Category: The Media

Reuters seems to be counting Pittman-Robertson dollars as sin taxes. PR has been around for quite some time, and as far as I know has been 11% pretty much its whole existence. The dollars used for fish and wildlife management, as well as public ranges. Even so, it might be unconstitutional. The Heller ruling probably puts upper limits on how much governments can consider firearms and ammunition to be a “sin” and tax it accordingly.

The BBC is even worse than our media, in this article on an airline losing Netanyahu’s security detail’s Glocks:

Port Authority police in New York are currently investigating whether the weapons went missing before or after the suitcase was transferred to LAX, NBC News has reported.

One source told NBC that the suitcase was inspected and cleared for shipment by Transportation Security Administration screeners who put a seal over the bag at Kennedy Airport.

The Glock 9mm is a powerful semi-automatic used by law enforcement and security organisations around the world.

Powerful compared to what? How is more powerful than any other 9mm pistol?

Also, I’ve always wondered by what legal exception foreign security are allowed to carry firearms in New York City? I know PA has no such exemption. I wonder if it’s a diplomatic immunity thing, or whether we just look the other way. Perhaps a federal law I am unaware of?

This article is sure to outrage. Firstly, it gives an account of a criminal gun trafficker, who’s turned his life around you see, but he wants the legal dealers he criminally deceived to pay too:

“I’m supposed to have remorse for what I did. But you wanna tell me these bastards [the gun dealers], they sit back, and they say, ‘Oh well, you know, [Jerome], that was on him whatever he did after that,'” he says, his voice gravelly and angry but still quiet. “If I should feel remorse, these motherfuckers should feel remorse, too. Because I came in there, and they took the money, and they took the money, and they took the money, and they took the money, over and over and over again. And these fuckers are sittin’ in their houses, their nice little house, they go on sellin’ guns, day out and day in, with no consequence. None. None.

So he basically lied to a number of Philadelphia gun dealers about being the true purchaser, and now he wants them to feel sorry with them? Sorry, you’re the criminal asshole. The big question I have is why, if he was doing this in the 90s, is he still not in prison. It’s ten years for every illegal gun they can prove federally. Oh, but we have a former ATF agent too, who complains it’s just too hard to lock up FFLs:

THEYï’RE GETTING AWAY WITH IT: Joseph Vince spent 28 years with ATF, helped compile a database that traces where guns found in crimes came from and authored the 2004 report on Colosimo’s. He says the standard for prosecuting straw sellers is too restrictive: “You have to prove that they willfully did it, that they intentionally wanted to do it, that they absolutely knew what they were doing was wrong. The truth level is so high, it’s higher than any other [crime] I know of.”

Apparently he doesn’t like Mens Rea, a basic concept in our legal system that says for most serious crimes you must have intent to commit the crime. The article is so riddled with inaccuracy and distortion I could write a dissertation on it. In one shot they show pro-gun counter-protesters and claim them to be anti-gun protesters.

Any time you see a major newspaper talking about myths and gun control, you can bet there’s going to be a lot of uneducated crap in the article. This one from Washington Post is no exception. Let me just talk briefly, or perhaps not so briefly, about some of their major points.

1. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

This anti-gun-control slogan, a perfect fit for bumper stickers, has infected the public imagination with the mistaken belief that it’s just criminals, not weapons, that lead to deadly violence. The key question is, really, whether guns make violent events more lethal.

This is the argument the media likes to throw at us every time, acting like it’s the only argument we’ve ever floated when arguing against the effectiveness of gun control in fighting crime. You have to wonder if the authors on this article have ever actually had to argue with someone who is an opponent of gun control, because they argue a point no one makes. Our primary argument has never been that guns don’t make criminals more dangerous. We acknowledge that. The argument is that criminals will find ways to get guns. It’s the criminal you have to get off the streets, not the gun. By myopically focusing on guns, which is a favorite of many inner city politicians, the bigger issue of getting criminals off the street falls by the wayside. It’s easy to see why. Prisons are overcrowded, and many big cities have a revolving door justice system. For big city politicians, gun control is a way to act like they are doing something, without actually doing anything.

2. Gun laws affect only law-abiding citizens.

Teenagers and convicted felons can’t buy guns — that’s against the law already — so the only people affected by firearm regulations are the “good guys” who just want a weapon for self defense. At least that’s one line of reasoning against gun control. But law enforcement benefits from stronger gun laws across the board. Records on gun transactions can help solve crimes and track potentially dangerous individuals. Illinois law requires that all gun owners have a state ID card and that transactions be recorded, allowing police to potentially link a gun used in a crime to its owner.

This is all rank speculation, with no data to back it up. If this were true, we’d see a correlation here, but we don’t. We’d also have lists of crimes that the Canadian Gun Registry has solved for the Canadian police, but they don’t. Then you have Maryland, which keeps a ballistic database. You’d think that ballistic database would be great for solving crimes, yet the Maryland State Police want it disbanded because it’s useless. Some “myth” eh? I think their statement here is the myth.

3. When more households have guns for self-defense, crime goes down.

[…] The key question is whether the self-defense benefits of owning a gun outweigh the costs of having more guns in circulation. And the costs can be high: more and cheaper guns available to criminals in the “secondary market” — including gun shows and online sales — which is almost totally unregulated under federal laws, and increased risk of a child or a spouse misusing a gun at home. Our research suggests that as many as 500,000 guns are stolen each year in the United States, going directly into the hands of people who are, by definition, criminals.

Wow… I did not know that online sales were totally unregulated under federal law. I could swear that shipping a gun in interstate commerce without an FFL was a felony. I’m also surprised to find gun shows totally unregulated! I guess all the regulations that apply to FFLs somehow disappear at a gun show. I’m glad the Washington Post is on top of these things. And of course they drag out the notion that your spouse is an idiot, and kids are too. No possibility your spouse could also know what he or she is doing. But to me the implication here is that you can’t trust women with guns.

In the next myth, they claim guns are actually pretty hard to get in Chicago, despite the fact that the City of Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the country. Compare it to other big cities without much gun control. Phoenix, Arizona? Almost half the murder rate of Chicago. Houston, Texas? Surely Texas has out of control gun crime in its largest city. Nope. About 30% lower than Chicago. Same for Dallas, Texas. But what about Los Angeles? If it’s actually hard for criminals in Chicago to get guns, it doesn’t play out in the crime statistics.

5. Repealing Chicago’s handgun ban will dramatically increase gun crimes.

[…] Local officials from Dodge City to Chicago have understood that some regulation of firearms within city limits is in the public’s interest, and that regulation and law enforcement are important complements in the effort to reduce gun violence.

Dodge City. Ah yes. But how much do these two authors actually know about Dodge City? You see, guns were not prohibited within all of Dodge City. In the ordinary parts of town, you could carry a gun strapped to your hip just fine. No licenses in those days either. The only part of Dodge City you couldn’t carry a gun was past the “deadline.” north of the railroad tracks. This just happened to be where all the saloons, whorehouses, and gambling establishments were located in town. It should also be noted that if you were a cowboy coming into town after a long cattle drive up from Texas, and you wanted to go get liquored up, you could check your gun. So Dodge City’s gun prohibition, in only one part of town, was really to deal with the problem of drinking and carrying, which most of us understand the state has an interest in regulating. Personally, if every red light and saloon district had law enforcement willing to accept checked firearms, few of us would have a problem.

This is a terrible article. Poorly researched and easily challenged. If academic types want to make arguments for Chicago’s gun prohibition, they are going to have to do better than nonsense like this. The sad part is, an editor at the Washington Post was willing to go along with this. There are myths in this article all right, but they are not of our making.