Author Archives: Editorial Team

Assault Rifle Rename

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It would be easy to laugh if the motivations of gun control groups were not so well advertised. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (LCPGV) is the newly self-anointed gun control propaganda group. I attended one of their meetings where they were collaborating with members of MADD and the anti-tobacco coalition, openly discussing reforming public opinion. Their desire to enact more gun control laws – regardless of efficacy – is something they promote with slightly snarky glee. So when they get basic definitions wrong, I doubt it is amateurish idiocy. One LCPGV web page I discovered this graphic. Ignore the irrational concepts it promotes, but pay close attention to the text block in the lower right where they claim an “assault rifle” is a “semi-automatic firearm”. According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Small Arms Identification and Operations Guide, assault rifles are “short, compact, select-fire weapons that fires a … Continue reading →

Holder on Hold

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Despite heavy federal penalties for illegally acquiring guns or committing crimes with them, the feds have never been big on prosecuting gun crimes. As Bill Clinton’s attorney general said (and I paraphrase) “that’s a state issue.” (see our infographic on current attorney general Eric Holder who helps smuggle guns to Mexican drug cartels, and is responsible for what you are about to read). News of the day shows the trends. Federal gun crime prosecutions started to rise once the National Instant (background) Check System (NICS) was in place, then started a decline in the latter Bush years. Under Obama, the decline was not reversed. There are a number possibilities with this trend line. Since crime in general has been falling over the past decades, perhaps the total number of ripe opportunities to prosecute people is also falling. But that argument is implausible since there are over 34,000 Brady Act retail purchase violations committed by felons … Continue reading →

Reason gets it wrong

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In a recent blog piece, the otherwise reasonable Reason magazine got the Chicago violence story wrong. In short, Reason was saying that things in Chicago are not bad … compared to other horrible places … and that violence is a lot less than at it’s peak. The problem with this … errrr … reasoning is that by any measure, Chicago violence is off the charts and not doing as well as the nation. This first chart shows the trends. You notice that the rest of America is much safer than Chicago, and had I the time I could run the same series for other major metro areas and get similar results. More to the point, most of Chicago’s “progress” echoes national trends (the second chart put the U.S. on a different axis so we can see trend tracked together). This means whatever minor good if happening in Chicago is likely unrelated … Continue reading →

Children and handgun availability

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One bit of persistent good news is that very few children die from guns in the United States. There is no need to recite all the other statistics about things that kill kids. We know that suffocation, drowning, poisons and other life hazards are more dangerous to kids than guns. The rate of child gun deaths remains low, about one kid per day out of a population of 61 million such critters. But I had to look at the trends, because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ annual Firearms in Commerce reports show that the number of guns keeps increasing steadily. Certain policy groups promote that gun availability is a danger to your offspring. Not the case. Peaking in 1993 (as most violent crime did), the rate of kids being killed with guns (regardless of the cause) has been falling fast, and leveling off around 2004 (around the same time that violent crime across … Continue reading →

AKs and ARs: Real assault rifles vs. mythical “assault weapons”

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When Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, passed away, some media reports estimated that about 100 million AKs around the world. They are full-fledged and full-auto war weapons. There are between 3-10 million AR-15s in the United States. These are civilian, semi-automatic sporting rifles, and not weapons of war. This perspective is important. In the worst of the worst places around the globe − Syria, Rwanda, Somalia − AK-47s are the norm and the corpses are plenty. Civilian AR-15s are nearly never used in homicides in the U.S. (yes, it has happened, but statistically it is so rare you cannot assign statistical accuracy to their use in crimes). Mexican drug cartels show how this all gets in the way of gun policy. Drug cartels like AK-47s … a lot. South America is awash in Soviet made AK-47s left over from when the former communist block was exporting their ideology one bullet at … Continue reading →

False evidence, biased judges

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One reason constitutional rights are made inviolate is because judges have been known to violate them. If passed, a California law will be invalidated due to this principle. Cali is considering giving judges to power to take away a person’s guns based on something less than evidence. Known as AB1014 and the Ex Parte Gun Violence Restraining Order bill, the law would empower a judge to revoke the Second Amendment if a person is claimed to be a danger to himself or others. This is one of several knee-jerking reactions to the recent Santa Barbara slashing/shooting/driving homicides homicides. The idea is that is a friend, family member, neighbor or perfect stranger claims you are armed and nuts, the government can take away your firearms. Lack of real evidence is the issue. The law as currently written requires a judge to consider squishy evidence such as written or oral statements by … Continue reading →

EveryCon and Your Child

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Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group EveryTown should be renamed EveryCon. In a bit of email agitprop, they made the following two statements: I want you to imagine a chilling scenario: Your child is at friend’s house for a sleepover. While she’s there, her friend starts playing with a parent’s unsecured gun. All of a sudden, the gun fires. A child is unintentionally shot and killed. The intent of this first one is to frighten anyone who likes kids and wants them to be safe, which is basically everybody. To create fear, they invent a personalized scenario, then … Sadly, this sort of tragedy happens with frightening regularity in our country. In 2013, almost two kids per week were killed in shootings that involved unsecured guns. … they present that scenario is real. This is a common propaganda ploy, and one equally matched in shamelessness and ham-handedness. You would think that … Continue reading →

Booze, not bullets

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Alcohol has always been fun, but deadly. Now we find out the the odds of dying from drinking is much larger than dying from guns. A recent Center for Disease Control (CDC) study determined that 88,000 working age Americans die from excessive drinking (not always from the booze itself, but tied to guzzling more than one should). This tally provides some perspective. We have long known that working-age adults were almost three times as likely to be killing by a motor vehicle, and almost five times more likely to get poisoned than to catch a bullet meant for them or someone they were standing close to. But consuming more than a couple of drinks a day is deadlier still. Why bring this up? For perspective’s sake. People picture guns as a huge daily threat when compared to other things – voluntary liver abuse and associated pancreatitis, hypertension, prostate cancer and cirrhosis … Continue reading →

74 School Shootings Bunk

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How you define a thing defines that thing. Recently the President of the United States, echoing without analysis a gun control group sound bite, talked about how there have been 74 school shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre. He did not elaborate on how he came by this number because, frankly, he doesn’t know what he is talking about (surprise). Like many criminological things, the definition of a “school shooting” is borderline nonsensical and defined by government criminologists. In the Bureau of Justice Statistics publication Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2013, they note: School associated violent deaths include those that occurred while the victim was on the way to or returning from regular sessions at school or while the victim was attending or traveling to or from an official school sponsored event. Ponder this for a moment. A kid wearing the wrong colors while dashing from school to home through a gang-infested … Continue reading →

Media Meddling

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Since I work with the media to help them understand the realities about guns and public policy, I receive many media inquiries. One source is via Help A Reporter Out (HARO), a service where reporters can widely query experts. After the rampage in Santa Barbara, a reporter from the Arizona Republic nakedly asked for expert to help the gun control industry craft better market messages. We all accept there is bias in all media. We also accept that reporters, like the rest of us, often skew their work. But the request from Megan Finnerty goes beyond bias: she is actively aiding a political ideology, and thus abusing the very word “journalist”. Here is her request (minus some links she provided). Folks everywhere should call the “newspaper” (800-331-9303) and express their concerns: I am looking for thoughts on how Richard Martinez, the outspoken father of a young man killed in the Isla … Continue reading →