Politician Gun Control Quotes

Our good friend and fellow sportsman George W. Bush signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act into law back in 2005. Essentially, unless we make a terribly defective gun, the law creates a complete shield from liability. God bless Citizens United, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the NRA, tort reform, and needy and greedy politicians.

I have filed a lawsuit; I am not engaged in a legislative battle. I am very proud my son will help spearhead an effort to put forth a survivor’s legislative agenda with many of his fellow students, teachers, and other survivors of this tragedy. Kenny and his colleagues are now voting age or will be before the next election. Pro-gun politicians need to address the problem, or they may find themselves looking for work.

Why do Second Amendment advocates assume every time a well-meaning legislator suggests common-sense gun control legislation, politicians must be coming for our guns?

In a functional civilized society built on the premise of peace, guns belong only in the hands of combat personnel, not in the hands of regular civilians, not in the hands of politicians, not even in the hands of billionaires.

The boar held a VCR reote control and cackled maliciously as he watched a video of U.S. politicians grinning with their one-time budy Saddam--Dick Cheney, Gulf War-era Secretary of State James Baker, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, to the tune of "Taking Care of Business." And then the viewers saw themselves in a mirror emblazoned with the words "You are a witness.

At an NRA annual meeting in Cincinnati in 1977, Second Amendment “absolutists” took control of the NRA from previous leaders who thought the organization was really there to protect marksmen. Gun nuts call this event the Revolt at Cincinnati. Our modern epidemic of mass shootings can, more or less, be traced to these yahoos winning control of that organization. The ammosexuals reformed the NRA from the generally benign conglomeration of Bambi killers to the grotesque weapon of mass destruction we know it to be today. It was this new NRA that invented the radical rationalization of the Second Amendment as a right to armed self-defense. It was this new NRA that gained political supremacy in the Republican party. It was this new NRA that got Ronald Reagan, who once signed one of the most sweeping gun restrictions in the nation, to sign the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, an act that rolled back many of the restrictions from the Gun Control Act. The NRA’s wholesale reimagining of the Second Amendment hasn’t just lured Republican politicians, it’s become part of the gospel of Republican judges. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, the two outside interest groups most responsible for telling Republican judges how to rule, have fully adopted an absolutist, blood-soaked interpretation of the Second Amendment. These groups of alleged “textualists” read “well regulated militia” clear out of the text of the Amendment. Instead, they substitute self-defense as the “original purpose” of the language. There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery.

Time seemed frozen, the applause went on and on even though heads were turning, necks were craning; someone had screamed because there was a man in the gallery and the man was holding a rifle and this was something they had all seen on TV, it was a situation with classic elements that they all recognized. In it's own way, it was as American as The Wonderful World of Disney. The politician and the man in a high place with the gun.

Adult politicians have been ignoring this issue and playing politics on gun safety issues for years. Meanwhile, my generation has been getting shot and killed in schools across the country. Listen to how these politicians speak to each other; watch how they treat each other on local or national levels. How can we expect to see any meaningful change on gun violence if politicians on either side of the aisle are incapable of civil discourse?

Ladies and gentlemen, after Columbine, Newtown, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, San Bernardino, Orlando, Vegas, Parkland and now in our own community, one thing should be clear to citizens and politicians alike. Our society needs stricter laws for people who purchase guns for the purpose of perpetrating criminal acts. We need tougher laws for people who buy guns to sell to criminals or kids. These laws should severely punish anyone in these categories—neither suggestion steps on the Second Amendment . . .

It is not a war, it is a lesson of life (first part) It's a life lesson. It's not a war. War brings hatred, violence, destruction, while we are called, at this particular moment, to rediscover values ​​such as solidarity, fraternity, neighborliness and nature. The war metaphor, so dear to journalists and politicians, has the unique purpose of amplifying the context of a narrative, framing it perfectly for the use of Tg and Talk shows to remind us, rather than to inform us, which are meant to sell news, gaining a broad audience. To say that we are at war is, in my humble opinion, a pure example of lexical inclination. Don't fight at war on the couch at home or by repeatedly posting stories on your favorite social network. No border is in danger, there is no enemy out there to shoot down. And then, to understand it sincerely and serenely: we, as human beings, have been waging wars since the dawn of time. We are so brutal that for thousands of years we have killed each other with stones, sticks, swords, spears, cannons, machine guns and atomic bombs. Imagine if we needed a pandemic to declare war ... who are we? A stupid virus that's part of the nature of things? However, at this time there is a disease that affects and does so without distinguishing borders, nationalities, skin color or social status. And this is already a great first lesson in life. He tells us - as it should - that we are all the same. Diversity and distinctions are the fruit of our limited and limiting mind, the apotheosis of our finitude. We are facing a pandemic that, in order to be addressed, requires a strong sense of personal responsibility and collaboration between communities. It requires a counter-current gesture, of altruism, in an individualistic society, in which everyone thinks for himself and defends his goods. And this is a second life lesson. Let's stop looking at our little miserable garden made of selfishness, greed and spiritual misery. Do you know how this pandemic will end? With mutual help! We will have to help each other! Either the sense of community will predominate, or we will be doomed to eat each other. The message "No one is saved alone" launched by the Pope. This virus, in its way of being contagious, in making us stay a little alone with ourselves, tells us that the error was probably the first. The naiveté in believing that our way of life was right, the blindness in believing that we are happy and not superficial, the folly of seeing a world that burns and gets stuck on itself - and on us - pretending that it is normal. The mistake of considering the law of profit as the driving force of all. Instead of investing in healthcare, for our care, in solidarity, to strengthen the sense of community, we preferred to spend in the armament, to defend ourselves from others, from our fellow citizens. Isn't that a life lesson too? We wake up from the heat of a time when possession was more important than knowledge, it was deception and not truth, inhumanity and not benevolence. But not only that, it was the moment of insensitivity, blindness, selfishness, cowardice, appearance, mediocrity, misunderstanding and especially evil, in all its forms. Maybe, dear readers, it's time to acknowledge that the disease is not the virus. We are the disease! So far we have lived convinced that life, in a subtle way, has deceived us. That she was unfair and cruel. We forgot about ourselves watching the clock, with our all-powerful feeling, convinced that we can control the passage of time. As we were convinced that there is still time, that nothing will happen tomorrow and everything can be postponed. I was wrong. An invisible being, transported into the air we breathe and which, in just over a month, has traversed the seas, mountains and entire continents, was enough to bring to our knees all our beliefs and customs.

Gun control advocates in the U.S. often point to Europe’s strict gun laws as the example for the U.S. to follow. Yet, the three very worst public shootings during 2001 and the first half of 2002 all occurred in Europe. Around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have recently strengthened gun control laws have seen violent crime soar. Ironically, the gun laws are passed because politicians promise they will reduce these types of crime.

America has the highest gun homicide rate, the highest number of guns per capita,” recites Charles Blow of the New York Times.3 In another story, the New York Times quotes researcher David Hemenway as saying: “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death.”4 Bloomberg’s Businessweek also makes similar claims.5 Like most international comparisons of gun ownership rates, all of these claims make use of something called the 2007 Small Arms Survey, a group that receives funding from and often works closely with George Soros’s Open Society Institute.6 The UN provides homicide data for 192 countries, but the Small Arms Survey only lists gun ownership and homicide data for 116. All of the countries that are missing are countries that have homicide rates higher than the U.S. rate. The Small Arms Survey makes it look as though there are only twenty-five countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S. In fact, there are 101 countries with higher rates. So how do homicide rates compare across all 192 countries for which the UN provides data?7 For 2008, the U.S. rate was slightly less than 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The worldwide rate was 10.5 (about twice the U.S. rate), and the median was six per 100,000. Yet there is one important caveat to realize when looking at these numbers—they are provided by the countries themselves, and you can’t always trust their numbers. Politicians and dictators like to give the impression that they are doing a better job than they actually are. This is a problem in some United States jurisdictions such as Chicago, where what look like murders are reclassified as “noncriminal death investigations.”8

You need to use this as a lever to urge politicians to pass cautionary laws to put a stop to drones and especially robotics and artificial intelligence. People urge gun control after a school shooting, right? Well, we won’t have to worry about a school shooter in the near future because he’ll be cooking up a genetically engineered supervirus in his basement, and everyone on earth will be dead. You need to ensure that these technologies are treated like radioactive nuclear material, because that’s how dangerous this is, and—

Why did it happen? Was he a Defender? Was it ultimately about the Carls? No. Those are all the wrong questions. It's so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on people's fear and confusion. We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder "means" is that we've made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I'm sick of it. Moving on.

More gun control? The politicians come up with a myriad of crazy solutions, but continue to ignore the problem. There are plenty of gun laws on the books, good ones, but they are not fully enforced.

The war on guns has been as much of a failure as the war on drugs. Terrorists can also use homemade bombs, and have lately made a habit of utilizing vehicles as weapons.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings

police explain that the job of protecting people is their own,

the media had its narrative before it knew any of the facts

The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from—their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable. Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.

The Small Arms Survey makes it look as though there are only twenty-five countries with higher homicide rates than the U.S. In fact, there are 101 countries with higher rates. So how do homicide rates compare across all 192 countries for which the UN provides data?7 For 2008, the U.S. rate was slightly less than 5.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The worldwide rate was 10.5 (about twice the U.S. rate), and the median was six per 100,000. Yet there is one important caveat to realize when looking at these numbers—they are provided by the countries themselves, and you can’t always trust their numbers. Politicians and dictators like to give the impression that they are doing a better job than they actually are. This is a problem in some United States jurisdictions such as Chicago, where what look like murders are reclassified as “noncriminal death investigations.

Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.

Omitted is the fact that the UK’s homicide rate rose after its gun control laws were enacted.8 The UK’s homicide rate is lower than the US’s, but this is despite the country’s counterproductive gun control laws, not because of them. The UK’s homicide rate was very low before it had any gun control laws.

In 95% of the cases, merely brandishing a firearm is enough to fend off an attacker.

Both attacks came to an abrupt end once police arrived,

there

National media outlets such as ABC,8 CNN,9 and NBC noted that the alleged gunman told another white man: “Whites don’t kill whites.” It sounded as if the gunman was merely reassuring a bystander. But that bystander was a permit holder who was pointing a gun at the killer. What the killer actually said was: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”10 The killer was pleading with a permit holder not to shoot him.

Americans use guns defensively about 2 million times a year — about 5 times more frequently than guns are used to commit crimes.

In real life, crime guns are very rarely left at the scene of incidents, and the only exceptions occur when criminals have been seriously injured or killed.

Also, crime guns are very rarely registered. In the exceedingly rare instances that they are, they aren’t registered to the person who committed the crime. That’s why police in such diverse places as Chicago, Hawaii, DC, Pennsylvania, and Canada can’t point to any crimes that have been solved as a result of registration.

In 2014, the worst 2 percent of counties accounted for 52 percent of the murders. Five percent of counties accounted for 68 percent of the murders.

Gun control advocates such as Vox never mention that every single time that guns are banned — either all guns or all handguns — homicide/murder rates rise.

A month later I again asked for the information, but all I got was a vague email saying: “Regarding how countries and territories are covered, much depends on specific registration rules and reporting practices. A lot of countries publicly report annual retail sales, seizures and disarmament, or public registration figures. Others routinely see annual data reported in the press. We also get reports by asking. That kind of thing gives official annual inflation/deflation.”21 But he never gave me a list of sources for each country. There was no way to actually check the numbers.

Between 1950 and June 2019, 94 percent of mass public shootings in the United States occurred in places where general citizens were banned from carrying.

In 2019, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld explained to me what he called “the prison of two ideas.” He told me that no one can seriously talk to or even be perceived as working with people on the “other side” of the debate, or they will be disowned by their own side. This applies not only to the media but also to politics generally. This surely explains much of the lack of civil, productive debate on guns.

The claim that guns are rarely used in self-defense comes from only counting defensive actions that result in the death of the attacker. But by any measure, only a fraction of one percent of defensive gun uses result in the criminal attacker being killed or wounded. In 95% of the cases, merely brandishing a firearm is enough to fend off an attacker.

Of those shootings, 53 occurred in the United States and 2,354 happened in the rest of the world. While the US had about 4.6 percent of the world’s population during this period, it had just 2.20 percent of the mass public shootings.

Semiautomatic weapons are also used to protect people and save lives. Single-shot rifles that require reloading by hand may not do people a lot of good when they are facing multiple criminals. The first shot may also miss or fail to stop an attacker. People wanting to protect themselves and their families might not have the luxury of time to reload their guns.

After Parkland, I had a text message exchange with CNN’s Jake Tapper, to whom I expressed concern about how lopsidedly pro-gun control the media coverage had been. Tapper told me that it wasn’t surprising given the liberal politics of Broward county, where the shooting occurred. Immediately after the Santa Fe shooting, I reached out to Tapper again, suggesting a town hall event that would reflect Texas’ more conservative politics. But this time, I didn’t get a response. Perhaps CNN didn’t want to deal with a more pro-gun town hall audience.

You hear gun control advocates say all the time “guns kill people.” And you hear a lot of Second Amendment advocates say “no, people kill people.” But what you have to understand, and what you will understand after reading this book, is: gun control kills people.

Civilians are no more fit to have guns at their disposal than politicians are to have nukes at their disposal.

The shootings, the denials, the scoffing at all evidence of institutionalized misogyny, the pushback against gun control, the patronizing attitude of editors and politicians, only served to radicalize those women. Before the shooting, they were students. Now they were warriors. Before I was not a witch, wrote Ruth Zardo. But now I am one.

They’ll never get the chance to do this again in Ireland,” the man said, steel in his voice. “The first politician who stands up and announces he’s in favor of gun control is very likely to get shot.

Take the Solomon Islands, for example. Despite the islands' 1999 ban on handguns and virtually all rifles, 21 people died in three mass public shootings from 2000 to 2002. There may have been other mass public shootings, but the islands have only issued a police report that briefly provides details on the years 1998 to 2003. I have asked the Royal Soloman Islands Police Force for information on other years, but has proven fruitless. After talking to the police, it was pretty clear that since their nation gets most of its revenue from tourism, they saw little benefit to providing this information. Even if these were the Solomon Island' only mass public shootings from 1998 to 2012, the annual death rate from these events would come to 2.98 per million people (given an average population of 470,000 over those 15 years). This is 46 times higher than the US rate

How can you trust a politician to protect your life when they want to control your guns?

American police terrorism was created to control the black and brown people of slavery. This remains vivid today. We need change across this country and accountability for our loved ones whose lives have been stolen by American terrorism. Who will govern the government when they continue to murder American citizens? Injustice in this country is pitiful and pathetic. The injustice starts with economics, education, and politicians.

Patriotism is primitiveness. Patriotism is the antithesis of world peace - it is the antithesis of acceptance, integration and harmony - in short, patriotism is the ultimate crime against humanity. Let me show you how. What's the image that comes to your mind, when you hear the word "patriotism"? A soldier with a gun - and where there is a soldier, there is an enemy. And who is that enemy? Usually it's just another soldier from the other side of the border - who has his own children, own spouse, own family at home, and is the symbol of patriotism in his own nation. Now, do you see the absurdity of the whole concept of patriotism! That's how sick this society is - where the only thing that distinguishes patriotism from terrorism is which side of the border bears your feet shackled - borders that are peddled by politicians to maintain control - not security, not peace, but control. Because a world without borders is a world without fear - and it's impossible to control people when they no longer fear each other.

CNN reported: “An agent working for the FBI’s background check system, who was performing the review on Roof, failed to contact the Columbia, South Carolina, police department which arrested Roof — in part because of a clerical error in records, listing the wrong agency.”11 Most people know that any felony conviction, even a non-violent one, precludes you from ever legally owning a gun. Even a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction will ban you from having a gun. Just being charged with a state offense that could result in a prison term of two years is sufficient for you to lose your right to buy a gun.

In March, I tweeted from my personal account that the perpetrator of the New Zealand mosque shooting was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.” I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States. After Twitter locked my account, I wrote about it in a New York Daily News article.23 Twitter then locked the Crime Prevention Research Center account for linking to the Daily News article.

My numbers show that at least 16.5 percent of attacks between 2014 and 2017 were stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. Back in 2015, when I pointed out errors in the first FBI report, the authors simply responded, “We acknowledge in the FBI report that our data are imperfect.” But no correction was ever made.

When I requested information on how he had obtained his list of foreign cases, Lankford emailed me back with the mere assurance that “it was a lot of work.”22 Lankford wouldn’t even give journalists any specific details on how he collected his sample.23 His paper contains no information on his use of different databases, foreign languages, or search terms. It simply claims, “Complete data were available for 171 countries, and they averaged 1.7 public mass shooters per country from 1966 to 2012.

The entire gun control debate would likely be dramatically different if the national media would cover some of the heroic actions of permit holders.

As we touched on earlier, this causes a dramatic underestimate of the true rate of ownership in Israel and Switzerland. Both the Israeli and Swiss governments issue guns to civilians, while the government still technically owns the guns. In Israel, the government owns most guns, and people apply to have them issued. In Switzerland, all able-bodied Swiss males between the ages of 18 and 34 keep military weapons in their homes.46 After age 34, they can apply for permission to keep their military weapons, and the majority opts to do so.

By contrast, public health researchers place these same policies near the bottom of their list. Their top policy choice — barring gun sales to people deemed dangerous by a mental health provider with just over a 6 out of 10 rating — is the fifth most valued policy by criminologists (4.88), but their other top policies aren’t viewed positively by criminologists.

The Small Arms Survey is the most commonly-cited source for data on gun ownership rates. It has given support to the claim that the United States has by far the highest level of gun ownership, with 88.8 guns per 100 people.

How many gun control laws that a state has potentially explains about 3% of the changes in its total number of firearm deaths.47 The ultimate question is whether total deaths, not just firearm deaths, go up or down as a result of more gun control.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings (Figure 15). The New York Times came up with a slightly higher number when it analyzed mass public shootings from 1949 to 1999.46 The results confirm something that we have known for a long time — it is very difficult for psychiatric professionals to know who will actually commit mass murder.

The problem is that even top psychiatrists failed to identify them as real threats. And it’s not as though psychiatrists lack incentives to get the diagnosis right. Beyond their reputation, professional pride, and desire to help, psychiatrists also have a legal obligation to inform authorities of threats. Families of the Aurora movie theater victims sued Holmes’ psychiatrist for not recommending that his patient be confined.

There are some differences in the political views of researchers in these different fields of study, but they lean heavily Democrat. Democratic economists outnumber their Republican counterparts by almost five to one, while in sociology (of which criminology is a subfield) there are about 37 Democratic faculty members for every Republican.5 No similar numbers are available for the field of public health, but political campaign donations indicate that few medical school faculty members make donations to Republicans.

Semi-automatic guns don’t fire “rapid bursts” of bullets. Fifty-caliber sniper rifles were never covered by the federal assault weapons ban. Such weapons may be “super destructive,” but the New York Times neglects to mention that there is no recorded instance of one being used in a murder, and certainly not in a mass public shooting.8 “Urban assault vests” may sound like they are bulletproof, but they are actually just nylon vests with a lot of pockets.9 These are just a few of the many errors that the New York Times made in their news article.

Bans on large-capacity magazines are more or less exclusively obeyed by law-abiding citizens, and will prevent concealed handgun permit holders from carrying many bullets in their guns.15 Concealed handgun permit holders usually don’t carry multiple guns or magazines, whereas attackers often arm themselves to the teeth. Magazine limits mean that criminals are more likely to out-gun law-abiding citizens.

Mass killers have even explicitly talked about their desire to attack places where civilians can’t defend themselves. One need only listen to the February 2016 wiretap of an ISIS supporter who was planning an attack on one of the biggest churches in Detroit. Khalil Abu-Rayyan explained his choice of target this way: “A lot of people go there. Plus, people are not allowed to carry guns in church. Plus, it would make the news. Everybody would’ve heard.”32 Fortunately, Abu-Rayyan’s father alerted the FBI.

Police and security guards play an important role in stopping crime, but there uniforms put them at a disadvantage in these terrorist-type attacks. Knowing that the officer is the only person with a gun makes things quite simple for attackers. They need only kill him first. It is the equivalent of wearing a neon sign saying “shoot me first.

Jake Berry, a reporter with the Nashua Telegraph (New Hampshire), concluded after a 2013 interview with gun control researchers: “On the whole, Lott’s colleagues—both in the media and academia—don’t dispute his findings [on gun-free zones].

In March 2019, immediately after the New Zealand attack, I tweeted that the shooter was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.”63 I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States. Twitter locked my account for two months so that I couldn’t post anything or even read messages from other users.

Right-wingers don’t normally declare that “conservatism is dead” and that “global capitalist markets are the enemy of racial autonomists.” Tarrant calls himself an “Eco-fascist.” Have you ever met a right-winger who pontificates about the need for “furthering the unionization of workers” or minimum-wage increases? Or one who denounces “the ever-increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit”? Tarrant writes: “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.

The first of these CDC-funded studies came out in November 2015.9 Using data for Wilmington, Delaware, the study discovered that the majority of young men who were involved in firearm crime were also involved in crime as juveniles. Many got expelled from school, were abused as children, dropped out of high school prior to graduation, or were unemployed. Then, the study simply asserts that government programs would help solve the problem. It suggests providing “life skills training,” “individual placement and support” for jobs, “multi-dimensional treatment foster care,” and something listed as “coping power.” It isn’t surprising that research funded by a Democratic administration would reach these policy conclusions.

The paper fails to report that in only 8 of these 444 homicide cases was the murder weapon the gun that had been kept in the home. Moreover, the number of criminals stopped with a gun is much greater than the number killed in defensive gun uses. In fact, the attacker is killed in fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 defensive gun uses.

At a town hall at George Mason University in January 2016, President Obama said, “If you look at the statistics, there’s no doubt that there are times where somebody who has a weapon has been able to protect themselves and scare off an intruder or an assailant, but what is more often the case is that they may not have been able to protect themselves, but they end up being the victim of the weapon that they purchased themselves.”20 Obama seems to be echoing a claim that has been championed by Arthur Kellermann and his many coauthors.

Both have the same top four preferred policies for stopping mass public shootings. American criminologists rate the following policies most highly: allow K-12 teachers to carry concealed handguns (with a survey score of 6), allow military personnel to carry on military bases (5.6), encourage the elimination of gun-free zones (5.3), and relax OSHA regulations that pressure companies to create gun-free zones (5). The top four policies for economists are the same, but in different order: encourage the elimination of gun-free zones (7.9), relax OSHA regulations that pressure companies to create gun-free zones (7.8), allow K-12 teachers to carry concealed handguns (7.7), and allow military personnel to carry on military bases (7.7).

The New York Times’ pro-gun control results seem to stem from a heavy reliance on public health researchers. Furthermore, the Times only asks questions calling for more government regulations of gun ownership. But the Times’ panel was even more supportive of gun control than was the average public health researcher in our survey, so it is hard to believe that there wasn’t bias at work in the selection of the panel’s membership.

Americans have a right to be concerned with the increased frequency and severity of mass public shootings in their own country. But the fact of the matter is that the rest of the world has it worse, and is definitely not an example for the U.S. to follow. The U.S. has high gun ownership rates, and it hasn’t resulted in any elevated level of mass public shootings.

Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to speak the truth when it put others on the defensive or made her seem like a downer. The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter's food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn't seem to be going away despite so much talk. Rape at the elite American colleges, which wasn't going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from-their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. .. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable.

The two factions long struggled for control. (Some patterns start early: Barack Obama was not the first urban politician to complain that rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion.”)

Marx discovered the significance of economic power; and it is understandable that he exaggerated its status. He and the Marxists see economic power everywhere. Their argument runs: he who has the money has the power; for if necessary, he can buy guns and even gangsters. But this is a roundabout argument. In fact, it contains an admission that the man who has the gun has the power. And if he who has the gun becomes aware of this, then it may not be long until he has both the gun and the money. But under an unrestrained capitalism, Marx’s argument applies, to some extent; for a rule which develops institutions for the control of guns and gangsters but not of the power of money is liable to come under the influence of this power. In such a state, an uncontrolled gangsterism of wealth may rule. But Marx himself, I think, would have been the first to admit that this is not true of all states; that there have been times in history when, for example, all exploitation was looting, directly based upon the power of the mailed fist. And to-day there will be few to support the naïve view that the ‘progress of history’ has once and for all put an end to these more direct ways of exploiting men, and that, once formal freedom has been achieved, it is impossible for us to fall again under the sway of such primitive forms of exploitation. These considerations would be sufficient for refuting the dogmatic doctrine that economic power is more fundamental than physical power, or the power of the state. But there are other considerations as well. As has been rightly emphasized by various writers (among them Bertrand Russell and Walter Lippmann25), it is only the active intervention of the state—the protection of property by laws backed by physical sanctions—which makes of wealth a potential source of power; for without this intervention, a man would soon be without his wealth. Economic power is therefore entirely dependent on political and physical power. Russell gives historical examples which illustrate this dependence, and sometimes even helplessness, of wealth: ‘Economic power within the state,’ he writes26, ‘although ultimately derived from law and public opinion, easily acquires a certain independence. It can influence law by corruption and public opinion by propaganda. It can put politicians under obligations which interfere with their freedom. It can threaten to cause a financial crisis. But there are very definite limits to what it can achieve. Cæsar was helped to power by his creditors, who saw no hope of repayment except through his success; but when he had succeeded he was powerful enough to defy them. Charles V borrowed from the Fuggers the money required to buy the position of Emperor, but when he had become Emperor he snapped his fingers at them and they lost what they had lent.’ The dogma that economic power is at the root of all evil must be discarded. Its place must be taken by an understanding of the dangers of any form of uncontrolled power. Money as such is not particularly dangerous. It becomes dangerous only if it can buy power, either directly, or by enslaving the economically weak who must sell themselves in order to live.

Yet, the three very worst public shootings during 2001 and the first half of 2002 all occurred in Europe. Around the world, from Australia to England, countries that have recently strengthened gun control laws have seen violent crime soar. Ironically, the gun laws are passed because politicians promise they will reduce these types of crime.

Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model.