Democratic Representative Seth Moulton (courtesy moulton.house.gov)

Responding to the Las Vegas spree killing, Democratic Representative Seth Moulton (above) appeared on ABC’s This Week last week. In the course of declaring the need to “do something” — specifically, more gun control — Mr. Moulton declared “background checks been unequivocally shown to reduce gun violence.” politifact.com decided to fact check the statement, honing-in on the key word: “unequivocally.” Bless their heart . . .

For some reason, the website had a difficult time finding any scientific evidence that background checks for firearms purchases do a damn thing to reduce firearms-related injuries and deaths. Maybe because there isn’t any?

The best they could do was this citation-less quote from longtime gun control advocate David Hemenway:

Stronger gun laws and fewer guns are associated, all else equal, with lower rates of gun violence. Among all the gun laws, there is probably the best evidence that background checks help reduce gun violence. A handful of studies find that they appear to reduce interpersonal firearm violence (and gun trafficking).

Associated? All else equal? Probably? Appear to? I’ve got a truck I can drive through those logic loopholes. By the same token, I’d have to drink 40 gallons of that weak beer to give Hemenway’s statement one iota of credibility.

Any rational reader would read the prevarications in politifact.com’s fact-free analysis and conclude that Representative Moulton’s statement was FALSE. I guess politifact doesn’t cater to rational readers. Here’s their ruling:

Research has shown background checks to be associated with reduced gun violence, and they’re believed to be a necessary measure to stop guns from falling into the wrong hands. But it hasn’t been scientifically established that background checks alone could reduce violence, separate from a broader system of laws, regulations and enforcement.

politifact.com's Truth-O-Meter (courtesy politifact.com)

In short, the scientific literature is fuzzier than Moulton claims, experts said.

We rate this Half True.

Of course, the politifact.com’s commentary section is filled with pointed, pro-gun objections from more scientific minds. Oh wait. They don’t have a comments section. It’s a strange omission for any organization that sells itself as dedicated to finding the truth. Or not.

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68 COMMENTS

    • His office is located in Salem (yes, that Salem), which is filled with really strange people this time of year, and yet, nobody scares me more than he does.

  2. Because of the incessant quest to stop “pre-crime” we talk about this inanity.

    To even speak of such things is in the opposite direction of freedom and liberty.

    Laws only proscribe what punishment is meted out AFTER a crime has been committed.

    A law that says murder is illegal makes perfect sense. But it absolutely does not stop anyone from committing the act. Most people do not want to murder. There might be a scant few who say to themselves, “hmm..I really want to kill so-and-so, but man, life in the slammer would suck…nah, I guess I’ll let so-and-so live.”

    And in fact, people who are hell bent on killing don’t value human life to begin with, including their own, so they are more than willing to damn the consequences and just off themselves after the fact.

    There is NO solution to that.

    It comes down to morals and culture. Period.

    Well, we’ve come to the point where roughly half the population says they are atheist or agnostic at best…no reason for them to value human lives or private property or anything else others might hold dear and value.

    Ideas have consequences.

    • We could box up everyone and isolate us all from each other to ensure no one harmed anyone else but it might be a little hard for society to function.

      Tax revenues would take a little hit so the welfare state would never go along with it.

      • Simpler solution:

        Peaceful secession.

        Let the Welfare-staters create their own welfare state where everyone VOLUNTARILY wants to provide their income to others for various needs.

        In our quest for political correctness and whatever else, we’ve been taught that all discrimination is bad. But this is patently false. We discriminate everyday. If I choose to buy my groceries from store A for whatever arbitrary reason I have and not shop at store B I’m discriminating against store B.

        Discrimination can be very bad when it is…you guessed it…government sponsored discrimination. Because now everyone has to discriminate or not because it is by decree, fatwa, diktat, etc.

        But freedom, liberty and free markets depend on discrimination at a personal level. We all know this and assent to this but come to cognitive dissonance when we experience discrimination that we personally don’t like.

      • we all could all have one of those giant, inflatable hamster balls to move around in! that would be fun!

        • Jim, your info is biased and wrong in a lot of ways. Simple statistics are often very easy tripe for people with an agenda.

          True, simple statistical numbers say that the “poorer” states, colloquially known as “red” states, tend to vote Republican or conservative, while the richer states, the “blue” ones vote Democrat. However, the red states aren’t actually poorer in terms of the way people live.

          Blue states, like California, New York and Illinois; whose economies turn on finance, trade and knowledge, are generally richer than red states. But red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs. Red state economies based on energy extraction, agriculture and suburban sprawl may have lower wages, higher poverty rates and lower levels of education on average than those of blue states — but their residents also benefit from much lower costs of living. For a middle-class person , the American dream of a big house with a backyard and a couple of cars is much more achievable in low-tax Arizona than in deep-blue Massachusetts. As Jed Kolko, chief economist of Trulia, recently noted, housing costs almost twice as much in deep-blue markets ($227 per square foot) than in red markets ($119).

          Yes, sure, income inequality might be important in a way, wealth inequality should have a place in our thoughts. But what really matters to people about how life is lived is consumption. Levels of consumption and also consumption inequality. That last is important in a political sense currently because consumption inequality just hasn’t widened out as much as income and wealth inequality have. And levels of consumption: well, that’s really what income or wealth is, the ability to purchase consumption. And if you’re in a place where prices are lower, leading to greater consumption (whether of food, or square feet of housing, or leisure, or whatever), well, then you’re richer, aren’t you?

          And thus is our conundrum solved. The red states aren’t in fact poorer than the blue states. They’re richer: that’s why they vote more conservative and more right wing.

          For blue state urbanites who toil in low-paying retail, food preparation and service jobs, for the journeyman tradespeople who once formed the heart of the middle class, for teachers, civil servants, students and young families, the American dream of homeownership – or even an affordable rental apartment – is increasingly out of reach. Adding insult to injury, rapid gentrification in these larger knowledge hubs brings the constant threat of displacement of creative workers. For even the much better paid techies, engineers, financiers and managers who are displacing them, the metropolitan version of the American dream is a cramped condo or a small house and a long commute. Many are opting to move to cheaper red states instead, further driving their growth.

          That rather shows that the way that the blue states are run isn’t conducive to good living standards for the poorer half of the population, doesn’t it? Or, as we might put it, blue, liberal, policies don’t actually do what they say on the tin, aren’t in fact pro-poor. All of which is something that ties in nicely with something… Restrictive zoning is very much more common in those blue states than it is in the red. And housing is still a family’s largest single expense. Meaning that by artificially pushing up the cost of housing those blue states are indeed making life worse for the poor. The adoption of build anything anywhere (almost, we’re not quite ready for a steel plant in Manhattan) policies would thus improve the lives and fortunes of the poor substantially.

        • Continued from above:

          But that is to become perilously close to snark about all of this. That basic and first observation still stands though. That puzzle of why people in places with “lower incomes” tend to vote right wing is solved. Because those lower income places have even *lower prices*, making consumption standards higher. There is therefore no conundrum. The richer people, by the only standard that actually matters, consumption, are voting right wing, the poorer are voting left.

          What we now need to go on and explain is why those nominally left policies, those blue ones, are so to the disadvantage of the poor they’re supposedly helping…

        • “Taxes” are a function of percentage. We could run America on what we pay for taxes, but we like to tax you more because you’ve come up with the system yet you’re still stupid enough to pay it.

          THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE IS: “THE DUMB MUST SUFFER”

          SUFFER IN SILENCE STUPID,

          AND KEEP DISARMING YOURSELVES SO IT’S EASY TO COME ENSLAVE YOU AND TAKE THE REMAINDER OF YOUR ASSETS.

          There’s more Red then Blue, Blue are the problem in every respect.

          Look at the map. We could live without you your liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, globalist higher cost of living bullshit.https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/2017/05/11/trump-going-hang-map-election-results-west-wing/101556478/

          Either way, your outnumbered, so, suck it.

        • Joe, the population of many of the red states is next to nothing you big idiot. Further, even Trump didn’t win the popular vote so your entire narrative is false!

          Blue states run the country, they’re smarter, better equipped and aren’t full of backwards Christian hicks.

          Blue>Red. Hail Satan.

        • Evan: Well said!! Logic and truth are unassailable, unless Jim ignores them.
          Joe R.: Calm down. Jim is one of those hard core, died in the wool lefties who’d cut off his right arm before admitting he’s wrong, even when he knows he is. The more you react, the more he’ll troll and trolling is the only reason he’s here.

    • Story time: Hoodlum stole my money, guns, and the real pisser my Led Zeppelin collection. He was using pistol to rob people, I caught him in parking lot one night. Hit him with my car, jumped out with a ball bat and was going to smash his head in. Then ,somehow in my rage, I thought about repurcussions and prison, whacked him a few times in the legs n left. I don’t know why I thought about prison, but I’m glad I did

    • Your reliance on the alleged goodness of human nature is misplaced. Remove the prohibition on murder and this society would devolve into “The Purge” by nightfall. Just look at places where there is no legitimate government meting out justice to evildoers. They’re basically free fire zones.

  3. Maybe background checks can reduce killings in general. All murderers line up for screening today to save lives tomorrow.

  4. Par for the course for self-appointed “fact checkers.” Lefty narratives get a “half true” or “not quite” while righties get a clear “false” if any one word is out of place. By that standard, Moulton’s statement should get a big red X.

  5. They should add as a prohibited class any persons weighing over 500 pounds. We don’t want people buying guns, dying of a heart attack a week later, and then leaving all those guns for people to steal because they’re too dead to defend their guns.

      • How about anyone that supports abortion (not just that it’s allowed to happen in emergencies, PUSHED TO HAPPEN WORLDWIDE, AND PRAISED AS A POPULATION LIMITING ‘SAVIOUR OF THE EARTH’).

        If you’re going to invite hell like that, damn, you’re dangerous in an eternity sort of way.

  6. >>Well, we’ve come to the point where roughly half the population says they are atheist or agnostic at best…no reason for them to value human lives or private property or anything else others might hold dear and value

    I have a country with a ton of religious bullshit everywhere to relocate to. Don’t expect locals to value human lives or property, but Kool Aid they drink in buckets.

    • Note that I finished with: “Ideas have consequences.”

      If someone’s idea of “religion” is “kill everyone who doesn’t look like X or doesn’t worship X or doesn’t do X” then yes you’ve also got big problems on your hands.

      I’m of course talking about a Judeo-Christian perspective. And yes – many who have purported to be such would also be very guilty.

      The main difference being that atheists and such, by nature of the fact, have no absolute morality to rest on. A “Christian” behaving badly is probably a “CINO”. Hence the need for the laws describing punishments for doing bad things to others…

      Try having a conversation about the Vegas shooting with a self-proclaimed Nihilist…they could give less than two nickels about the people killed in the incident or the incident itself. Why? Well, to a Nihilist there ultimately is nothing and when we die there is nothing and so ultimately is no point. All value or sentiment is purely man-made and fictional. Logic and truth do not equate with that kind of nonsense…but you can’t argue with them because they absolutely do not see reality and truth and logic – they refuse to.

      So again, ideas have consequences.

      And BTW, I fully support people having the freedom to group together and live out their philosphies and ideologies so long as it’s voluntary and peaceful. If a bunch of atheists or nihilists want to go form a “state” or whatever they want to call it and go make their own laws and rules and live peaceably together…go for it, I say.

      Shared values and culture are the only way to make and maintain a free society and obtain liberty.

    • If by ‘ton of religious bullshit’, you mean the Christians in the US, then you’re right.

      Khorne is the only true god.

      • Actually, I’m a Christian but I agree with your first statement to a large extent.

        “Christendom” has completely missed the mark of what Jesus actually taught. Rome co-opted Christianity and the result has been a prostitute riding a beast ever since. Most Christians now are very much Statist and Authoritarian in nature.

        Contrast with Jesus’ own words: “True religion is caring for orphans and widows.”

        And yes, Jesus probably would mow your lawn. That’s what a good neighbor would do. After all, he washed his disciples feet as well…

      • There is only one GOD, and his Son is named JESUS, and whose Spirit is called “Holy”. Cause some of you are really F’d up about that. Especially Hay-sooos who lives with his parents and doesn’t own a ‘yard’.

  7. ” “do something”” YA CHOKE YOURSELF! NOT WITH MY HAND, NUMB NUTS! YOUR HAND, LEAN INTO IT !

    IT IS WRONGFUL, NOT JUST WRONG, FOR THEM TO CLAIM THAT ANYTHING THEY DID, OR DO, WILL PROTECT YOU, ESPECIALLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL.

    GET RID OF YOUR LYING REPRESENTATIVES, AND YOU’LL BE AHEAD.

  8. The end game is gun confiscation. The last 10daze confirm that. And now the leftscum have help from our supposed “allies”. Molan Labe…

  9. A bunch of people wishing really hard is enough to grant a complete falsehood half true?
    In that case flat earthers just earned a half true.

  10. Fact check:

    A spree killing is “killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders”.

    I’m not aware that unnamed-a-hole-mc-jerkface changed locations.

  11. I have to admit that I’m very much looking forward to the no doubt brilliant retorts and “pointed, pro-gun objections from more scientific minds” submitted by the “rational readers” of this website. So far, I have yet to see any.

    • The right to keep and bear arms is a constitutionally protected right. So while I took politifact to task for not allowing comments pointing out flaws in their logic, American gun rights are not subject to the democratic process nor scientific arguments about social utility.

      And if it were, the onus is on gun control advocates to prove background checks prevent or limit firearms-related injuries or death. Which, as we see here, they can’t do.

    • I’ll be your huckleberry:

      Russia, Brazil, Mexico all have more strict gun control than anything currently proposed by any American politician. And yet their murder rates are all multiples of the US murder rate.

      The US is the second safest country in the Americas, behind Canada. And yet the majority of countries in the America have stricter gun control.

      Most shooting deaths in America are suicides, not murders. And yet gunless Japan has a suicide rate DOUBLE the US murder rate and suicide rate COMBINED.

      I’m personally not against background checks as long as it is an instant background check. However, they haven’t made much of a difference.

      Neither has gun control. In fact, despite more guns in the US than every before, the murder rate overall has been declining for decades, with the exception that in some black inner cities the local murder has increased. Guess what….those inner cities tend to have gun control stricter than average in the US.

      • I quit comparing other countries crime rates an gun laws, them countries don’t matter. They do not have our Constitution, so my 2a trumps any country’s success or failure

  12. Yeah bullshit. Gun laws are just like anything else, say stop and frisk, in NY and Chicago, Baltimore, LA, etc. They’re literally grasping at straws to do ANYTHING, to make it look like they’re doing ANYTHING, to stop violence from happening.

    In their heart of hearts they know it doesn’t stop those predisposed to breaking the law from magically stopping. But they gotta dog-and-pony show for the voters.

  13. In other words: “We really, really, really wish this absolutely FALSE claim were correct, so we’ll rate it ‘half-true!'”

  14. Some day, people are going to realize how corrupt politifact is, and it will be glorious.

    (I think they are or were affiliated with WashingtonPost, which does have a comments section. Maybe they’ve struck it out on their own again, but it’s entirely possible or likely that it’s mirrored there)

    ((I don’t like them much either, but they host the Volokh Conspiracy, and Eugene Volokh and Dave Kopel are well-worth reading for anyone interested in gun law))

  15. “…they’re believed to be a necessary measure to stop guns from falling into the wrong hands.”

    Yes, well, that there is why the Second Amendment says “…shall not be infringed.” It does not provide the government the authority to decide whose hands are “the wrong hands”.

    If you concede that the government that the Second Amendment was intended to allow you to protect yourself from has the authority to create, maintain and enforce lists of persons who, in the opinion of that same government, may not exercise their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, how will you keep your name off of their lists?

  17. The question NEVER asked of gun grabbers…..

    What would be better for Chicago. ….more gun control or more fathers?

  18. “Fewer guns are associated, all else equal, with lower rates of gun violence.”

    OF COURSE there’s less “gun violence” if there are few guns available. That’s self-evident.

    But is there actually less violence? That’s the real question. And I can’t help but notice that the progressive crowd never brings it up…probably because the answer doesn’t support their preordained conclusion.

    • “OF COURSE there’s less “gun violence” if there are few guns available. That’s self-evident.” No. It’s not. The vast majority of “gun violence” is perpetrated by people involved in organized crime. People in organized crime are involved in international smuggling of illicit items. If gun control passes and there are, as a result, fewer guns, it won’t be the people in organized crime who go without.

      • Yes, it is self-evident. The lack of a tool necessarily precludes the use of it.

        I think they vastly overestimate the effect due to the fact that they tend to confuse gun ownership with criminality. (Legal gun owners are perpetrating virtually none of this violence.)

        And I’m not saying that “gun violence” would ever go away, however, especially not in the US, where we’re already saturated with guns.

        If we went the way of Australia (God forbid), the more organized and successful criminals would still get guns easily enough, but a lot of small-time violent criminals would lose access to that particular tool of their trade.

        “Gun violence” would almost certainly go down to some extent, in the near term. But violent crime surely would not — as it did not in Australia or any of those other gun-control utopias we hear about. And as Australia’s recent uptick in “gun violence” shows, in the long term it’s no solution at all.

        • Except that there cannot be any necessary preclusion of a tool if it exists in the first place. Like, say, guns for instance.

  19. Quote———————–For some reason, the website had a difficult time finding any scientific evidence that background checks for firearms purchases do a damn thing to reduce firearms-related injuries and deaths. Maybe because there isn’t any?————————–quote——————–

    Wrong on all counts. In Japan you are indeed allowed to own rifles and shotguns and through extreme vetting, background checks and registration and mandatory safe storage they have reduced firearms homicides to just about absolute zero. Its also worked well in many European Countries for decades in reducing crime and accidental deaths.

    It is difficult to stop an enemy country from causing deaths in your own country but that is a war situation not having anything to do with laws designed to work with domestic crime and domestic mad men getting guns.

    • Other countries do not (or did not) have the problems we have here:poor education system…poor health care system…way too many disenfranchised minorities.
      Look at gun violence and you will see a hugely disproportionate number of brown and black young men…definitely not PC…and goes against the lib gun-grabbers. These guys rarely use assault rifles…usually it is a hand gun…bought by a friend or family member (illegal straw purchase).

    • It can be perfectly true that strict gun control can and has worked elsewhere, and that those places have a statistically significant rate of gun ownership with very little crime — and yet it’s completely irrelevant.

      The two most important questions are (not in order) whether something like that would be possible in America — and whether America actually wants to do it.

      I submit that it isn’t and that we don’t. (You might, but I don’t, and right now it appears that more of America agrees with me.)

      Gun ownership in America is more widespread and culturally entrenched than in any other place on earth. In a diverse country that already has 400 to 600 million in private ownership, taking guns out of circulation and clamping down like Japan is going to be logistically impossible. Probably legally impossible, too, given the Second Amendment.

      Even if it were possible and America did go that way, it wouldn’t be America anymore. Not as it was founded or intended to be, and several million Americans (me included) would rather die (or, preferably, kill whoever is trying to make it happen) than accept an America that looks like that.

      • Your wrong on all counts. Australia did it and it did work. What is generally overlooked is the vetting system rather than the number of guns turned in. I think we should try my suggestions of intense vetting including psychological testing to get a gun owners i.d.card as well as vetting of all gun sales and safe storage and security alarm systems. None of this confiscates guns it only prevents the wrong people from getting them. I think most of the gun owners in the U.S. would go along with this as was proven in the overwhelming responses on social media by gun owners after the Las Vegas tragedy. Even the Band had a change of heart when they saw all the death and carnage. Its understandable when you have not been there or lost a loved one but quite another when you are the victim of such needless tragedies.

        I think too when you log on to a forum such as this it in no way represents the majority of gun owners in America rather this forum draws in the mentally ill Right Wing Nazi’s that exhibit all that is wrong with America which includes hatred of all other races and religions, hatred of immigrants (even legal ones) and hatred of refugees. All of which were the ones that did make the U.S. great and continue to make it great, not some raving lunatic in a red tie and soon to be impeached.

        • @crsico kid — He’s right on all counts, you mean. Australia did it and it actually didn’t work. At all.

          http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/buyback-has-no-effect-on-murder-rate/2006/10/23/1161455665717.html

          A ten-year study, lead by Dr. Samara McPhedran and published in the British Journal of Criminology, found that the $500M AUD spent on the mass confiscation and destruction of previously-legal firearms had absolutely no effect whatsoever on homicide or suicide rates.

          https://www.melbourneinstitute.com/downloads/working_paper_series/wp2008n17.pdf

          Yet another five-year study, produced by Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi from your University of Melbourne and published in the Melbourne Institute’s Working Paper series, confirmed Dr. McPhedran’s conclusions and no others.

          Dr. McPhedran even testified to this fact before a recent Australian Senate Inquiry, which had looked into – among other things – banning semi-automatic handguns. Needless to say , gun control advocates were rightly and completely humiliated.

          Before that same Senate Inquiry, Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Julian Slater had freely admitted that not only do they have no clue what exactly what kinds of contraband were getting through, but they only know about what they somehow by some miracle manage to intercept. As I’m sure you may be well aware, and even if you’re not you will be now, Australia’s porous borders and low population density – coupled with deeply corrupt postal and customs services – make it a veritable smuggler’s paradise.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjPEdEaS8eY

          More analyses of U.S. domestic and Australian gun control laws have been done besides the brilliant work of Dr. McPhedran, and Wang-Sheng and Saudri, on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. Their findings match those of the former researchers almost exactly.

          http://www.smh.COM.AU/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/revealed-australias-suicide-epidemic-20090820-es3p.html

          aph.GOV.AU/~/media/wopapub/senate/committee/clac_ctte/completed_inquiries/2008_10/suicide/submissions/sub42_pdf.ashx

          http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-31-criminal-target_N.htm

          A Deputy Director from the Australian Institute of Criminology also testified before the Senate Inquiry, and explicitly stated that only 5 of the 48,000+ handguns in the Australian state of Victoria had been stolen. To complicate matters further, the AFP even admitted they had not even bothered to examine the AIC’s report on gun thefts at all.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P3Etjp_WK0

          After the Port Arthur shooting, there were also the Quakers Hill and Childer’s Palace arson attacks, the Black Saturday Bushfires – which were deliberately lit in case you needed a reminder – the Cairns Stabbings, the Lockhart Shooting, and the Monash University Shooting. The 1996 NFA didn’t stop the massacres from happening, but only changed the methods in which they are carried out. Especially not when many thousands of guns handed over to the government for destruction in 1996 were then illegally resold to criminals – many of which have still never been recovered, and have very likely been used in crimes since. Some were indeed recovered though, in the private collections of police officers.

          http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-big-sting/2007/02/09/1170524303995.html?page=fullpage

          http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/ravenshoe-police-sergeant-resigns-after-discovery-of-surrendered-guns-in-his-private-collection/story-fnihsrf2-1226705185355

          Guns are taken from Melbourne’s own ‘Red Zone’ every two days – all from “prohibited” persons – and by the thousands every single year — and that’s just one metropolitan area in one city.

          http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/gun-found-every-two-days-in-melbournes-red-zone-20150618-ghrak9.html

          Even police and military armories are broken into with mind-boggling regularity, to the tune of dozens of times – and that’s just in the state of Victoria and the port of Sydney.

          http://www.skynews.com.au/news/local/melbourne/2015/05/12/vic-gun-thieves-eavesdrop-on-cops.html

          http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/no-sign-of-stolen-rocket-launchers/story-e6frg6o6-1225787746734

          http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-30/navy-base-security-breach-larrakeyah-darwin/4400646

          Isn’t it any wonder that only after the states of Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania were excluded from all crime statistics reports by both the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Criminology from 2010 onwards there begins an appreciable drop in Australia’s violent crime rates across the board?

          Indeed, wonders never cease. Especially when criminals receive hundreds of pistols at a time through the mail and several times every year, made especially easy by Australia’s institutionalized corruption of its Customs services – not to mention that of individual officials, as well.

          http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/guns-imported-through-sylvania-waters-post-office-linked-to-crimes-in-sydney/story-fnpn118l-1227252669241

          http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/customs-staff-charged-over-alleged-drug-smuggling-ring/story-e6frg6nf-1226576397568

          http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2015/03/24/cocaine-customs-cop-caught/

          http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3675337.htm

          Even if criminals couldn’t receive their guns through the Sunday Post, they can just as easily make them or have them made-to-order. These aren’t those shoddy rusticles of zip-guns you’d expect to find in a jail cell, either, but finely machined MAC-11 sub-machine guns – complete with 32-round magazines and silencers.

          http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/homemade-gun-factory-shutdown-by-police-in-sydneys-southwest-20140618-zsd4a.html

          http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/jeweller-angelos-koots-admits-to-making-submachine-guns-at-his-seven-hills-home-and-supplying-them-to-bikie-groups/story-fni0cx12-1226760983916

          In conclusion, no, America would not benefit from Australia’s gun control laws. (Even Australia didn’t seem to benefit from them.) This is for a wide variety of reasons. Given the level of sophistication of the criminal enterprises that were created by Prohibition in the U.S., and now during the morbidly hilarious failure of the “War on (Some) Drugs” around the world, the only logical conclusion that can be drawn about a prohibition on guns – which is what you have by-and-large in Australia – is that equally large and sophisticated criminal enterprises will arise to fulfill the demand for guns. This can, as quite thoroughly demonstrated above if I do say so myself, can and will be accomplished in a number of ways: clandestine domestic manufacture, surreptitious importation from abroad, and widespread theft.

          Australia is plagued by the first and the second. America is plagued by the second and third.

          To give you an example of the futility of banning an item to which is attached very high demand, some 1.6 million pounds of marijuana was seized by the U.S. DEA in 2010 – and that’s only a very small percentage of what is believed to have made it across the border. It is reasonable to assume that the shear amount of arms, ammunition, and accoutrement that can occupy the same space as 800 tons of plant matter is quite sufficient to arm a significant portion of the U.S. criminal element.

          These dreadful shortcomings demonstrate a basic and willful failure of Prohibitionists to understand or even acknowledge the market forces governing anything for which there is significant demand. It is the primary reason why central economic planning has only proved an unmitigated disaster everywhere it’s been tried. More basically, they fail to realize or consciously ignore the fact that when people want something, someone will get it for them. The harsher the ban, the higher the profit motive. The higher the profit motive, the more risks criminals will be willing to take to satisfy their market. A market that WILL be satisfied and in full, regardless of whatever laws are passed and how strictly they are enforced. There are deeper reasons for this failure than simply flat-out flunking ECON 101. Those who trade in prohibited goods are, by definition, criminals who are engaged in a criminal enterprise without the benefits of redress the courts or any other avenue of dispute resolution or of police protection. When an enterprise can’t: take out a loan, open a bank account, establish credit, file a lawsuit, or have police respond to an alarm, it becomes necessarily more violent to protect its financial and territorial interests and to affect resolutions over contractual disputes. Essentially, prohibition of highly desirable goods can only function to increase overall violence and disregard for the law as a basic factor of prohibition. One must accept this as a basic premise and then try to reconcile the increased violence and criminality coupled with the inevitable encroachment on individual liberty with any perceived utility of the prohibition.

          As the world slowly comes to the realization that prohibition of drugs, with the focus now being primarily on cannabis, has very little if any utility in the face of extremely high demand we begin to move away from banning it.

          Considering that those who smuggle, steal, and manufacture weapons and their customers will obviously still be armed, the level of violence in the wake of an Australian-style prohibition would be unprecedented. Once one factors in the unique culture surrounding guns and civil rights in the U.S., the increasingly ubiquitous support for the Second Amendment and the right it protects, and American’s historical resistance to tyranny, the violence may very well escalate into that of armed insurrection.

          http://rt.com/usa/269362-assault-guns-control-ny/

          http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3115418/posts

          Mass civil disobedience is already the order of the day, and police departments are already realizing the logistical absurdity of such an endeavor in actually enforcing registration or, Heaven forbid, a mass confiscation. In fact, many law enforcement officials have already announced their intentions to not enforce such laws at all.

          http://www.policeone.com/chiefs-sheriffs/articles/6435415-NY-sheriffs-We-wont-enforce-gun-laws-magazine-limits/

          http://www.newswithviews.com/NWV-News/news437.htm

          http://www.examiner.com/article/conn-police-refuse-to-enforce-new-gun-laws

          Also given that firearms are very durable items, with many examples lasting 500 years or more with proper care and maintenance, and that upwards of 406 million (as of 2015) are already thought to be present in the hands of up to 128 million Americans, it’s highly unlikely that any prohibition would succeed at all as confiscation must immediately follow – as it did in Australia – to realize any utility at all.

          http://www.leg.state.co.us/Clics/Clics2013A/commsumm.nsf/b4a3962433b52fa787256e5f00670a71/c4b73dc817da609e87257b24005ef7f8/$FILE/13SenState0304AttachC.pdf

          All this having been said, advocacy for prohibition of firearms can only be seen as either ill informed (as in being simply unaware of the consequences) or malicious (aware of the inevitable and invariable failure of the prohibition and the increased criminality and violence and potential to destabilize society and government and possibly to result in violent revolution). It’s either one or the other. There is NO third option.

          What is actually overlooked is that vetting systems are nothing more than security theater, like the TSA. What you like to “think,” and I rightly use that term very loosely because that’s NOT what you’re doing, is irrelevant and inconsequential in the face of actual facts. Facts being things that you’re not in possession of.

          You’re wrong about popular opinion. You’re wrong about legislation. You’re wrong about litigation. You’re wrong about literally everything.

          Especially about the bile that left-wing Nazis like you who are those that actually exhibit all that is wrong with America, what with your hatred not only of any and all minorities that don’t agree with you but also of white, straight, Christian males. And the rest of the world, for that matter. Also, no, Drumpf is not going to be impeached any time soon, either. Or ever.

    • I agree, Japan is a great model. Tightly controlled, ethnically and culturally homogeneous nations are vastly superior. We’ll start the purge tomorrow, I look forward to your support.

      • Of course you would have his support. Every bit, in fact, so long as it’s anyone who is even remotely a self-described conservative.

    • @crisco kid — He is right on all counts, you mean. Japan doesn’t matter or count as they are incomparable to and their laws are inapplicable to the U.S. Plus, it’s actually the culture in Japan that leads to a low reported crime rate there in the first place, not their gun control laws. Such schemes also haven’t worked at all in Europe, either, especially being that there are in fact significantly higher rates of violence and suicide there than in the U.S.

      It’s actually not that terribly difficult to stop an enemy country from causing deaths in your own, being that a standing military is specifically geared towards that. But, gun control laws are not designed to deal with domestic crime or mad men with guns. Their sole and explicit purpose is to discriminate against the poor and minorities who will be the most adversely effected by these laws while simultaneously not dealing with ANY of the underlying issues that drive crime — which do NOT include mere possession of tools, PERIOD.

      Race, sex, and class discrimination IS the foundation of ALL gun control laws throughout history.

      Race, sex, and class discrimination IS the end result of ALL gun control laws written today.

      Race, sex, and class discrimination is NOT what solves problems.

      You are a willfully pig ignorant, intentionally uneducated, morally and ethically inferior, disgusting bigot and literally nothing more.

  20. to Evan
    quote—————————The richer people, by the only standard that actually matters, consumption, are voting right wing, the poorer are voting left.——————-quote

    What weird planet do you live in or what fantasy world for that matter. The overwhelming majority of Herr Drumpf voters were poor uneducated Whites in rural states.

    • “Herr Drumpf”? Yet it’s that very same Herr Drumpf’s .gov that you want to give the power to “vet” who gets a gun. Or not.

      Basically, giving more power to “Herr Drumpf”. Fascists of a feather flock together, right, Herr Cisco.

    • First of all, its not a complicated concept. Some places a dollar has more or less purchasing power. In high pop urban areas its less. Rural sparsely populated areas, its more.

      Further, why do you want GOV to decide what you can an can’t do. Surely right now since you’re one of those people that hates Trump for…something, its hard to tell cause he really hasn’t done a damn thing yet, but still want HIS gov to regulate you. You realize that right? the gov may not always be the gov you want. Please stop begging other people to run your life. I really will never understand this shit.

    • @crisco kid — What weird planet do you live on or what fantasy world do you live in that other country’s gun control laws matter to us? Oh, and the overwhelming and vast majority of Herr Shillary voters were and still are poor, uneducated minorities in urban states.

      • to Excendrin Headache

        Actually you FLAME DELETED they the urbanites of the lower class actually stayed home as they were not thrilled with Hillary and was one of the major reasons she lost as reported by MSNBC news. Those people turned out by the millions to vote for Obama. And we had the millennia’s that by and large also did not turn out to vote at all and again it was because they did not like Hillary. Leave Politics Excedrin Headache to people who vote and know what they are talking about. You only succeed in making a fool out of yourself with such FLAME DELETED statements.

        • @crisco kid — Actually, you imbecile, they most certainly did not stay home. An overwhelming and vast majority of urbanites did, in fact, vote for Shillary. She did, after all, somehow by some miracle manage to collect a couple million more votes than Drumpf. And, as you yourself said, her vote consisted almost entirely of city dwellers, who might I add resided entirely within 57 counties — out of 3,007. The actual reason she lost is because she’s a lying, thieving, back-stabbing Wall Street meat puppet without a clue as to anything that goes on out here in the real world — where neither you nor Shillary live. You only succeed in projecting your own foolishness onto people that have for a fact repeatedly demonstrated to you that they know better than you. About literally everything. You need to leave politics, crisco kid, to people who actually live here and know what’s going on here and why, and have already thoroughly fisked every single solitary comment you’ve ever made.

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