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Trafficking In Illusion The Women's March around Washington. If you call their office today, you will be informed that they are packing up and shutting down. Field offices? Won't be any unless the locals contribute. Legal verification of foundation status? Don't know. Pending. The Million Mom March is over. As columnist Tony Snow observes, gala marches accompanied by chanting, singing, entertaining stars and coverage by national television and an adoring media incorporate the venerable American belief that statutes can improve the world. Most often in these events, facts are buried and emotions freed to run riot. The current gun licensing, registration and confiscation parade, organized and funded by Clinton sycophants, is not, at this point, considered to have staying power. Facts do. The first consideration is the size of the issue. There are about 80 million Americans who own just short of 250 million firearms. Some 45 percent say that a gun is kept in the home. Compared to the number of guns and gun owners, the issues are very small. To counter the relative insignificance of the issue, a current Post-ABC poll has been quoted to say that 9 percent of respondents claim to have been shot at in a non-military setting. That includes both robbery and accident. An additional 14 percent say that they have been threatened with a gun. While the poll has been used to bolster the significance of gun control proposals, its unpublicized details also reveals root causes. The level of violence reported by blacks in the poll is nearly double what it is for whites. Among white respondents 50% say they have a gun in the home and 80% do not feel threatened by guns. Among black respondents, 23% have guns in the home but just 65% do not feel threatened. The primary statistical driver of the poll is minority gang-related confrontations among individuals 17-19 who are known to each other. That is the crux of the gun violence issue. It is not, as claimed, random violence to suburban children under ten years of age. Yale economist Dr. John Lott has studied the issue for a number of years. Speaking at the Second Amendment Sisters counter-demonstration, he noted that manipulated and left-out or partially ignored numbers are all too common in the gun control debate. The statistics from 1996 are the latest ones available. In that year, Lott says, there were 1,134 Americans killed in accidental shootings. Only 42 of the victims were under ten years of age and just 8 of those incidents were from handguns: one child-related incident for every ten million gun owners. That compares with 1,915 young children killed in motor-vehicle accidents, 489 who were hit by cars and trucks, 805 who drowned and 738 who were killed by fire or burns. Accidental shootings have hit the lowest level ever recorded. Each year, private citizens who mistake a victim for an intruder accidentally kill about 30 people. In comparison, police kill about 330 annually by accident. School violence, despite the media headlines, has fallen dramatically since the mid 1980's. There have been no publicized instances where shooters had not violated existing law. The MMM claim that "12 kids die every day" infers that "kids" is being defined as under 10 years of age. The statistics cited are actually for people under 20 years of age and 70% of the deaths are urban gang members in their late teens. Only 2 percent of that number come from children under 10. The same is true of data about persons shot by a gun in the home. Just 14 percent are from the gun owned in the home. The other 86% is from weapons brought into or near the home, again mostly gang-related. Dr. Lott argues in his book More Guns, Less Crime, that those 40 states that allow citizens to acquire permits to carry concealed weapons have dramatically lower rates of murder, assault and burglary. Conversely, those 17 states with mandatory safe storage laws show 9 percent more rapes and robberies and 5.6 percent more burglaries. The safe storage laws - including trigger locks - in these states are associated with 3,600 more rapes, 22,500 more robberies and 64,000 more burglaries than concealed carry states. In their promotional material, MMM denies that a legitimate reason for gun ownership is lawful self-protection or the defense of one's family. They go out of their way to make gun ownership for self-protection politically incorrect and aspire to making it illegal as well. They have no answer for what happens between the time a violent incident is threatened and the police arrive. Their stance blames evil on objects rather than on the moral choices of individuals. Gun control laws don't apply to criminals or stop gun violence, Harry Browne observes, they simply make it harder for innocent people to defend themselves. Men's superior physical strength put unarmed women at great risk. Women armed with handguns are 2.5 times less likely to be in peril than passive women. Lott points out that in 1997 there were 430,000 crimes committed with guns but 2 million crimes were prevented, primarily by the intended victim brandishing a weapon. Former Manhattan assistant district attorney David Kopel says " When a robbery victim does not defend him or herself, the robber succeeds 88% of the time and the victim is injured 25% of the time. When a victim resists with a gun, the robbery success rate falls to 30% and the injury rate to 17%. No other response from drawing a knife to shouting for help to fleeing produces such low rates of victim injury and robbery failure." Funding for the MMM was principally from the Bell Campaign, a San Francisco-based anti-gun and victim's support organization supported by a $4.3 million grant from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. Their policy positions include statements such as that the Second Amendment does not, and never did, protect the private ownership of guns for private purposes. They seek the orderly elimination of the private sale of handguns in the United States. In the interim, they are allied with advocates who propose federal preemption of state laws to limit the availability of gun dealer's licenses, increased dealer license fees, restrictive licensing and the registration of handgun owners, increased taxes on handguns and ammunition, strict liability for gun manufacturers, regulating firearms as consumer products, banning of cheap handguns and a national limit on handgun purchases. In response to media pressure and Democratic parliamentary manipulation, the United States Senate passed a Republican non-binding sense-of-the-Senate resolution 3150 calling for stricter enforcement of existing laws by a vote of 69-30. The Democrat non-binding resolution 3148, praising the MMM and calling for further action on gun control, passed 50-49. Camille Paglia, no particular friend of the NRA, summed up the week this way " It doesn't take a weatherman to figure out that the average citizen doesn't want national policy determined by packs of weeping women led by a shrill, dimwitted talk-show host." The reason more gun laws have no positive effect is simple, Tony Snow concludes. Bad guys are rational. They pick on easy prey and avoid trouble. Passive citizens are easy prey. For crooks and governments alike. |
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