Two Colorado districts recall Democrats who voted for gun control

What these recall elections reveal most of all is that their advocates' logic & facts are neither logical nor factual--but instead reflect a simplistic, emotionally powerful narrative that's pure propaganda--propaganda spoon-fed to them by their worst enemies, who they mistake for their best friends.

Their worst enemies aren't their boogeymen, the dreaded Gun-grabbin' Metrosexual College boy California Libruls all in cahoots with Uppity Drug-Dealin' Blacks. Their worst enemies are actually the hyper-rich corporatists whose insatiable thirst for More has grabbed away the rank-&-file Republicans' economic security...& then told them that owning an AR-15 with an extended magazine will make up for that.

But an extended-magazine AR-15 can't change the fact that the incomes of the richest 1% have soared into the stratosphere over the last four decades, while most everyone else's has stagnated or gone overseas. However, modern economics are incredibly complicated. Guns are simple, concrete, satisfying. President Obama was right--these people are over their heads trying to deal with modern life but are too proud to admit it, so they do indeed cling to their guns & their tribalized version of Christianity.

They think the rich, conservative politicians & pundits who look like them are like them. That's tribal thinking at work, & as every con artist from The Music Man to Wayne LaPierre knows, it works like a charm.

These NRA members have been played.

Oh no! There's a slippery slope!

The NRA's war on the ATF, the CDC, and all the American citizens who depend on the government to save them from anarchy, all rests on one basic argument: that reasonable laws invariably lead to more extreme, unreasonable ones.

This is the "slippery slope" "argument."

But "slippery slope" is a metaphor, not an argument. Metaphors can illustrate points. They can't make them. There are incidents without number when a restriction led to even more restriction. There are also incidents without number where a restriction led to a loosening. These things have to be looked at on a case by case basis.

For example, Prohibition didn't lead to having the death sentence for possessing alcohol. Instead it was repealed. Marijuana possession laws were enacted in the last century, and they will almost certainly be repealed in the not too distant future. The voting age was moved from 21 to 18. It hasn't moved from 18 to 10.

There is no such thing as a "slippery slope" except for actual slopes--like on hills--that get slippery when they get wet.

Why we fight (for gun control)

Why we fight:

•Charlotte Bacon, 6
•Daniel Barden, 7
•Rachel Davino, 29
•Olivia Engel, 6
•Josephine Gay, 7
•Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
•Dylan Hockley, 6
•Dawn Hocksprungm, 47
•Madeleine Hsu, 6
•Catherine Hubbard, 6
•Chase Kowalski, 7
•Jesse Lewis, 6
•James Mattioli, 6
•Grace McDonnell, 7
•Anne Marie Murphy, 52
•Emilie Parker, 6
•Jack Pinto, 6
•Noah Pozner, 6
•Caroline Previdi, 6
•Jessica Rekos, 6
•Avielle Richman, 6
•Lauren Rousseau, 30
•Mary Sherlach, 56
•Victoria Sotom, 27
•Benjamin Wheeler, 6
•Allison Wyatt, 6

All murdered on December 14, 2012, by a man employing his NRA-certificated training combined with an AR-15 assault rifle firing .223 high velocity rounds with "mankiller" wobble-head bullets, loaded into multiple 30-round extended magazines.

This isn't the typical way people are murdered in America. However, it is typical for massacres, most of which occur in America, & almost none in other advanced countries (the Norwegian massacre of many dozens of young liberals by a right wing extremist being a notable exception). And the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter used the firearm of choice for people who massacre: a semiautomatic assault weapon using .223 high velocity rounds in extended magazines.

Not one of the grieving parents of Newtown has called for banning or confiscating guns. They have called for banning extended magazines, making background checks universal, & coming up with a comprehensive program to stop straw purchasers/gun traffickers. And to reform how we handle crazy people.

Nothing the Sandy Hook Elementary parents want would interfere with lawful gun owners buying & keeping guns for hunting, target practice, and home defense. They WOULD put a crimp in the fantasy commando shtick that's so profitable for the gun makers.

BTW one way to simplify background checks would be a universal biometric database like India is implementing.

If you live by the sword...

The NRA has a demographic problem no amount of it brilliantly Fascist propaganda can cure: its hard core is aging. Those huge gun sales are going to present gun owners building arsenals, while fewer and fewer households have guns in them, and fewer and fewer Americans practice hunting. The new sales are mostly for home defense against the gun nuts' fantasy of heavily armed black drug gangs assaulting their compounds, despite the statistical unlikelihood of that happening to any of them.

Turns out the real weapon defeating the NRA is....first person shooter videogames. That's what young men generally prefer to the hassle of a real weapon. They can duel with simulated humans in elaborately detailed commando scenarios--and they never have to clean their virtual firearms...or store them in a gun safe...or pay the big bucks for them.

Remember, though, I'm not arguing for them--just observing what's actually happening.

The remaining gun zealots are highly motivated, of course, though this article avoids the real secret of gun glamour: most gun owners have experienced a progressive lessening of economic security; the majority of Americans have become more and more different from them in both appearance and iifestyle; modern society's issues and functions are too complex for them to understand...and all these changes are emasculating.

But the gun gives them instant masculinity, and assault weapons give them even more, since assault weapons shift the self-pleasuring fantasy from Mighty Hunter to Invincible Commando on an Important Mission--exactly how the Adam Lanzas of the world see themselves BTW.

These people will never change.

But they will die out, slowly but surely. Hard to mount a fierce campaign against a congressman who dares to disagree with the NRA in the slightest when the protestors have to use walkers...

Lastly, the NRA's take no prisoners tactics are making more and more Americans heartily despite them. If/when we do get the upper hand...they will get no mercy (legislatively speaking, natch).

Beward of comment threads being flooded with comments from people doing it for money

Here's a fun game: go down any comment thread about a hot-button topic where big money is at stake, such as climate change, and guess which human-caused-climate change deniers are simply standard-issue anti-science right wing cranks, and which are doing this for money?

To find out more about this form of astroturfing--check out this Guardian article that includes info from an astroturfer with a guilty conscience:

"After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. He was part of a commercial team employed to infest internet forums and comment threads on behalf of corporate clients, promoting their causes and arguing with anyone who opposed them.

"Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. Or, to be more accurate, as a crowd of disinterested members of the public: he used 70 personas, both to avoid detection and to create the impression there was widespread support for his pro-corporate arguments."

Especially in technical areas many if not most honest commenters don't realize that they're duking it out with a pro who's there for the money.

The astroturfers are generally the ones who post long threads full of technical-sounding arguments and lots of links, where if you check out their logic, facts, and links, it's all a steaming pile of, er...malarkey.

I'm guessing these are the kind of guys you know in college who took the easy A classes and got their BA in Communications or some such, and don't have strong political ideas. But they're willing to act like they do if it pays the rent.

Sometimes these people have a moral awakening later in life. Lee Atwater did after he learned he was dying of cancer, and ran around apologizing to the folks he'd screwed over.

Remember the wheeler-dealers at Enron who talked gleefully with each other about the little old ladies they were shafting--along with whole states?

Or the car salesmen who acted like sleazeballs?

That's them.

What to tell your Uncle Harry the gun nut about the 2nd Amendment at the next family reunion

James Madison wrote the 2nd Amendment to make it ambiguous on purpose, to make it noble-sounding when in fact it was a compromise demanded under the table by the slave states led by Virginia. The Brits had attempted to confiscate American individual arms, but that wasn't a big deal when the 2nd Amendment was written, because America had been a separate nation for over a dozen years and thus the Brits had no say in who had guns here.

Who did have a say was the South, and the white oligarchs depended on white militias to keep black insurrections in check. But Madison couldn't come out and so this because the non-slave states would go ballistic.

So he had to come up with an ambiguous, pretty-sounding compromise that gave the slave states what they wanted--to keep their boot heels on black necks, while at the same the non-slave states could accept the 2nd Amendment as something all rugged frontiersman-y that fed into American mythmaking.

In other words, things haven't changed much from then to now. Look down this thread and you'll see that white Southern men are still obsessed about black men--particularly the one in the White House.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

(the more it changes, the more it stays the same--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1808-1890)

For a clear, well-written article about all this see The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, from the UC Davis Law Review, published in 1998.aAvifrom the from thestory ofabout thisaboutoclear, wello...See More

 

Is America the world's murder capitol?

Naw. We're just number 100 from the least murderous. Dozens of countries are worse.

The FBI crime report for 2011 (the most recent available) shows that:

In 2011, the overall murder rate for America was 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, a 1.5% decrease when
compared with the rate for the previous year.

Rate in "total cities"                                        5.5
Rate in "metropolitan statistical areas"           4.9
Rate in "Cities outside metropolitan areas"    4.4
Rate in "Nonmetropolitan Counties"              3.2
Rate in cities with a population of 250,000 to 499,999:           11.7 (the highest)
Rate in suburban areas & in cities with under 10K population: 2.9 (the lowest) (lower than in rural areas)

67% with firearms

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement

Now let's compare the lowest rate--2.9 per 100,000 in the 'burbs--with that of other countries:

American suburbs come out the same as Libya and worse than 79 other countries.

Our suburban murder rate is:
--about three times the murder rate of the Western European countries, Australia and New Zealand.
--15 times the murder rate of Hong Kong.
--7 times the rate of Japan.
--3.6 times the rate of Germany and Spain.

The differential is roughly comparable to the number of American homicides committed with guns.

Of course all this is unfair. Most other countries have cities, suburbs, and countryside as well--especially the rich countries.

So let's compare the murder rates by country. Our rate--using 2010 figures like Wikipedia does--puts us as more murderous than 100 other countries. Our neighbors-in-murder-rate include Thailand, Cuba, and Belarus. Russia is twice as bad. South Africa is 6.6 times worse. The most murderous country on Earth, Honduras, is 19 times worse than us.

On the other hand, countries safer than us include all other rich countries plus even countries like India, Turkey, Chile, Taiwan, and China.

And America is six times more murderous than rich countries like Germany and Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

What should determine a congressman's vote? The will of the people?

Congressmen serve at least half a dozen masters: (1) the individuals who bankroll their campaigns; (2) the party they belong to, which can determine whether they get primaried or not, and which may demand that they sacrifice the interests of their constituents in some instances for overall Party demands; (3) the welfare of the voters in their district, (5) the wishes of the voters in their district, and (6) the congressman's personal principles. 
 
And what determines the wishes of voters in a congressman's district? What if they've been the target of a clever, lavishly funded propaganda campaign by special interests who exploit those voters' fears and prejudices? 
 
In Nazi Germany, I'm sure a majority of voters believed everything bad was all the fault of the Jews. Here, today, for example, a majority of Republican voters still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They didn't just think that up. They were victimize by Republican demagoguery. 
 
And today a majority of American voters don't accept the fact that we're in the midst of dangerous global climate changes caused by human activity. They don't accept this because Exxon and the Koch brothers and other major petrochemical firms have spent a huge amount of money (from a non-billionaire viewpoint) in getting people to believe that. 
 
It isn't in their best interests to believe that. And their Congressman has a moral obligation to help convince them otherwise and to vote himself accordingly.  
 
With guns, here again a small group of immensely wealthy men involved in gun manufacturing and sales have spent a whole lotta money propagandizing people about guns, leading them to believe all sorts of patent falsehoods about guns and gun violence.  
 
A Congressman will feel immense pressure to cave in to the wishes of his patrons and his propagandized, badly misled voters. To think it's moral for him to cave in to this is, well, anything but moral.

The NRA disrespects the 2nd Amendment. That's right. Disrespects it.

It's a pity the gun maker's lobby--misleadingly calling itself the NRA--and the one third of its live members (as opposed to the million dead ones they keep on the rolls to make it look larger than it is)--have no respect for the 2nd Amendment, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court's current right wing majority as conferring a right to bear arms for individuals and a right to regulate those arms by governments. That second part is clearly stated in the first half of the 2nd Amendment.

Thus according to Heller the federal government can require the national registration of all firearms, require universal background checks, make straw man purchases a felony, ban unusual and dangerous firearms such as assault weapons, RPGs, flame throwers and machine guns, and more.

Rejecting half of the 2nd Amendment is worse than rejecting all of it, because it couples rights with responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities leads to chaos, just as responsibilities without rights leads to tyranny.

Thus the NRA and its shills are acting like spoiled five year old boys who want all the rights of grown-ups but none of the responsibilities of grown-ups.

They should show some respect for our Constitution. Their disrespect for it is downright unpatriotic. They call themselves conservatives when in fact they're anarchists.

Can you serve two masters? When it comes to gun control, Republican pols are having trouble doing so. Hence the filibuster.

Until we get public financing of elections, every politician must serve two kinds of master: voters and patrons.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the gun regulation debate. Especially with universal gun registration, supported by over 90% of voters and even over 2/3 of NRA rank and file members--but opposed by the gun makers, major patrons and congressional job-killers of those who bring down their wrath.

The solution? Prevent a vote. That way the general voting public won't notice that your first loyalty is to your patrons, not your voters. Heck, most Republican districts are so radically gerrymandered you can't lose to a Democrat anyway. So what even Republican voters want doesn't matter all that much.

And of course when one side is being promoted by a multibillion dollar industry and the other by a few grieving parents and a few politicians with a conscience, voters are more apt to hear the blaring bullhorn than a few teary pleas.

In addition, from time immemorial the rich and powerful have always had a core of shock troops--their bully boys--to go out and defend their interests. In Tehran it's the thug militias who go out and club and shoot protesters against the mullahs. Here it's more peaceful but still has that flavor: that is, the million or so gun nuts--not to be confused with most gun owners--the gun nuts who believe they have a right to own military ordnance without the government knowing they do and without any meaningful protections from crooks and psychos having almost equally free access to firearms of all types.

It's an unequal fight. The one positive sign is the growing disenchantment of Republican voters watching even their opinions being flouted flagrantly by the people they voted into office. 

...and a few Republican senators who are manning up and denouncing the threatened filibuster, including John McCain.

Poison oak and gun control

The NRA says the solution to gun violence is more guns.

America has more guns per capita than any other country,

Therefore America is the safest country on Earth.

Only it's the most dangerous rich country on Earth--by FAR.

Hmm. A paradox.

To we simple minded folk, it seems like telling someone covered with poison oak to scratch it to relieve the itching.
Of course then it iches even more. So you just scratch it even more....and more...and more...

What isn't a paradox is that you can trust the NRA's proposals to ALWAYS involve making and selling more guns. 

The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Something to say to your uncle Harry the gun nut...

If you're a gun owner and want to address this topic, do your side a favor and address the actual laws being considered now in Congress.  
 
So don't rant about how you have a constitutional right to bear firearms. You do. OK? Now the issue is what firearms under what circumstances, and what do we do about the issues of bad guys getting their hands on guns. 
 
For example, don't you think it's reasonable to have a federal law making it a felony to sell or give a firearm to someone who would fail a background check because he's a felon or a psycho and has been officially judged not to qualify for firearm ownership? 
 
After all, it's becoming clear that the average thug with a gun got it from a "straw man" buyer or one of a minority of gun shops that sell guns by the truckload to criminal syndicates and then "lose" the paperwork. 
 
Seems to be that the best way to maintain the right of good guys to bear arms is to try much harder to disarm those who have no such right. And the states, by themselves, haven't been able to do it. Modern transportation makes it all to easy to buy a gun in Virginia and take it to D.C. 
 
Bottom line: it would allay the fears of the majority of Americans who don't own guns if gun owners would start publicly stating that they agree that the Second Amendment does not confer a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. And that they agree that the Second Amendment supports laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. And that the government can and should ban the sale to civilians of particularly dangerous and unusual weapons. 

Don't give up on gun control

Gun rights zealots believe they will always win--and that the rest of us will always lose. They have nothing but contempt and active dislike for anyone and everyone who advocates any form of gun ownership control, no matter how minor. If pressed, they claim their right to own any kind of gun they choose is based on the Constitution's 2nd Amendment having the purpose of enabling citizens to go into armed revolt against the government, using firearms comparable to those used by our military.Their message to gun control advocates is despair: "You are incompetent to talk about guns, your proposals are unconstitutional, and we OWN Congress (and every state legislature). Give up. We will always defeat you. And you deserve to be defeated, you contemptible worms."

They are that far out.

Equally far out is their defense of crazy people and criminals being able to get guns. Of course gun rights zealots say the exact opposite when they speak in generalities. But gun rights zealots are, as a group, self-centered and emotionally immature. So they see anything we could do to keep guns out of the hands of nuts and crooks only from the perspective of potential limitations to the zealots' rights to own guns--and to keep government agencies from knowing that the zealots have guns, and knowing which guns those are.

So they oppose changing the current federal privacy and mental health laws, which currently make it nearly impossible to institutionalize crazy people who don't think they're crazy--which is most of them. And they oppose universal gun registration, which would let us track straw buyers who are the source of most of the guns crooks possess.

Don't confuse gun rights zealots with gun owners in general, most of whom support at least some forms of gun control--especially universal background checks.

The only thing gun rights zealots support to deal with these all-too frequent massacres and gun homicides is more guns in more hands, which they say is the only way to more safety.

Of course every nation is an experiment in governance that other nations can study.America has more guns per capita with fewer controls than any other nation with comparable demographics. Comparisons prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our path--more guns, less regs--leads to four to eight times as many homicides (not just gun homicides) as comparable countries, and the more gun controls, the fewer homicides. It's that simple and that plain. The rate of violence is comparable to that of comparable counties--the difference with America is that here that violence is vastly more likely to result in death.

The gun makers know this, but they have proven repeatedly is that all they care about is profit. Their shills, who lead the NRA, tread a well-worn path after every massacre:

1. Loudly denounce gun control advocates who dare to use the massacre to try to get gun control legislation enacted--denounce them as exploiting the suffering of the victims and their families for political gain. Demand a period of weeks to "respect the victims" before launching any discussion about the massacre, which gives the NRA time to marshall its forces and lobby legislators.

2. Try to slow-walk such discussions--the more time that elapses between the massacre and the discussion, the more time the NRA has to prevent--or gut--any legislation that does ensue.

3. Loudly insist that the ONLY solution to gun violence is more guns in more hands. Claim that the expired assault weapons ban didn't work (a baldfaced lie--it did to a a degree, hampered by the gun lobby gutting the bill). Claim that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (a baldfaced lie--other countries that restrict guns have their criminals using knives mostly). Claim that massacres happen everywhere (they do--but they do several times as often here, and more are killed in each massacre here on average).

4. Trot out anecdote after anecdote showing how having a gun protected someone. This works because most people are innumerate and thus don't understand statistics (along with most abstractions).

5. Send forth the gun control zealots to overwhelm every newspaper and blog forum that mentions gun control, after stirriing them up with wild accusations.

6. Constantly try to change the subject from gun regulation to gun confiscation, despite the fact that no politician in America talking about gun confiscation.

7. Constantly try to change the subject of gun control to the subject of violent mental illness. It's a valid subject but not instead of gun control--it should be as well as gun control

8. Deny that there's any such thing as an assault weapon--important since the bulk of gun maker profits come from selling assault weapons, despite the fact that they're marketed to gun buyers as assault weapons, using military commando mission atmospherics.

9. Depend on the fact that the million-odd gun rights zealots wake up each morning thinking about guns, and typically associate gun possession with virility, so this group will ceaseless promote their position, while most people only think about guns for a few days or weeks after each massacre.

10. Continue to lobby to suppress any attempt to study gun violence by government agencies (a sucessful effort for decades).

11, Continually talk about video games and violent movies as the cause of massacres, ignoring the literally millions of young men who play such games and see such movies all the time and never commit acts of physical violence, also ignoring the difference between "shooting" cartoon people with a computer mouse vs. shooting human-shaped targets with real bullets fired from a real gun on a real target range.

12. Continually frame the debate as one between patriotic Americans and people advocating foreign ideas that violate the Constitution (talk about Constitution constatnly), bordering on treason. Use inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric, including denouncing the President for having Secret Service protection for his children when he doesn't want that for yours.

13. Try to wear down the other side on every front. Constantly belittle  gun control advocates for being ignorant about firearms and gun violence research (ironic since the NRA has prevented the government from studying gun violence).

Gun rights zealots typically know a lot more about firearms than gun control advocates. I'm not as ignorant about firearms as most gun control advocates, but even so I've found myself having to do hours of research to get up to speed enough to really debate with these guys.

And once I was up to speed I found that gun rights zealots--and the NRA--habitually and knowingly lie to the rest of us in order to advance their desire to own firearms of any type they like without impediments. I only discovered this after I'd done my homework. It was not obvious at first. This was especially interestting because gun rights zealots represent themselves as the most moral, patriotic, upstanding citizens. But in my experience they routinely practice taqiyya (an Arab term "honorable lying to Infidels") with those outside the gun community. If the NRA asserts something, you can safely assume it's a baldfaced lie unless proven otherwise.

For example, NRA membership claims include tens of thousands of members who are no longer alive, along with members whose membership was a freebie including with a gun purchase or gun show admission. It includes a million or so gun rights zealots along with three million or so gun owners whose views differ strikingly from those advocated by the zealots and the NRA leadership.

So when you debate with gun rights zealots, take note of the claims they make, and when you find out they're lying, and exactly how, consider the likelihood that they knew they were lying when they said that to you--and let them know, calmly but inexorably.

That is, use the techniques my spouse used to use when she worked as a collecor for a computer peripherals manufacturer. She never got mad but she never let people off the hook--and she took note of every promise they made, and used that in subsequent conversations, so as to draw the noose progressively tighter and tighter. And of course she never called them liars. She just pointed out what they said, what was factual, and asked them to account for the disparity.

That's the twofer. Never get mad--never relent.

It looks as though the gun makers and their eager shills will mostly win the current fight going on in Congress. But remember how many fights homosexual rights advocates lost before they started winning. Most political victories stand on the shoulders of innumerable losses.

And this is important.

Gun control advocates don't always stick to the high ground

At Connecticut state legislature hearings over the Newtown massacre, MSNBC presented--and the gun control world accepted--the proposal that gun nuts had been heckling a grieving father.

Wrong. MSNBC lied through editing the video--the grieving father had asked a rhetorical question during his testimony, demanding to know whether anyone could justify assault weapons being in private hands, then saying no one had an answer to his question--upon which several gun rights advocates in the crowd shouted out 2nd Amendment-type answers.

MSNBC edited out the relevant parts showing that the father had kind of set up the gun rights advocates by presenting what was obviously a rhetorical question, then acting as if he's asked a real question. And the MSNBC editors knew better.

Now at the same hearings a Sandy Hook father made an impassioned defense of gun rights that the RWM (Right Wing Media) ballyhooed. Then it turned out that more artful editing--this time from the other side--had concealed the fact that he wasn't a grieving father of a Sandy Hook Elementary murdered child at all--he was the father of a child who attended another school altogether.

This father hadn't pulled a fast one--he never claimed to be the father of a Sandy Hook victim--but the RWM did in promoting his gun rights rant as if he was.

We're never going to succeed in opposing the gun makers and their enthusiastic pawns if we stoop to their level. It gives them ammunition (so to speak) and lets them justify their own underhandedness.

The NRA Fake Fact Factory is working three shifts!

Anytime there's a mass murder committed with assault weapons, the gun lobby's Fake Fact Factory kicks into high gear, cranking out the same sort of supposedly accurate information that the cigarette industry put out for decades in its successful effort to protect its equally deadly profits.

The irony is that the gun lobby--through its political wing, AKA the Republican Party--has effectively banned agencies of the federal government from studying gun violence or even reporting the statistical data accumulated.

Using private research, though, you can draw some conclusions:

1. Almost every single thing a gun rights advocate says is factually incorrect.

2. Guns turn violence into homicide.

3. Assault weapons turn homicide into mass murder.

Here's the c>>onclusion of FactCheck.org, the most reputable nonpartisan factchecking organization:

>>among advanced countries, the U.S. homicide rate stands out. “We seem to be an average country in terms of violence and aggression,” says Harvard’s Hemenway. “What we have is huge homicide rates compared to anybody else.”

Says Wintemute: “The difference is that in this country violence involves firearms and firearms change the outcome.”<<

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/

The gun lobby and its shills tools also make mathematically impossible claims about all the lives saved by defensive gun use. Turns out the hundreds of thousands they cite are more like a few hundred (compared to the 10,000 lives lost because of our gun culture). The most popular fake "study" (which turns out to be a methodologically invalid survey by a gun nut with a PhD) was subjected to a statistical analysis by people who actually understand statistics, and ripped it to probabalistic shreds:

ScienceBlogs: How many lives are saved by defensive gun use?
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1994/10/19/dgu-00007/

Woman uses gun to defend herself!

Yes, a woman used a gun to defend herself. A gun nut stated this on an Amazon.com forum triumphantly, as if that proved that everyone should be armed to the teeth. 

This was my response:


re: A civilian successfully uses a gun in self-defense.

In 2% of car crashes, the driver/passenger(s) would have been better off if they hadn't worn seat belts.

Therefore cars shouldn't have seat belts.

That is your reasoning.

I strongly recommend taking a free, online course in statistics before you pontificate on comment threads again.

Here's a good one--very entertaining, by one of the best online teachers, Salman Khan:

http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2564/Statistics

Oh, and the relevant stats here:
Lives saved by gun defense each year: around 200.
Lives lost by gun homicides each year: about 10,000.
Ratio of homicide (gun or otherwise) in the US vs. other rich countries: about 8 to 1. The level of violent crime is comparable--but ours are more likely to result in homicide due to this country being awash in guns.

Of course the gun industry lobbying organization, the NRA, put out scads of fake facts about all this.

FactCheck.org assessed them and found them self-serving and largely fact-free, to put it mildly.

Here's the link:

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/

How the Gun Makers Arm Psychos & Crooks

Look at it from the gun maker's point of view. A sale of a gun to someone who's criminally insane or a criminal nets the gun maker just as much as a sale to a responsible NRA member who only uses his firearms legally.

Actually, in some ways it's better (assuming your sense of obligation as a gun maker is, as Milton Friedman said, only to profit), since it lets you argue for people buying guns to defend themselves from the people you've sold guns to.

Every time there's a massacre, the gun makers' lobby (AKA the NRA) and its political servants (AKA the GOP) first say it's political opportunism and an insult to the dead to take up gun control "at this time." Then, a week or so later, after they've lined up their ducks in those good old smoke-filled back rooms, they make a public statement that the problem of gun massacres is everything but guns, and the solution is always "more guns" along with measures that will supposedly keep the gun out of the hands of criminals and psychos, because "guns don't kill. People kill."

Well, people kill with the connivance of the NRA. Because the gun makers and their shills have successfully ensured virtually free access to guns by crooks and nuts. And by "guns" I mean assault weapons above all, because they are the most profitable segment of the gun market by far. 

Here's how the gun makers make getting guns a snap without discriminating on the basis of race, creed, criminal record, or psychiatric record:

1. "Felons Finding It Easy to Regain Gun Rights: Decades of lobbying have loosened laws, allowing felons to regain gun rights often with little or no review."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/felons-finding-it-easy-to-regain-gun-rights.html

2. "Some With Histories of Mental Illness Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back: States are increasingly allowing people who lost their firearm rights because of mental health issues to appeal to have them restored."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/us/03guns.html

3. "States Struggle to Disarm People Who’ve Lost Right to Own Guns: There is serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06guns.html

4. "N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say: Researchers who study guns and violence say the influence of the group has all but choked off funds."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html

5: "Guns in Public, and Out of Sight: As states ease concealed weapon laws, some of the permits are ending up in the wrong hands."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/us/more-concealed-guns-and-some-are-in-the-wrong-hands.html

6. The NRA sponsors/endorses bogus "research" supporting more guns/fewer controls.

http://propagandaprofessor.net/tag/dr-kleck/

7. "Over 62,000 guns unaccounted for in U.S. since 2008...weak federal gun laws and irresponsible gun dealers allow tens of thousands of firearms to leave gun shops without background checks or a record of sale"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012500867.html

8. "NRA-led gun lobby's powerful influence: The NRA-led gun lobby has consistently outmaneuvered and hemmed in the ATF, using political muscle to erect barriers to tougher gun laws."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121406045.html

9. Book: "Ricochet--Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist"
--shows how the NRA, among other things, works behind the scenes to weaken gun laws that would otherwise protect civilians from guns being wielded by psychos and crooks. The book is aimed at NRA members; its central thesis is that the NRA exploits its members with phony 2nd Amendment scares but really just works for its top management (the best-paid of any nonprofit organization in America) and the gun makers.

http://www.amazon.com/Ricochet-Confessions-Lobbyist-Richard-Feldman/dp/0471679283/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356645217&sr=1-5&keywords=NRA

The gun debate under the hood

The National Rifle Association used to be a national club for hunters and target shooters, with a dash of home defense thrown in.

But in the 1980s the percentage of gun owners in the population started declining and is still declining.

This is probably due to young people generally preferring to play first person shooter video games instead of going out at 3am on a weekend morning and sitting in a duck blind for hours, or hiking through cold muddy woods looking for deer that you may or may not see.

Then the gun industry discovered something: military weapons sell. The look of a battlefield weapon, all black and beautifully ugly and menacing--think Daniel Craig, the latest 007--turned out to be irresistible to existing gun owners--generally older men. So the gun industry too battlefield weapons and tinkered with them to make them street legal, and started a sales boom going on to this day, albeit muchly consisting of sales to folks who already own guns.

And it discovered something else: the NRA would make a splendid vehicle to use to sell these guns. It's hard for any enthusiast association to resist monied attention from an associated industry, and it didn't. Besides which the hard core of NRA members--the 29% who oppose closing the gun show loophole that means 40% of American gun sales are done without background checks.

The gun makers discovered that these gun owners will go to rallies, pepper congressmen with phone calls and emails, and generally work as diligent unpaid shills for the gun makers. Sweet.

One problem: military weapons aren't great for hunting or for home defense. Hunting rifles are good for hunting, shotguns are ideal for home defense. Assault weapons are good for killing people en masse. They're generally not aimed closely but instead used to lay down fire into a crowd of people--ostensibly a platoon of charging Taliban fighters. But kindergartners are even more killable, so if your main purpose is revenge against society through a high body count of its most precious members...well, an AR-15 will do the job beautifully.

So consequently the very essence of an assault weapon is a high rate of fire (plus a new generation of rounds that have vastly more killing power than older rounds of similar diameter). The law bans machine guns, but that's easy to get around. The gun makers redesigned their assault weapons to not be able to be fired automatically, but it doesn't matter because in semiautomatic mode an AR-15 with a 100 round extended cartridge can empty that cartridge into a crowd in a minute or less.

You can't keep up that rate of fire--the gun will start to jam and get "cook off" rounds--but if your goal is to quickly kill a lot of people before the cops arrive and then kill yourself, the AR-15's rated sustainable fire rate of 15 rounds a minute is irrelevant.

So while assault rifles and pistols--all semiautomatics designed to accept giant clips or even drum cartridges--are thrilling to own by ordinary gun enthusiasts--and by golly you look incredibly manly cradling a gun that looks like what Navy SEALs use--their real purpose is massacres, and the guns don't discriminate between Taliban fighters and a first grade class at Sandy Hook Elementary school.

This creates a public image issue for the NRA and the gun makers who control it completely at this point.

So when a massacre happens, the NRA says they're sad. Then a few days later they say we mustn't discuss gun policy now because it's a time for mourning. But the gun policy discussion never happens. Instead they lobby Congress to loosen gun laws instead of tightening them.

If challenged, NRA spokesmen say it's not the gun's fault. It's the psycho's. It's violent video games. (But now do you see why they're always trying to get violent videogames restricted?)
It's liberal atheists taking God out of the schools. And sure, all the other rich countries have vastly lower murder rates but they're just as violent. People use knives if they can't get guns.

Well duh. That's why they have a much lower murder rate a third the number of school massacres.

Finally they spend millions to defeat any politician who tries to restrict gun ownership in any way whatsoever.

In the last election they focused on seven Congressmen and the President. They lost four of the seven congressional race and lost even bigger on the President.

Seems like their mythic reputation of being able to crush any politician who opposes them is just that: a myth.

So that's the drill. We managed to ban assault weapons in 1994 but it didn't work because they grandfathered in all the existing assault weapons and added so many loopholes it wasn't hard to work around them, selling assault weapons with one or two features omitted but never the crucial one: the capacity to accept extended cartridges (cartridges designed for the new rounds with higher killing power).

No other rich country permits assault weapons, and that's the main reason why the average massacre happens here.

So even banning assault rifles isn't enough. We won't get anywhere unless we ban all guns--rifles and pistols--designed to accept extended cartridges, and don't grandfather in the existing ones. They'd have to be confiscated (and a fair market price paid for them, unfortunately), along with their extended cartridges.

The NRA's hardcore 29% would go berserk, naturally. These are the kind of people who believe that the Constitution gives them the right to own any kind of firearm without having to so much as register it. They're disdainful of the Supreme Court saying that guns can be regulated. They harbor dark fantasies of another Civil War, and though they'd never say it in public, the civil war they envision is whites against the rest. They read about home invasion by gangs of thugs, and even though they may live thousands of miles away from such events, they spend a lot of time thinking about personal and national disaster scenarios.

Some belong to private militias, or are survivalists. Some don't. All hate Obama with a fiery passion--it has to be seen to be believed. And they seriously dislike Liberals, and speak to and of them with contempt. To be fair, Liberals speak of them as "gun nuts" and are equally contemptuous, but they aren't armed...

And of course the NRA (=the gun makers' lobby) stokes these apocalyptic fires assiduously--not in what they say to the world at large but in what they say to the faithful.

So much so that if you dare to question their assumptions some will tell you you're stupid and should deal with something you know about. Not very persuasive, but they're used to getting their way through intimidation, so it's a familiar modus operandum.

They'll also blame the psychos and our inability to lock 'em up until after they've killed someone. They're right about this. The average "homeless" person is mentally ill. A third of prison inmates are mentally ill. Both should be in insane asylums, which back in the 1970s both liberals and conservatives wanted to close, and close them they did.

Now it's nearly impossible to institutionalize a crazy person, no matter how crazy they act, unless they commit a major crime.

Coming up with a better policy on psychos won't stop them all. Confiscating assault weapons won't stop all gun homicides. But we have to do both, not one or the other.

As for violent videogames--I don't play them myself, but even though they cut into gunmaker profits I don't find that sufficient cause to ban them. Their contribution to violent behavior is unclear. Killers play them before killing, but non-killers play them too.

Assault weapon owners say they shouldn't be punished for the crimes of a few, just as violent videogame players would say. But while the games may lead to violence, you can't shoot a real person with a videogame. You can with an assault weapon.

And they wouldn't be being punished. The problem is that they seem to have nearly rejected the social compact--you know, where we surrender a measure of personal freedom for the benefits of living in a society. They talk about the social compact like a five year old boy being told to behave himself.

The irony is that liberals seem to have just as much trouble with the social compact, focusing on the rights of crazy people without considering the right of the rest of us not to be killed by crazy people.

Talking giving something up "for the greater good" is anathema to hardcore NRA types, but seriously--they'd still have their hunting rifles, their shotguns, their revolvers. They just wouldn't have military weaponry. They already know they can't have M-239s or shoulder-mounted Stingers. They just don't realize that the AR-15 shouldn't be in private hands.

And the only way to ensure that crooks and crazies don't have them is to ensure that nobody has them. Sorry, but nothing else will work.

To NRA members

If you look around and see which way the tide is flowing, there's going to be gun control legislation, and it's going to pass, and the President is going to sign it.

It will in all likelihood reinstate the assault weapons ban, along with banning extended magazines. The questions are about what will be defined as an assault weapon, how many rounds will define an extended clip, which handguns will fall under the assault weapon provisions--and, possibly most important of all, how they will close the gun show loophole that 71% of NRA membership wants to close, not to mention everyone else. 

So all the talk you see on online forums stoutly defending against any and all gun controls is spitting in the wind. If you want to do something constructive for gun owners, tell the NRA leadership to stop working as the gun manufacturers' lobby and start acting as an advocate for gun owners. And contribute to the specifics of what the inevitable upcoming gun control legislation should do.

The gun industry has successfully defeated all legislation for decades. If you think that's still true, you need to get out more. Keep it up and you'll just be contributing to the destruction of the NRA as a player in Washington. Because it's becoming toxic to be associated with the NRA. You can only stop it by acting like responsible citizens and parents as well as gun enthusiasts. And that's the only way you can avoid the upcoming gun regulations from being even harsher than they're going to be.

The train is pulling out of the station. You don't want to be galloping down the tracks after it, watching it disappear over the horizon