Predictably in the wake of the shooting of a US politician and her surrounding admirers by an incoherent leftist (but I repeat myself), the journalistic profession continues to show just how completely they do not understand the subject they write about.
It is too painful for a nation traumatised by Tucson to reflect how these virtues have been betrayed once again by the insidious gun culture of America; by the pathetic weakness of laws which allow criminals and madmen to get their hands on real weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute; by the gun lobby’s intimidation of politicians in vulnerable seats; by the greed of the gunmakers who nowadays prefer to manufacture weapons more suitable for mass murder than for individual defence.
Yet far from gunmakers (who are a trivial political force) driving this debate, never was there a more truly ‘grass roots’ movement in the USA than the one which supports the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover ‘individual defence’ is only one of the reasons the Second Amendment exists… the primary reason for this piece of constitutional artifice is to keep the population armed as a counterweight not to criminals, well private sector criminals that is, but to the state itself.
But to expect a mainstream journalist writing for a British newspaper declaiming about US affairs to understand that… well I suppose that is like expecting a rodent to suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. It just ain’t going to happen. People like journalist Harold Evans have hardly blinked as personal liberties have been remorselessly eroded across the western world and when they call for yet more state controls, their opinions should be judged accordingly.
Given that Gabrielle Giffords herself is a firm believer in RKBA, this article is peculiarly insensitive and disgusting, even by the standards of the gun-grabbers.
And here I thought America has been betrayed by the insidious release culture. That is, that someone this mentally deranged and a threat to others cannot be detained against their will to protect society simply because of “the rights” of the mentally deranged to be free.
Banishing the existence of guns would not have stopped Loughner, he would have moved on to bombs or arson or poisonings or plowing cars through crowds. But detaining Loughner in an asylum would have saved people.
We’re used to this kind of stuff or maybe resigned is the better word, in the US.
Here is a nation that was founded on the daring idea of individuality, an individuality that restricted the state and empowered those same citizens to be armed watchers of the state itself. Over time since the late 19th century, that idea has increasingly fallen out of favor with the powered elites and their friends in the media/academia. They know the unwashed masses are dangerous if armed.
The political party of the state has learned the hard way that the ONE (sadly the only one) right we as citizens have that the majority will loudly defend at the ballot box and has pretty much publicly stopped efforts to restrict gun rights. The media/academia though have no accountability threats to their existence and still “fight” on. This will not change here or in the birthplace of modern free western thought I’m afraid.
Is this guy British? Even more patronising if so. Pretty insensitive. Maybe Delingpole could be sent round to give him a talking to.
Also, a 1 in 20,000 chance of being murdered is still pretty low. Certainly it is not a high enough probability to justify trying to regulate away any negative event of any kind
Furthermore, the statistic about states with more weapons having higher murder rates than those with fewer does not prove causation.
Oh Gawd , Not Harold Evans !! One of those colonizers who came over here to tell us lowly benighted natives how things should be done. The proper British (fabian) way. Along with his wife, (Tina Brown) he has carved himself a niche inside the world of Manhattan’s left wing, great and good.
The freedom to own guns represents everything that Britain’s powerful chattering class hates about America. Its freedom (relative to Europe) its refusal to go along with their plans, the way its politicians live in fear of the voters, its social equality.
The 2nd amendment is one thing that Americans feel very very strongly about. But every decade the Donks decide that they have to try and satisfy their base on this issue and they get beaten down. Its sad to see the GOP’s Peter King proposing his silly rule to control guns carried near politicians. I wonder if he still wants an exception for IRA guns carried near British MPs?
As with a situations where statistics are abused, you can bet your bottom dollar that if guns were outlawed in all 50 states bar Alaska then th number of guns purchased in Alaska would go through the roof (along with prices, at least initially until supply and demand were balanced). The fact that states where gun restrictions are in place MIGHT, POSSIBLY have lower deaths by gun related murder per capita could be for a thousand different reasons, not the least of which is journalistic bias by the liberal MSM.
Personally, I suspect you will find that there will be a high correlation between states with the highest density of McDonalds and gunshot victims. So should we outlaw McDonalds? No (well probably yes, but that’s because they are godawfull), because the correlation could the same basis, namely unemployment, poverty and population density.
I’m not saying the conclusions of research should be ignored, but I’d need a lot more evidence before banning or restricting access to guns in the US.
Since they took away our handguns in a panic of “something must me done” over whatever nutter massacre it was in response to, there are ony two types of people who have them, State licenced criminals i.e. The Police, and private freelance Criminals i.e villains. Has guncrime gone down in the UK since? No, it has soared. Fuckwits!
Evans is just trotting out the standard British attitude to guns, it isn’t even particularly leftist. We have been disarmed for so long, his attitude is almost across the board.
Heh! the emasculated twat really deserves to be married to Queen Tina though doesn’t he? Almost punishment enough in my book.
I suppose it’s entirely possible that the typical journalist’s obsession with freedom of the press derives from the desire to be free to tell everyone else how they ought to live.
Evans says, “The murder rate per 100,000 people for the US is 5.2. For Australia it is 0.07, for Japan, 0.05, and for the UK 0.06.”
Those statistics seem crazy. He’s saying that the US has more than 86 times the murder rate of Britain? No way.
This table from Nationmaster gives different figures entirely: link.
Nationmaster quotes per thousand, whereas Evans is per hundred thousand. It says that the US has a murder rate of 0.042 per thousand, the UK about 0.014 per thousand.
The UK has a population of about 60 million, right? That divided by 1,000 gives 60,000. If you multiply that by the 0.014 to give the UK murder figure per thousand it gives a number of UK murders per year of 840 which sounds about right.
A similar calculation for the US assuming a population of 300,000,000 gives 126000 murders per year for the US. Again about right from what I’ve read.
In other words the Nationmaster table figures give the US with a murder rate three times the UK rate. Again this sounds about right.
I just don’t understand Evans’ figures at all. As well as the hugely exaggerated ratio, a UK rate of 0.06 per hundred thousand ought to give 0.06 x 600 = 36 murders a year!
I suppose it could relate to a different length of time, for instance murders per average lifetime or something. But you’d expect the ratio of the US to the UK murder rate to still be about three to one. One of his figures for the UK or the US at least has to be wrong, and I suspect both are.
If anyone has a comment account at the Telegraph, it might be a public service to point some of this out. I did see a comment to the effect that the US rate looked 90 times too high, which I can’t find now, but the point could be reinforced.
Correction: I wrote 126000 for the US murders per year using the Nationmaster figures. This should have been 12600 (twelve thousand six hundred), of course.
I suppose if my typing figures can slip I should give a little slack to Mr Evans, too. But he is, I am pretty sure, publishing his mistakes in a national newspaper whereas mine are in a blog comment.
Ah, I think I see what Evans has done. he writes:
“All the comparable Western countries with reasonable gun laws have long had vastly fewer gun homicides. The murder rate per 100,000 people for the US is 5.2. For Australia it is 0.07, for Japan, 0.05, and for the UK 0.06.”
As you see, he goes from talking about numbers of gun homicides straight to talking about the murder rate (i.e. from any cause.) My guess is that his figures actually are rates for gun murders only. Then, obviously, the numbers of gun murders in the US could easily be 87 times the number of gun murders in the UK, since the UK has banned guns – but he has mistakenly taken this as being the murder rate for all types of murder.
The most damning thing about the supposed causal relationship between gun ownership and the murder rate is that countries that have levels of gun ownership close to that of the U.S. — such as Finland, Switzerland, France, or Canada — have much lower murder rates than the U.S. In other words, the U.S. murder rate is an outlier even after controlling for the level of gun ownership.
So, far from being a cause of a high murder rate, a high rate of gun ownership doesn’t even correlate to a high murder rate.
I have created a Telegraph comment account for myself and commented there in much the same terms as I did above.
I am a little heartened by the general tone of the Telegraph comments.
Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday takes a different, albeit definitely NOT a Libertarian, view. He blames it on psychological breakdown caused by cannabis-smoking.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/01/the-crazed-smile-that-says-its-the-little-packets-of-madness-that-we-really-need-to-fear.html
I dot have the exact numbers at my fingertips but I suspect that Swiss Americans and Finnish Americans commit murder at rates comparable to the murder rates in Switzerland and Finland. Whereas African Americans and Mexican Americans commit murder at rates that tend to match the numbers in their homelands.
There is certainly not a direct cause and effect, but when a guy like Evans tries to use murder statistics to prove his point then point. He opens himself up to being confronted with data that he may not want to discuss.
Call me stupid, but I thought that the entire purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure American citizens have the ability to kill politicians.
It’s the only way of keeping them under control.
Just ran through the data available on Wikipedia concerning rates of gun ownership and rates of gun-related homicide, by country. There is data on both for 23 countries.
The correlation coefficient is -0.23. If you remove the U.S. from the data the correlation coefficient becomes -0.35. For those without any statistical background, this means that there is no strong relationship between the two but, to the extent that there is a relationship, it’s negative — higher rates of gun ownership correspond to lower rates of gun-related homicide.
I’ll just re-mention something Taylor above already said: Take out of the stats inner city murders amongst the American black community, and to a lesser extent, hispanic neighborhoods, and I’d bet you’d get a much lower murder rate AND gun crime rate. These two minorities (or more specifically the circumstances they live in) live with dramatically different crime dynamics than those of other Americans.
That aside, I think gun ownership would be much more instrumental in reducing other crimes such as robbery, armed assault, and rape than it would murders. Outside of gangland, most murders are committed by people who know each other under conditions of emotional stress, not something that gun ownership should mitigate much.
Jack:
The numbers on that don’t seem to be as readily available as the murder-rate numbers were, otherwise I’d try a correlation on that, too. It would be interesting the see the results.
I would also note that the article is illustrated with a picture of Sarah Palin holding an M-4 military carbine. Not a civilian legal weapon. I believe it was taken when she was visiting the Alaska National Guard Units in the Middle East.
There is also a picture of Gabriel Giffords holding an AK-47. Why not use that ?
Predictably in the wake of the shooting […] by an incoherent leftist
I was unaware that of this. I am aware of his professed reading materials and I agree that they seem to indicate lefty, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they were chosen more for their shock effect. As in “A Fish called Wanda”: Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
I was far more impressed by Simon Jenkins going The Full Orwell. Man, at what point, do marxists become a parody even to themselves?
Bill Whittle reckons there are about 11,000 gun related deaths a year in the US and he describes why, despite this number, he thinks gun rights are essential in this video(Link). His main reason is trust. If your government doesn’t trust you with guns, then how long will they trust you with ideas?
(Yeah, I linked to another Bill Whittle post, but he does explain what my favorite brand of small g conservatism is about, and really well for the most part.)
Ummm. Doesn’t the Second Amendment give citizens the right to bear arms AS MEMBERS OF A DULY CONSTITUTED MILITIA? My study of history leads me to believe that the measure was introduced as a way to really upset King George as well as providing legal justification to raise large numbers of irregular troops to fight the perfidious British. Thus the second amendment was intended to protect the infant US, not to allow the citizens to defend themselves from it. In fact the Civil War was fought primarily to preserve the Union, not to emncipate slaves, and the armies on both sides at the start of the war were composed of peacetime militia regiments expected to serve for 90 days.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493644/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1295215449&sr=8-2
Grumpy Old Man, that argument (that the right to keep and bear arms is not a personal right, but rather accrues to the states for maintaining their militias) has long been a favorite of anti-gun advocates, but is not consistent with the history of the Second Amendment and has been explicitly rejected by federal courts. It’s simply wrong. Get over it.
Well, I think that a bunch of journalists could be called a joint, or a junta!
Furthermore, just to pick nits, the Bill of Rights doesn’t grant the people anything – it’s an explict enumeration of those things which the federal government is NOT permitted to do.
Its objective is to constrain federal government, and not to provide permission to the people, which is in stark contrast to most other legal codes (which is possibly why it took me quite a few years to catch on too). The matter is somewhat clearer if you look at the text:
1st Amendment …. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”
2nd … “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed …”
4th … “the right of the people … shall not be violated”
and importantly, the 10th
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people“.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of claiming that there’s this right see, that we’ve been given, that some people want to remove. But the whole tenor of the Constitution, and the (early) amendments was to stomp on some of the perogatives that the Old World’s governments used to claim or ride roughshod over, and explicitly direct Congress that it may not behave the same way.
Which is why the Constitution and its Amendments are – almost entirely – proscriptive of Government action. And it’s why many Americans reject the whole concept of a ‘living constitution’, because from a theoretical viewpoint, there’s not much left that could be added that would guarantee greater freedom for the individual, unless a couple of the newer Amendments such as the Commerce Clause were to be struck down.
Of course, the gulf between theoretical freedom laid out in the Constitution and practical freedom is huge; mainly due to legislation in individual or groups of states who quite brazenly attempt to abrogate (and succeed in abrogating) the spirit and letter of the Constitution.
These laws – if onerous enough – usually result in a case ending up at the Supreme Court. It can take time, and once the SCOTUS have ruled, there’s often a considerable realignment of state laws that end up being enacted. Recently, there have been a few headline cases which have reaffirmed the right of the individual to possess firearms, and one of those realignments seems to be in progress.
In conclusion, the Bill of Rights, of which the second amendment forms a part, was introduced in 1789 by James Madison, the fourth President of the US, and was ratified in late 1791, so the War of Independence had been over for 12 years, so no, it wasn’t a legal justification to raise levies to fight perfidious Albion.
The rebels had been quite happy to volunteer to protect their liberty.
The second amendment doesn’t create the right to bear arms, it merely states why that right shall not be infringed: because an armed population is necessary for the formation of a militia — or was, when the Constitition was written. One argument is that if the state provides a militia then the justification for the right given in the second amendment is no longer valid. But this has the story exactly backward. All rights and liberties exist quite independently of the Constitution. The Constitution is merely an attempt to create a formal process to respect those rights and liberties.
whoops – for the purists, the Commerce Clause is Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution – not an Amendment.
I plug this book whenever I can. It gives you an insight into the debates that were had at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. The same left-right debates we have now were being had then – except people were better educated. I have to confess that I only got half way through, but I enjoyed the half.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Debate-Constitution-Part-September-February/dp/0940450429/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1295266955&sr=8-4
Also, I think technically the Bill of Rights only constricts the Federal government from infringing specified rights. An amendment to the Constitution, the 14th?, made clear that the Bill of Rights also protected individuals from infringement of rights by States.
I disagree with the notion that the Constitution is the best thing since sliced bread. It clearly contains many short comings and is in many ways a compromise between Hamilton (Big gov) and Jefferson (small gov). Madison was Jefferson’s mate. Most obviously, it did not address the issue of slavery, or secession for that matter, or civil rights. It also contains weasel phrases such as the ‘common welfare’ etc.
For the sake of full disclosure, I want to add that a few hours after I wrote my previous comment above, I discovered that the shooter is, in fact, an incoherent leftist.
I stand corrected.
I’m not sure we can really tag this guy as a leftist.
We make joke about US Liberalism and Fabianism being a mental disorder, but this guy is stone cold nuts, who just happened to think that the movie Zeitgeist was pretty damn cool.
The message that an insane person gets from a movie like Zeitgeist (and for that matter, ‘Atlas Shrugged’) is likely to be very different from the message that a sane person would extract.
We stand in danger of being pilloried mercilessly if at some point in the future, some nutcase gunman is revealed to have borrowed “The Open Society and its Enemies” from a public library in 2004.
A fecklessness of journalists
It occurs to me that the title of this post gives a good group name for journalists. You know, like a flock of sheep or a murder of crows: a clueless(ness) of journalists.
… or did I miss this the first time around and only just catching on now? It’s not the first time…
As collective (collectivist) nouns go, it’s not bad, but I’d go more for “An excrescence of journalists” or “a feculence of journalists”
Tedd and Jack,
This is taken from a comment I wrote back in 2006 and referenced in 2007. I don’t know if the links or data are still available.
And to which I add now that an extremely high percentage of murder victims already have criminal records themselves. If the data was limited to murder victims w/o criminal records, I suspect the data would be even more indicative of gun rights=public safety.
The leftists praising grassroots movements are the same ones deriding gun rights enthusiasts as flannel-clad billybobs being directed by slick conmen at the NRA.
Coming to this late… but I’m surprised no one has noted the Telegraph‘s blatantly false reference to “weapons of mass destruction that can fire hundreds of bullets in a minute” in the hands of “criminals and madmen”. Such automatic weapons are tightly restricted in the U.S.
The Safeway madman used a semi-automatic weapon with a maximum rate of fire of 60 rounds in a minute (not counting time to load fresh clips).
And to which I add now that an extremely high percentage of murder victims already have criminal records themselves.
Yep. I suspect if you excluded drug dealers killing each other the US murder rate would be quite a bit lower.
Is it wrong of me not to care when drug dealers kill each other?
It may have been mentioned above (I have not read all the comments), but this newspaper article – this tissue of distortions and even blatent lies, appeared in the leading “conservative” newspaper in Britain.
Nor is this sort of article in anyway unusual in this newspaper, especially (but not only) in its coverage of the United States.
People sometimes say “well British radio and television (Sky News almost as much as the BBC) is leftist – but at least you have conservative newspapers”.
No we do not, not anymore, we have Conservative PARTY newspapers (which is a very different thing).
Nor has this always been the case – things have changed, and changed for the worse.
For example, I can remember when the Daily Telegraph mocked “gun control” as the absuridity it is (as if a criminal or madman would ever respect a gun control regulation, as if it would prevent them getting a firearm and ammunition – all such regulations do is to make honest and sane people DEFENSELESS).
The people who have gone into journalism over recent years are typical products of the leftist dominated education system (the left were always powerful in schools and universities – but now such places are totall controlled by them) they are bad, really bad. Including the ones who call themselves “Conservatives” (they are “Conservative” in the way that David Cameron is a “Conservative”).
If Frank Johnson (to name one journalist of the old days) were still alive, he would be horrified by what the Daily Telegraph has become.
By the way I know Harold Evans is not one of the young journalists.
He is an establishment leftist who has been doing the rounds of “liberal” social events (where to say anything hostile about the life long Marxist Barack Obama is “racist”) for many years (playing on his humble origins – although he has not engaged in humble work for many decades).
My point is not that there were not always leftists like Evans (out praising Castro or Obama, or whoever else the “liberal” flavour of the month was), my point is that people like Evans have a de facto monopoly now.
Good points Paul, but I can’t remember when even the Telegraph was against “gun control”. I recall back in 1987 after the Hungerford shootings, their editorial position was that handguns other than Olympic style target pistols should be banned, and that was when the editor was Max Hastings, who loves to be seen as a shooting and fishing type. Of course all that means is that he would not countenance the sort of guns he uses being banned, everyone else can go to hell. As such, he was very much in line with current “conservative” thinking.
Good point John – Max Hastings was (and is) an utter swine.
I will give you two examples of good Telegraph journalists (from opposite ends of the social spectrum).
Frank Johnson (whose background was no higher than mine) and Charles Moore (who actually is the gentry type that Max Hastings pretends to be).
But it is the basic “feel” of the sort of person that has changed.
Once the tended to be like Bill Deeds (upper class yes – but that was not one’s first impression of him, the first impression of him can be summed up in one word “decent” if you want a more formal word “honourable”).
Someone like Bill Deeds would never misrepresent someone’s else’s argument in order to belittle them – or to smear them.
The modern types take “liberalism” as the automatic truth – and if the person they are dealing with is not a “liberal” they smear them without shame.
They smear without even thinking about it (almost automatically) the “without shame” point was important.
Bill Deeds might have supported “gun control” (I have no idea), but he would not have smeared those that did not (and neither would his type of journalist), the modern ones (Harold Evans was a “modern” decades ago – he is a “liberal” from his fingers to his core, there is nothing decent in the man – no honour) would (indeed it is their nature to do so).
I make it a point never to bother with the “Guardian”, the “Independent” or the “New Statesman”.
These are far left publications filled with (surprise, surprise) far leftists. One either believes in free speech or one does not – and I do.
So they can say what they like – everyone knows what they are (they make no secret of it) and only a fool makes a habit of reading the words of Pilger (the late A. Waugh was correct “to Pilger” is a verb, it means to LIE), “Vince” Cable, and the rest of them.
The problem with the Telegraph is the same as the problem with the Economist – it pretends to be what it is not.
The Economist pretends to be “free market” supporting publication (actually it is a Welfare State and Corporate Welfare supporting bit of toilet paper), and the Daily Telegraph pretends to be “conservative” and there is a hardly a conservative bone in its body any more.
I say “hardly” because they are some conservative elements.
Simon Heffer is an obvious example – he is also a good example of an athiest conservative.
Contrary to what is often taught being conservative does not mean that one need have religious faith.
A conservative may well not believe in God – but they will never “redefine” God to mean something like “the people” as a “liberal” will.
Just as a conservative may attack an opponent (perhaps in the most harsh terms), but they will never SMEAR them with subtle lies.
The sword always goes in the front – never the back.
There is a lot of laughter about the old terms “cad” and “bounder”.
When we hear the word “cad” we think of Terry Thomas character from a film – forgetting about how terrible such a person would be in real life.
Someone who would lie, cheat, and even murder – remember the comic characters that Mr Thomas played often tried to murder people.
A “cad” is a decietful, and dishonest person without honour. And such a person will murder – if it is to their advantage and if they do not think they will be found out.
And when we hear the word “bounder” (someone who violates social bounaries) we not only laugh we can become angry.
“How dare those snobs look down on someone trying to get on in the world”.
And YES there was snobbery involved – but not just snobbery.
Remember the “bounder” is not a poor person who has become rich, that is not what is being pointed at.
A “bounder” is someone pretending to be from a higher social position than they actually are from.
Which would offend snobs – yes, quite so.
But also not just snobs.
For if someone is lying about their social background – they may be the sort of person who lies (and cheats) about other things as well.
In short the “bounder” may well turn out to be a “cad” as well.
Of course this can lead to absurd over reactions.
For example, people who met Field Marshall Robertson’s family were astonished that none of them spoke like him.
Robertson joined the army as a private – and did not wish to be thought a bounder (a deciever) so as he got higher and higher in the army he was determined to speak in a “working class” way – and he overdid it.
You see it was not his family (all his relatives back home in the village) who were speaking artficially (to impress visitors) it was Robertson who was speaking artificially (without even knowing it).
Personally I think that “speaking down” (for fear that someone will think one is upper class) is very silly.
There was even a serious military point here.
Robertson language (and thought?) was limited by rejecting certain words or even using lines of argument – because people might think he was putting on airs.
It is no good having a brain – if you are afraid to use it.
That is the bad side of snobbery – or rather the fear of snobbery (for if everyone had been such snobs – how did Robertson get to such a position, head of the Imperial General Staff, in the first place).
I might be a bit late in here, but Natalie Solent refers to Harold Evans talking about murder then quoting the US gun homicide figures.
Homicide refers to everyone who has been killed by a gun. So the figure doesn’t just include those murdered or manslaughtered with a gun. It also includes suicide (a large chunk of those who die by gunfire in the US), accident and also lawful homicide, such as defensive gun use by people including, of course, armed cops (which the UK by and large doesn’t have).
The US murder rate by gun is much lower. Still higher than places like the UK and Oz, but not so dramatic.
Also, Evans fails to point out that the UK gun death rate has not decreased significantly since the post-Hungerford and post-Dunblane restrictions…
Every time I turn on NDTV (English language Indian news) there are reports of murders by firearms.
The Islamists, the Maoists, or just ordinary nutjobs have gone into a village (or whatever) and killed everyone – it is impossible to even keep count as how many people use to live in the settlement is not always known (and the bodies are sometimes missing – believe me you do not want further explination about the bodies).
If only they had “gun control” in India – oh THEY DO.
Ditto with Mexico – just over the border from Arizonia.
Strict “gun control” and any criminal (or any lunatic) can get a firearm with ease.
The only people without firearms are the honest ordinary people (as in India) – and it makes them SOFT TARGETS, the playthings of drug gangs and other such.
And, by the way, the illegal firearms in Mexico are NOT mostly from the United States (that is a myth – a lot of disinformation from governments).
“Tell Harold Evans all the above”.
If anyone really thinks that explaining the fact to a “liberal” will make them drop their demands for more statism…. well I have a nice bridge to sell you.
People like Harold Evans are not statists because they do not know the facts – they are statists (in favour of tyranny) because they are EVIL. It is as simple (and as brutal) as that.
Paul:
Where are they from?
Alisa:
The military type full auto weapons favoured by drugs cartels come from police, paramilitary and military sources in Mexico and central America. This is not to say that no guns are ever smuggled from the USA to Mexico, but to point out that the drug cartels do not rely on US sources for their weapons, and especially that they do not get their most destructive weapons, such as machine guns, assault rifles and anti-tank weapons from US civilian sources. Obviously, the Mexican authorities do not ask the US authorities to trace guns which are clearly from their own military or police, so that gives the impression that the drug gangs are mostly armed with American weapons, a fiction which US gun grabbers, the US MSM, and the governments of the US and Mexico are very happy to propagate, but a fiction nonetheless.
John K: but I presume those guns are still made in the US? I am not making an argument, just a point of information.
Alisa:
These guns could be made anywhere really. Mexico makes its own military small arms I think. The point is that the Mexican government likes to give the impression that its drugs cartels are armed with guns smuggled in from the USA, whereas in fact most of them are smuggled from their own police and military.
Alisa, the 5 largest exporters of weapons are the US, Russia, Germany, France and the UK (in that order).* Of course, this includes all weapons, not just the hand-held sort used by drug cartels and other assorted criminals, but clearly it’s unfair to target the US as the source of “most” weapons. There’s lots of blame to go around. I’ve heard (but can’t confirm) that the Russian AK-47 is the most popular weapon world-wide, and that wouldn’t surprise me as it’s far more robust (forgiving of mud, dirt, etc.) than is its US counterpart the M-16.
Incidentally, have you seen the Nicholas Cage movie “Lord of War”? Great movie, about an illegal arms dealer. The ending caught me completely by surprise.
* They also happen to be 4 of the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, with the 5th member (China) ranking number 7 on the exporters list; read into that what you will.
I submitted a reply to you, Alisa, but I has been smited! Must be all the evil words I used. Oh, well.
Thanks John.
Serves you well Laird dear.
Smited too!!!
Alisa.
The favourate automatic rifle in Mexico, among criminals, is the AK47.
Of course the MSM may present people holding AK47’s (and people driving T72 tanks and people flying Mig aircraft – as in Iraq under Saddam, such pictures were regually shown by the BBC as evidence of Western “arms to Iraq”) as evidence of the evil West – but you will not fall for this.
As you know the same MSM will show Roman ruins as evidence of recent Israeli attacks.
They are not wildly honest people.
Thanks Paul.
Alisa-
Mexico’s military small arms are a mixture of German-made and domestic copies of German guns made under license from H&K.
As noted above, most of the “problem” guns are Kalashnikov-pattern from either Russia/FSU or China. Funny how those show up where ever there’s a communist insurgency. There are a (very) few US-made Kalashnikov-pattern guns here in the US, but those are expensive boutique toys, wrong side of $800 each and produced.in very low volume. Unlikely they would end up in Mexico except after being stolen here.
ISTR a pretty impressive volume of M16s being given or sold to the Mexican government by the US. As a transferable-to-private-person M16 will cost somewhere on the wrong side of $10k (with supplies limited by FOPA), I doubt very much that the civilian market in the US is a significant source of that particular model.
However, blaming everything on los yanquis is slightly more popular a pastime SotB than cockfighting or soccer, thus this particular fairy tale. As Paul notes above, would we really send German or Russian weapons to Mexico or Iraq or Somalia for the greater glory of US arms makers? The idea fails the giggle test.
OK, since we’re at it, another question: do you think that the US anti-gun advocates would like to actually stop all small-weapons’ production (actually close the factories and hammer all their stock into
plowswind turbines), or do they only specifically want to prevent ownership of these weapons by private citizens? I mean, what is their ultimate goal, if they could have their way all the way?Alisa, as a proud American gun nut, I pay a bit of attention to the gun grabbers. I believe most of the anti-gun populace honestly believe “less guns=less crime”, plain and simple. They see guns as objects of hate, and just want the guns to go away. It seems to be of little use explaining empirical real world statistics, logical a priori blah blah and suchedy such. They have their anti-gun faith, in a way which resembles the AGW faith of the greenies.
As an aside, you won’t find any American gunshows selling crates of discount full auto machine guns, armor piercing bullets, or explosives. Such items are scarce, due to extremely strict ATF controls, and the few that do find their way into priveleged hands command astronomical prices. Compared with Mexico, America is very very wealthy. Why would we sell our guns to Mexico at Mexican prices? Paul was right – most of the guns used by the Mexican cartels are purchased by the cratefull from South America and Russia, most likely shipped right along side the drugs.
I myself have an AK-47. It was made in Romania, and in order for it to be imported to the U.S., its reciever had to be altered so as to have no fully automatic function. It would therefore be of no interest to the cartels.
I forgot to mention, my family runs a gun shop near the Mexican border. Some of my kin just couldn’t handle any more Pacific Northwest rain. Trust me, there are no “straw purchases”, and no one is buying full autos, due to the strict ATF controls. We even just survived our first ATF audit, which was brutal. Mexican guns are coming cheap through the SOUTHERN Mexican border, not the northern.
Alisa:
The stated aim of gun control enthusiasts is to restrict ownership of small arms to government agencies, though some of them may concede that a small number of licenced hunters may have limited access to single shot rifles or shotguns. Clearly, they are of the mindset that the state monopoly of arms will have no long term concerns for free people. Then again, their concept of “freedom” may be rather different than mine. So on the whole, they are not pacifists, who wish to see no arms in the world, but infantile statists, who only want Mummy & Daddy Government to have ownership of weapons.
Sounds about right, John. I do wonder though what their response is to guns always ending up in the hands of criminals – mainly because I’ve never heard any such response.
Alisa:
In the UK at least, having succeeded in banning the legal ownership of handguns, anti-gunners tend not to address the huge increase in crime with handguns (how can they?), rather they agitate for more “controls” and/or bans on the legal possession of rifles, shotguns and airguns. They are not interested in examining the problem of armed crime and solutions to it, their aim is purely and only to see the total disarmament of the civilian population.
What is the ultimate aim of the American leftist?
At the risk of being laughed at I will try and say what it is.
There are two main sort of leftist – hard Green and mainstream.
The hard Green (the person who actually wants to go back to Iron Age roundhouses and so on) need not detain us – people like Barack Obama are not wildly interested in this stuff (although they will humour them and take their votes).
The other sort of leftist watches something like “Star Trek: The New Generation” and thinks “cool – an egalitarian world community where everyone gets what they need, that is what we should aim to build”.
I sware on my life (I even sware I something I actually value – as people who know me may suspect a trick when I say “I sware on my life”) that I am not joking – they really do think like this.
Call it Plato’s Republic on a world scale, or Francis Bacon’s “The New Atlantis”, or some of Karl Marx’s (deliberatly hyper vague) fantasies – but that is what they believe.
It really is this crazy.
So of course people would not carry or own firearms – there would be no need to as there would be no crime.
The mainstream leftist (in American and elsewhere) is AT THE SAME TIME very practical (very cunning – they can run rings round anyone on our side) and UTTERLY DELUSIONIAL.
They really are BOTH – and at the same time.