Gandhi > Obama

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=4a451ee5-71c3-4f29-a826-3260fb1eaaa1

Society needs crime control, not gun control. Munday writes that "violent crime in America has plummeted" in the past two decades after the majority of states enacted "right to carry" legislation and issued permits to carry concealed weapons to citizens of good repute. I think there were many reasons for the decline, but "right to carry" certainly wasn't detrimental to it.

There are Second Amendment absolutists in America, and libertarians elsewhere, who regard a person's birthright to own/carry a firearm beyond the state's power to regulate. I'm not one of them. I think it's reasonable for communities to set thresholds of age, proficiency, legal status, etc., for the possession of lethal weapons, just as they set standards for the operation of motor vehicles, airplanes and ham radios. But it seems to me that, within common sense perimeters, you'd want to enhance, not diminish, the defensive capacity of the good guys, and increase rather than decrease the number of auxiliary crime-fighters who are available to be deputized when the bad guys start climbing over the fence.

Munday quotes no less an advocate of non-violence than Mahatma Gandhi on the imperial decree of the Indian Arms Act of 1878 that laid the foundation for the defencelessness of the victims of the Mumbai massacre 130 years later. "Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India," said the Mahatma, "history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."

There's no such thing as a "gun free" zone!

The mayor of Seattle wants to ban concealed carry in almost all public places, because a mental patient with a concealed carry permit shot a few people last spring. They say that you will still be able to carry in parking garages and on streets, but how the hell can you carry when you won't be able to legally enter any of the buildings? Under current laws, people with Washington state concealed carry permits can carry in parks and at the Seattle Center. The proposal would take that right away. [1]

Almost EVERY study shows that crime goes down when you allow concealed carry. That's why despite places like Seattle, the general trend recently has been in favor of concealed carry. For example, this year the supreme court overturned the unconstitutional handgun ban in D.C. and Atlanta residents gained the right to lawfully concealed carry on the MARTA. Florida was one of the first states to allow it and more and more states have followed suit after seeing the positive results.

Is the real problem the gun itself? Or is it the man holding the gun?

The only people who obey gun free zones are law abiding citizens who wouldn't be committing crimes in the first place.

Criminological and sociological analysis provides important, even crucial, information as to the role of firearms in violence and the utility and viability of potential gun control strategies. Virtually all of this information is ignored or affirmatively suppressed in the health advocacy literature. That literature also shows consistent patterns of making misleading international comparisons, mistaking the differences between handguns and long guns, and exaggerating the number of children injured or killed, thereby building up the emotional content. Other distortions include presenting gun ownership in such a manner as to ignore or minimize the benefits, and measuring defensive benefits purely in terms of attackers killed, rather than considering attacks deterred or attackers repelled. To the contrary, the criminological and sociological research literature demonstrates the existence of high risk groups for firearms misuse, and of the "career" criminals who commit many of the serious crimes in our society. Yet the anti-gun health advocacy literature consistently overlooks these data and attributes equal propensity to commit violent crime to all people. [2]

PS. Starbucks is super gay and Michael Moore is fat.

[1] http://www.seattle.gov/firearmsrule/

[2]http://www.guncite.com/journals/tennmed.html