy here, it’s ebonics gone bad,lol, Randy

    • ” Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed”

      When my daughter (now 26) was in elementary school, she helped me write down an incredible list of the names in her school. I wish I still had it to share with you today, nearly 20 years later.

      Those names up there? Those are NOTHING, compared to the list I had. If she weren’t at work I’m sure she could remember some.

      And BILL COSBY? SERIOUSLY? GUN-GRABBER, PEOPLE!!!

  10. Sadly, the current round of firearms laws will do nothing to prevent crime or stop spree shooters. In fact, crime will go up and we’ll have even more mass shootings. Which in turn will cause the gun control efforts to increase, creating more laws that will cause even more crime. And down the spiral goes. England has all but eliminated private gun ownership and has the most violent crime rate in Western Europe. But it’s a difference of perspective – you see shooting a criminal for atticking you is worse than you getting robbed or violently raped. So it’s not really that simple after all when you add it up like that.

    • You forgot “your just as likely to be hurt by your own gun as the criminal” like was said on a vid though, “not if you know what end of the gun the bullet comes out of”, Randy

    • That’s the thing I am trying to address.

      The articles that really bug me are women saying that women can’t stop rapists with guns and are more likely to be shot with their own guns. This idea, the numbers they use, are from women being shot by people with guns already. Not with their own. But to your point…if they decide to ban guns or the right to carry then I suppose anything is better than shooting anyone…even if its a bad guy who is going to violate, maim/injure or kill you anyway…that’s the really sad thing.

      The Gun Control Lobby doesn’t propose what happens when guns are eliminated and roving groups of people with clubs and hammers start robbing people in broad daylight. That gets to me.

      • The statement, “women on the whole can’t use guns to prevent rape” is an extreme and foolish over-generalization, much like saying, “(insert minority label here) on the whole are lazy”. I have met very few women that were of the ‘lay-back-and-take-it’ persuasion; most seem to want to fight. I can only assume they should have the same chance I would want were I in the same situation.
        Personally, I’m of the opinion that many of the folks that would actually say “women on the whole…” have a lot of overlap on a Venn diagram with the same folks that say, “she shouldn’t have been there/out late/by herself” and “that’s what the police are for, to protect us”.
        To them, I say they can keep the change they thought for which they were voting. I’ll bitterly cling to my choice of being a bad choice in someone’s “victim selection process” and always others to do the same.

  11. How can the people of Chicago prevent crime when so many of them are criminals and the rest of them elect criminals to high office? Chicago has a crime problem because Chicago wallows in crime like pigs wallow in mud.

    • Well, if enough of us talk about the things that those rather fancy idiots are saying that are blatantly untrue maybe Chicago can be properly mocked for being inefficient instead of pointed at as some sort of city model.

  12. While stating the obvious here, it is not about stopping crime or saving children.
    It is about civilian disarmament.
    It is about control.

    Many progressive left say, “You say it is to stop tyranny, and topple an evil government. But how can you whack jobs stop an army with tanks and nuclear bombs? You are truly stupid.”

    Clearly none of the armed intelligentsia want armed conflict. As we have reiterated before we do not condone or promote the killing of elected officials or the toppling of any government. BUT, and this is a big but..

    Clearly the folks making the statement above have no clue about real life. We only need look at history. Afghanistan, Syria, Israel, and many others. A small armed force can make the lives of a standing army a living hell. You don’t even need to win. At least not in the sense of having said standing army wave a white flag. You just need to make everyone else’s lives come to a stand still and the rule of public opinion will change quickly. When folks have their lives turned upside down, and can’t get their Starbucks, or travel and basic things like food, and communications are disrupted, there will be screams to make it stop.
    I am not condoning armed revolution, not by a long shot, but from a strategic stand point this is something that could happen in theory. Anyone who thinks it could not is simply burring their head in the sand.

    • I didn’t address the political value of revolution in this post simply because it is too easily torn apart. The part you refer to remains hypothetical until another Civil War breaks out. The part the anti-gun crowd preaches remains true until another Civil War breaks out.

      I’m with you on what you just said, do not get me wrong. But I doubt me saying, as we’ve said multiple times, that gun control underlines the second word and has little to do with the first would really be an epiphany. The way to undo what these people are doing is to undo their base of “Knowledge” with actual facts. The fact that criminals are willing to commute or move to places where they can ply their trade and get what firearms they need from outside of the oppressive place that Chicago or any other gun control paradise is does not strike me as a difficult premise. However, when championing these bastion cities symbolic of safety, those small details get omitted. Rather intentionally, given the post about the Mainstream Media Playbook regarding “Gun Violence”.

  14. Want a simple equation? Look to nature.

    Criminals are predators and the law-abiding citizen are prey. Predators and prey. Still with me Mr. Vice President?

    Predators have weapons (claws and fangs) and the prey has natural defenses (horns and speed). The US Govt, in it’s infinite wisdom, believes predators will stop hunting prey if the prey has less defenses (aka. hobbled and de-horned).

    How does that make any sense to anyone of average intelligence? Seriously, watch Discovery Channel or something.

    Want to know how humans stopped being eaten by animals with claws and sharp teeth that could outrun us? We made better weapons and killed them before they killed us. That’s how you survive against violent criminals.

  15. As an engineering student, I can agree that gun-grabbers are irrational variables and their solutions are nonreal. 😀

  16. The reason there is less crime in the areas in which the Guns of Chicago originate is that the guns are no longer in those areas, having moved to Chicago.

    Were the guns still in the neighboring areas, Chicago would be a paradise.

    It’s just that simple.

    😉

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