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David Mitchell
Gosh it had been a peacefull night here. I was going to stay out of this, but just before you posted this article from the Washing Post, I had found and read the article. What a shock! I cannot let this lady's utter nonsense pass without comment. I urge you to read it for yourselves and explain where I must be missing something.
I am simply dumbfounded by the glaring absurdities and misleading and inaccurate suppositions she makes! She must have been paid a lot of money to write this. I question her research, I question her facts. I question her suppositions. I question her conclusions. I question her intelligence. I question her honesty!
This part really slays me. Does she imagine we cannot even read facts?
"No correlation between England and the US - who does she think she is kidding???
"I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths."
Is this "author" nuts? Can she not read satistics? Ambiguous effect?
In the year beginning in March 2016 the U.S. had 11,004 murders by firearms. England had 26 - "twenty six"! (okay, adjusted for total population diffenece it would be the equivalent of 130). Guess what? Hardly anybody in England owns a gun. Numbers for Australia are also quite low.
Ambiguous effect? Hello! There already were so few guns that "buy back"programs would have shown negligeable results anyway. What was she thinking?
And for all her research, she comes up with some completely absurd (and nearly impossible) solutions. "Identify the potential victims before,,,, duh! But of course! I say we identify the potential victims and stop all crimes before they happen. And all violence. And all accidents. And all tooth decay.
The gun control argument is not asking the undoable - the unconstitutional - ban all firearms. We understand the man in a dangrous neighborhood keeps a pistol in the bedroom or the kitchen. We understand the Montana cattle rancher needs to keep the wolves away from his livestock. I understand my wonderful, slighly left-of-center, dear old friend John Jackson works with one of those liberal tree-hugging "open space" committees and they need to control the local deer population, and so he therefore suports the local hunting club's rights and their efforts to shoot them. I understand the farmer in Nebraska wants to teach his kids to hunt, and my friends in Denver (father and sons ) like to go to the firing range and shoot skeet on a Saturday morning. I could go on but I think you get my drift (Hell, we even know a half-crazed, retired, liberal, "invalid" in the great PNW who needs to control the moles in his yard).
We are simply asking for some common sense controls of some of the most quesionable practices - practices that would infringe on absoutely no law abiding citizens rights - at all! We know there is no all-or-nothing solution. We know there is no one single "cure". I myself, a moderately conservative, semi-evangelical, patriotic, combat veteran (and part-time raving dipsomaniac) am most assuradly not part of some lunatic left who just wants to "come take your guns."
Why is that so hard to grasp?
*Added later - Why is this so hard for US ON THE RIGHT to grasp?
p.s. I venture a guess that many of you actually don't even understand the full implications of some of the technical features of weapons that are being discussed - "single shot", vs, "semi-automatic", Vs. "automatic", etc. Stuff that the framers of our Constitution never dreamed of.
Just the whole concept of larger ammo clips is a major topic unto itself. Someone would have been able to bring down the shooter in the parking lot when that lady Congresswoman (Gabby?) was shot by that kid if he hadn't had large clips. Large clips allow the shooter to go on shooting longer without having to stop and re-load.
"but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless."
Meaningless? She's obviously never handled a clip-fed gun before. One or two seconds can be a lifetime!
Gabby Gifford's shooter shot 17 and 6 died. Several armed guys hiding nearby could not get the break they needed for just a second and a half to get up, draw a bead, and take the guy down. So that would have only saved half of them one may argue. Correct. That would be the "all-or-none" point of view. I will never accept the idea that limiting clip sizes would infringe on anybody's rights - AT ALL! Only a partial solution you say? I'll take it for starters.
And don't even get me started on "Gun Shows".
Silly me. I thought I was going to watch football tonight.
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