Left Rudder

Joe Huffman asks a typically obtuse question:

Can you demonstrate one time or place, throughout all history, where the average person was made safer by restricting access to handheld weapons?

The beauty of this question is that no matter how it is answered, Joe can always dispute the answer by claiming the ‘average’ person was not really ‘average.’ The same applies to ’safer.’

Further, Joe warns us not to look at a US-UK comparison because it “fails in a big way. Look at before and after gun control was introduced in the U.K.” Of course, Joe is not a student of history; if he were, he might have known there have been 4 or 5 major pieces of gun control in the UK going back over a century. Of course, Joe omits the fact that gun-related homicide rates in the UK are about 1/25 of what they are here in the US.

Oliver Willis raises an excellent point: the GOP Presidential candidates were basically tripping all over themselves in order to address the NRA. But they couldn’t seem to find any time to address this nation’s largest black and hispanic groups.

It’s not too difficult to figure out why that is.

The NRA and the GOP deserve one another. Both groups seek to dupe a small fringe of extremists.

Recently, we had the GOP candidates for President attempt to pander to the NRA. And what a spectacle it was.

Rudy G. claims he changed his mind about gun control after 9/11. Yeah, that makes sense–I suppose he thinks New Yorkers could have shot at the airliners about to strike the WTC with their handguns. Rudy once called the NRA “extremists” but apparently is willing now to say anything to rescue a campaign that’s in a death spiral.

Fred Thompson, whom I believed was terminally lazy but may actually be senile, has been all over the map on gun control. He is now reduced to showing up at gun show with his trophy wife leading him about as they peruse tables filled with The Turner Diaries.

Mitt Romney. “Varmint hunter.” Hahahahaha.

John McCain has taken positions antithetical to the NRA, including bans on certain handguns, assault weapons, closing the gun show loophole and the like. But that doesn’t stop him from pandering to the NRA.

The question is why these candidates do so. The answer is simple: the GOP field is so poor, a candidate needs a vote wherever he can find it. After all, this is a GOP field where “none of the above” won a GOP straw poll in Iowa. Gunloons and the NRA used to tout that their support won elections–what happened? After all, Bush gave the NRA carte blanche–where is that NRA influence?

As part of an FBI sting involving bribery and corruption, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) had his phone calls with an Alaskan oil contractor recorded. The AP:

The secret recordings suggest the Justice Department was eyeing Stevens long before June, when the Republican senator first publicly acknowledged he was under scrutiny. At that time, it appeared Stevens was a new focus in a case that had already ensnared several state lawmakers.

The recorded calls between Stevens and businessman Bill Allen were confirmed by two people close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. They declined to say how many calls were recorded or what was said.

Allen, a wealthy businessman and Stevens’ political patron, agreed to the taping last year after authorities confronted him with evidence he had bribed Alaska lawmakers. He pleaded guilty to bribery and is a key witness against Alaska legislators. He also has told prosecutors he paid his employees to renovate the senator’s house.

Why does the GOP attract so many criminals?

Most organizations are a reflection of their leadership.

In the case of the NRA, this adage rings particularly true. In the modern era, the NRA has had four leaders:

Harlon or Harlan Carter. (Carter often deliberately misspelled his first name in an attempt to mask the fact he was once convicted of murder. In fact, his NRA card–on display at the NRA HQ museum–has his first name rewritten).

G. Ray Arnett. Arnett was shown the door after it became apparent he was involved with a young NRA staffer, Tracey Atlee.

“Mr. Arnett has made personnel decisions on the basis of his personal interest rather than the interests of the Association.” These charges stemmed from Arnett’s relationship with NRA staffer Tracey Attlee. Attlee was a frequent Arnett travel and shooting companion. In 1986 Arnett promoted Attlee from the public education division to international shooting with an unauthorized salary increase of more than $13,000. This, coupled with Arnett’s dismissal of the remaining public education staff, resulted in the NRA board’s removal of both Arnett and Attlee.

Warren Cassidy. Cassidy apparently learned nothing from Arnett. Arnett and the NRA lost a sexual harrassment suit brought by a former staffer:

In pretrial depositions, Cassidy was reportedly forced to give detailed accounts of his sexual liaisons with female staff members. Yet only six months earlier, Cassidy had castigated “all NRA critics, especially you cartoonists, who exhaust yourselves portraying us as the epitome of macho chauvinists!”

Coming soon: how Wayne Lapierre supplements his salary.

When dealing with gunloons, you always have to understand the gunloon often hasn’t the faintest idea of what he is talking about. Whenever, you mention Dr. Arthur Kellermann, this ignorance tends to go into hyperdrive.

Kellermann is a CDC epidemiologist who has studied emergency cardiac care, injury prevention, healthcare and insurance, and firearm-related deaths and injuries. The latter issue causes gunloons to foam at the mouth.

Kellermann authored or co-authored some 50 peer-reviewed studies on firearm-related deaths or injuries. Several stand out and received a great deal of attention. One study in particular had two particular and distinct findings on different issues–this, of course, created great confusion among gunloons (like Thirdpower) who believes Kellermann has changed his numbers or findings.

The study measured whether a “firearm in the home confers protection against crime or, instead, increases the risk of violent crime in the home.” This study found “that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide (adjusted odds ratio, 2.7; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.6 to 4.4).” IOW, a gun in the home carries a nearly three times greater risk of homicide than a home without a firearm.

The other finding produced by the study found that people are 21 times more likely to be killed by someone they know than a stranger breaking into the house. IOW, gun-owning households saw an increased (21 times) murder risk by family or intimate acquaintances, not by strangers or non-intimate acquaintances.

Gunloons are usually confused by this, having never read the study, and will often attack Kellermann on the erroneous basis that Kellermann has revised his figures from 3 to 21 or vice-versa.

Then again, gunloons usually aren’t well-read and repeat the propaganda of their masters at the NRA.

Moonies and Gun Loons = GunLoonies

Get your handguns from North Korea!

Every couple of years or so, Mary RoshJohn Lott is compelled to recycle the long discredited notion that DC’s gun laws caused an increase in homicide and crime.

Via yet another gunloon blog that bans dissenting views, John Lott trots out the tired old chestnut for another spin ’round the gunloon:

The problem for the city is that anyone who can look up the crime numbers will see that D.C.’s violent crime rate went up, not down, after the ban.

[…]

The city’s brief focuses only on murder rates in discussing crime in D.C. Yet, in the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. But there is one fact that seems particularly hard to ignore. D.C.’s murder rate fluctuated after 1976 but has only once fallen below what it was in 1976 (that happened years later, in 1985). Does D.C. really want to argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate?

Similarly for violent crime, from 1977 to 2003, there were only two years when D.C.’s violent crime rate fell below the rate in 1976. These drops and subsequent increases were much larger than any changes in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. For example, D.C.’s murder rate fell 3.5 to 3 times more than in the neighboring states during the five years before the ban and rose back 3.8 times more in the five years after it. D.C.’s murder rate also rose relative to that in other similarly sized cities.

This is what’s known in the biz as “cherry-picking.” Tim Lambert debunked Rosh Lott in 2003; the same graph he used then applies here:

As Lambert explains:

…you can see the trick Lott has used. (Data is from here.) Notice how the crime rates fluctuate from year to year. If you choose one year at random to represent the situation after the law was passed their is a good chance that it will be unrepresentative. Of course, they didn’t just choose one year at random. They chose 1981, which just happens to be the year that had the highest homicide and robbery rates of the ten following years. (And contrary to their claim, the murder rate in 1985 was below the 1976 rate.)

Also by presenting rates for just 1971 and 1976, they make it look as if the rates were decreasing before the law, instead of going up and down. The law was also in effect for only part of 1976, so that year is not a good choice to represent the situation before the law.

If you look at the graphs you will see that homicides tended to be lower after the law and robberies were about the same. Of course, just looking at the graphs only gives a rough idea of the possible effects of the law. This has been studied by several researchers. Loftin at al (NEJM 325:1615-1620) found significant decreases in firearms homicides and no significant change in non-firearms homicides. Kleck et al (Law & Society Review 30(2):361-380) disputed their findings, arguing that the law had no effect. Whoever is correct, there is no published support for Lehrer and Lott’s claim that the law caused crime increases.

Another example where the media gets it wrong is the fact they buy into the NRA’s myth of 20,000 gun laws. The standard NRA talking point is that there are 20,000 gun laws which should be more than enough and if we just enforce those (as opposed to new laws), there’ll be no problems regarding gun-related crime.

A complacent and compliant media buys into this myth.

Of course, there aren’t 20,000 gun laws.

So how many gun-control laws are there? Recently, we assembled a significant new database of major state gun laws, including laws governing how firearms are designed, manufactured, sold, and possessed, that sheds some light on the 20,000 figure. Although we didn’t include every possible law, our count yields approximately 300 different state laws as of 1999. These laws were defined as those that affect the manufacture, design, sale, purchase, and possession of firearms. Adding the few federal laws wouldn’t appreciably increase the total.

A common tactic among gunloons is to complain the media isn’t presenting their side or giving them a fair shake. They never can cite concrete examples of this bias–but much of what gunloons believe is a matter of faith.

They just know it.

Of course, this is what is known as working the refs. In reality, the media does a pretty poor job of presenting either side of the gun issue–and that’s how the gunloons like it. After all, there’s no credible research that backs up what gunloons like to tout and the fact is many Americans simply believe gun laws are actually stricter than they are.

As an example, 70% of Americans think licensing and registration of firearms already exists in our county. This is the media’s fault, as when polls showed 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.