Reflections From a Murky Pond

Every time there is a well-publicized shooting certain elements residing within America – mostly, but not entirely, Liberals – starting frothing at the mouth and jabbering about how we “need” to ban or, at a bare minimum, severely restrict gun ownership and availability in America.

It’s predictable to the point of being passé, with the same sorts ranting or whining the same baseless arguments.

Leaving those arguments aside for now on the grounds that they’ve been addressed and refuted time and time again, let us, instead, look to the hypocrisy or stupidity of their arguments themselves.

There’s a strong overlap between the groups who want to ban firearms and who want to legalize marijuana and other illicit recreational drugs. It’s not a 100% overlap, but the majority of those who are vocal in calling for legalization of drugs are also vocal in calling for tighter gun control.

On this issue they also tend towards using the same argument repeatedly.

The argument, which borders upon mantra amongst them, is that the War on Drugs is not only a wasteful failure but has actually caused the various gang-related crimes associated with the drug culture. They liken it to Prohibition aka the 18th Amendment which arguably led to the rise of organized crime in America in the early parts of the 20th century.

I’m forced to admit that this isn’t a completely baseless argument. While a lot of the problems were and are problems of lax enforcement and weak punishments, there’s no denying that anytime that a high profit margin, easily portable commodity is outlawed a black market for that commodity will develop. There’s also no denying that more organized and violent criminal groups will eventually, unless mercilessly quashed, gain control of that market.

The question roiling through my mind is why do these people believe that it would be any different with firearms?

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Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 other people — six of whom were killed, including a 9 year-old girl — in Tucson, AZ on Saturday, January 8, 2010 should have shocked the nation. That, at least would be the normative common consensus about such a brutal and sudden massacre, coming, as it did, without forewarning and leaving so many people dead and/or wounded.

Obviously such shock is part of the innocence that America has lost over the years; it was not in evidence that Saturday. The victims’ bodies hadn’t finished bleeding out, much less grown cold, before the ghouls of the Left were doing their best to capitalize upon the lethal attack.

The Professional Left

Within minutes of Loughner’s attack Liberal pundits and the Left-Wing, “lamestream” media were trying to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sharron Angle, the Tea Party, and American patriots in general for “inciting” the attack with their rhetoric.

These filth didn’t know at that time what had actually happened or who the attacker was, much less what his motivations were but that didn’t stop them from feasting on the fresh corpses for the sake attacking their American rivals.

The Race-Baiters

Right behind the Professional Leftists were the race-baiters, though there is, of course, an overlap between two varieties of ghouls They did, perforce, have to wait until Loughner was identified as being a White. Once he was known to be White though, they dove right into the feast.

This particular breed of domestic enemy was, after establishing the Whiteness of the attacker, was as quick as always to paint the whole incident in racial terms and attempted to tie it into immigration laws even though Giffords was not a proponent of porous and insecure borders.

After that initial spate of anti-Americanism came the Muslims and their shills who jabbered on about how, if Loughner were a Black or Muslim, he’d have been treated differently by the media and would have been called a terrorist as opposed to a murderer.

The Gun-Grabbers

Finally came the ghouls amongst the gun-grabbers, hell-bent on using anything to disarm the law-abiding members of American society.  They were last to the feast because they had to wait until the evidence pointed to Loughner attempted assassination of Rep. Giffords being the act of a madman as opposed to a political act.

They Hunger For Blood Of The Innocent

Both Americans and our Liberal and Progressive enemies knew this sort of cynical use of the Tuscon, AZ rampage was going to happen. It’s part and parcel of realpolitik and is firmly embedded in modern ideological warfare.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste, and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you didn’t think you could do before.

– Rahm Emanuel

What is disgusting is how fast the Leftist ghouls descended on the victims and twisted their deaths and injuries, and the resultant anguish of their loved ones, into agenda-driven political and ideological attacks against America, Americans, and fundamental American values.

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama led the nation in a moment of silence Monday morning in honor of the victims of Saturday’s mass shooting in Tucson, AZ. As laudable a symbolic gesture as that was, the nation would have been better off if the Left had held a moment or two of silence on Saturday before starting their macabre orgy.

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Liberals, in their seemingly unending quest to disarm the American people, nearly continuously claim that stricter gun control laws reduce violent crime and make America a safer place in which to live.

Conservatives, in their seemingly unending quest to maintain the right of arms for the American people, nearly continuously claim that more lenient control laws reduce violent crime and make America a safer place in which to live.

Both sides have made such directly conflicting claims for decades and do not look like they’ll be shifting from their respective positions anytime soon. That being the case, it behooves people to do a bit of research into the available data in order to form an objective opinion. To that end I researched the FBI’s Violent Crime Statistics and the Brady Campaign State Scorecards.

This is where I totally enrage both sides of the gun control issue. Publishing non-partisan, objective data tends to do that.

Some key points of my findings are shown below. They do not well fit the claims of either side of the argument of gun control.

Top 10 Least Violent States

So, according to the FBI’s statistics on violent crime, the ten (10) safest (least violent crime per capita) states have Brady Campaign scores ranging from 4 (very lenient) to 54 (fairly strict).  Indeed, the safest is Maine with its rather Wild-West-esque Brady Score of 12 and the most dangerous – of the safest ten – is Connecticut with its Brady Score of 54. It seems that there is little or no correlation at all between gun laws and violent crime in the ten (10) least violent American states.

Looking at the other end of spectrum, the ten(10) states with the highest violent crime rates per capita, we see a worrisomely similar lack of correlation between gun laws and violent crime.

Top 10 Most Violent States

So, according to the FBI’s statistics on violent crime, the ten (10) most dangerous (most violent crime per capita) states have Brady Campaign scores ranging from 2 (extremely lenient) to 53 (fairly strict).  Even within this most dangerous ten (10) states there is no direct correlation between violent crime rates and the strictness or leniency of gun control laws.

Most telling though is the similarity in the Brady Scores between to ten safest and the the ten most dangerous states. Both group have a very similar set of scores and a very similar scattering of the scores in question.

Composite of Safest &  Most Dangerous Sorted by Brady Score

Given these results, it seems difficult – if not completely impossible – for an objective opinion to be formed that there is a direct correlation between the strictness or leniency of gun control laws in the states and those states’ respective levels of violent crime. I think it would behoove both the Liberal and Conservative camps to consider another point of contention.

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