After all — making drugs illegal has worked so well, amirite?
There’s no such thing as an ‘Opioid Epidemic’ in the United States because prohibition always works so well.
It’s not like there’s a black market for those substances — that NEVER happens.
Criminals don’t trade in said black market, either, right?
In the wake of the horrible mass shooting in Las Vegas, there are the predictable, immediate calls for gun control.
Did you catch Doug’s take on the Vegas shooting? Here it is:
https://www.facebook.com/ClashDaily/videos/1480096762107097/
Funny how there wasn’t a call for banning airplanes after 9/11, or cars and knives after the many, many, many ISIS ‘lone wolves’ that use cars and trucks to hit multiple people in crowded streets and then go on a stabbing rampage.
The Bastille Day Nice attack alone killed 86 people with 458 others injured.
But THIS time, it will work with guns, right?
Isn’t it strange that the left doesn’t say much about further gun control in Chicago where gun crime is a real issue?
The website Hey, Jackass tracks gun crime in Chicago and the final number of gun homicides in September in Chicago alone is 57.
And yet, Media (D) silence.
Weird, right? It’s almost the same death toll as the Las Vegas massacre.
One Gun Control advocate was a researcher that was frustrated that the NRA was against all of the ‘common sense’ gun control policies advocated by the Left.
Leah Libresco is a statistician who wrote this telling opinion piece in the Washington Post. It’s titled, ‘I Used To Think Gun Control Was The Answer. My Research Told Me Otherwise.‘
Here are a few of the juicy bits:
We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
What? You mean don’t limit the guns but look at the risk factors?
Libresco brings up the statistic that no one on the gun control lobbying end would ever bring up, the vast majority — two-thirds — of gun deaths in the United States are suicides, not homicides.
The issue isn’t the gun, it’s the intention of the wielder.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.
So, where are all the deaths coming from?
As a statistician, Libresco lays it out:
…the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
So, about that ‘common sense’ gun control…
Libresco suggests focusing on the various needs of the potential victims and intervening there — cracking down on gangs, helping abused women, counseling middle-aged men that are most likely to commit suicide using a gun.
She says that as she analyzed the data, and though she personally is still ‘anti-gun’, she could no longer support the gun control measures touted by politicians. She said that many of these policies seemed to be supported ‘because gun owners hate them‘ and were advocated by those that had never encountered a gun as anything other than a ‘figure in a briefing book or on the evening news‘.
She sums up her results:
We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.
Source: Washington Post
What do you think?
Is Leah Libresco right or ridiculous?
Let us know in the comments.
