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 →

Suicides and Guns

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Gun control groups love to say that there are “30,000 deaths from gun violence every year.” What they don’t say is that 62% of those are suicides, almost all of which are committed with legally acquired handguns (no assault weapons or extra capacity magazines required). The common retort is that if America had fewer guns, there would be fewer suicides. Yet a brief examination of international data shows this to be utter buncombe. The World Health Organization (WHO) tallied suicides around the globe, and the Small Arms Survey estimated private gun ownership rates. WHO also noted how people exit this life when it gets too rough for them. The chart to the right pretty well debunks that guns are the determinant variable for suicides. The United States has way more guns than anyone else, yet their suicide rate is not terribly higher than international averages (11.1 suicides for every 100,000 … Continue reading →

Only Scattered School Shootings

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School shootings are actually pretty rare, though you would never know if you listened to gun control groups. USA Today recently illustrated the point, even while attempting to sensationalize the topic. In a story titled “Deadly school shootings since Columbine”, the paper created a timeline showing when such events occurred. I suspect their goal was to make each tragedy easy to find and read about. What it really showed was how infrequent such events are. In the slider bar at page top, there are multi-year gaps between such events.  This matches data from the federal government that noted a low mortality rate and a steadily falling rate of school deaths. This is one point that needs to be stressed: Things have been getting better for the past couple of decades. Violence against children is falling, with the occasional lunatic mass murderer causing angst. Statistically speaking, your child is safer than … Continue reading →

Negligent Discharge and CCWs

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A Gun Facts fan asked what we know about concealed carry licencees and negligent discharges (accidental discharges). Frankly, there isn’t much out there. I wish there were concise statistics on this subject, but such events are rare enough that nobody in government, criminology or epidemiology finds it worth the trouble to investigate. The best we can do is triangulate some other numbers.  a) According to the CDC, in the most recent reporting year, there were 606 accidental firearm deaths. Not all of these were really accidents and not all were negligent discharges. There is no breakdown, but Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns cites one set of studies (investigative reports by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company) that note most accidental gun deaths were due to dumb behavior (not negligent discharge) – people drunk, playing with guns, walking into a hunter’s line of fire, etc. b) There are about 11 million CCW holders in the … Continue reading →

LCPGV: The 20 Year Canard

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The new anti-gun agitprop masters are in the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. I’ll be writing about them frequently because they are: Getting good at creating falsehoods. Are drafting laws and getting them passed in California. Have money … and lots of it. Their most recent con is claiming that California’s 20 year drop in gun deaths is due to gun control laws. “Proof in the Data: Thousands of Lives Saved” is their tag line and is accompanied by a chart showing the firearm death rate in the Golden State. There are a number of major problems with their numbers (mainly Cal’s fast falling suicide rate) but more importantly is what they omit, namely criminal control laws. Their chart begins in 1993, a year with no significant gun control laws in California and the year when violent crime nationwide was peaking. If anything Cal rode a national wave. But … Continue reading →