Cowboy Confessional

Possessing an insane depth of knowledge concerning gun control, as evidenced by any years of publishing the Gun Facts e-book, I’m alerted (often against my will) to the words and misdeeds of gun control advocates and other people of limited IQ.

An instance of this occurred last week when a gentleman named Zach Marks posted a piece on the now intellectually suspect Huffington Post.  I don’t know Zach, but suspect he comes from a good family and is otherwise devoid of unsavory behaviors.  In his blog he attributed the drop in violent crime during the 1990s to Brady Law and the lapsed assault weapons ban (which Zach mistakenly amalgamated into one piece of legislation).  I can’t blame Zach for coming to this conclusion because cum hoc ergo propter hoc errors are common when research is lacking.  Thus I have no bone with Zach, for even elected officials and other criminals are suspect to this logic trap.

My accusation lies with the scoundrels within the editorial bowls of the Huffington Post.

When I read Zach post, I added a couple of paragraphs to the comments section detailing the actual causes for the 1990s drop in violent crime (economics, get-tough legislation, and demographics).  I mentioned my Gun Facts e-book and provided a link for the convenience of anyone who wanted more in-depth info.  The post was polite and succinct.

And it remains unpublished, though others have followed me:

* Several people’s comments have been posted after mine.

* Many are antagonistic and impolite.

* Some have links.

So I can find no excuse for Huffington to not include my post, aside from keeping people from achieving a deeper and more informed understanding of the issue, and one that goes against the political agenda of Huffington’s management.  In other words they hand-pick comments that amplify their beliefs, or prevent people from learning contradictory data.

Intellectual fraud at best, corruption of conscious at least.

Bookmark to:

I hesitate to bite the editorial hand that occasionally feeds me, but the masthead memo last Sunday at the San Francisco Chronicle concerning the Tiahrt Amendment (“Aim for safety”) rhetorically missed the target.

The goal behind this series of legislation is to prevent well-documented abuse of a law enforcement tool for political gain. San Francisco was party to the failed conspiratorial litigation against firearm manufacturers on the sophistic theory that gun makers are party to the criminal misuse of their products. The legal theory, pitiful in its lack of logic, was built upon misused Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearm and Explosives (BATFE) trace data. Given the transparent attempt to bankrupt an entire industry through misappropriated and inaccurate data was the genesis of the Tiahrt amendments.

Thankfully, the amendments are available for public reading through federal web sites, and the preservation of law enforcement access to crime gun trace data is clear. The current Tiahrt amendment states that the data will remain private “except to a Federal, State, local, or foreign law enforcement agency … or local prosecutor … in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution.” That is clear to everyone, especially the BATFE and Fraternal Order of Police who expressed “strong support” for the amendment.

In other words, cops get the data and publicity seeking politicians don’t. That is an accurate and safe aim.

Bookmark to:

ABC news, which was marginally reliable before Peter Jennings puffed his last breath, has now sunk to a journalistic low previously unknown outside of Dan Rather’s alleged mind.

This evening ABC pandered to the Bloomberg clique of inept mayors who are blaming guns and trafficking for their inability, or more likely their unwillingness, to put enough cops in bad neighborhoods to stop gang members from using one another for target practice. 

Philly’s City Councilman Darrel Clarke, a man of marginal linguistic ability, struggled to articulate his inane notion that state law — that treats everyone in Pennsylvania equally — prevents him from enacting gun control, and said restrictions would have an effect on Philly violence.

It is instructive to examine other large cities from other states that also have uniform state-wide gun law preemption.  If lack of local civil rights violations were a determining factor in violent crime, then other large cities in other preemptive states should have similar crime rates.  But from the table below we see that there is something simply wrong with Philly (and almost as bad with Dallas).

We see that Philly is a hell hole, with all varieties of violent crime rocketing past any definition of civil society. Rates of rape are three times higher than New York.  Aggravated assaults are twice that of San Diego.  And Philly’s murder rate is off the charts.  And yet they are not by law treated any differently than most other large cities when it comes to regulating gun ownership.

The good people of Philadelphia should go to city hall, stand on Councilman Clarke’s desk, and scream loudly into his festering face until he puts enough cops in their neighborhoods to prevent thugs from owning the streets.

But he won’t do that.  Doing real work is too hard for politicians who prefer easy headlines hyped by those who play at being reporters.

Bookmark to:

Things are about to get interesting in D.C., as if dodging bullets was not already the town’s primary pastime.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided not to hear an appeal on the Parker case, a 2nd Amendment challenge to the absolute handgun ban in D.C. (well, almost absolute — certain reviled but well connected people appear to be immune from the law).  The denial of an en banc (i.e., the full court) hearing means that the city has only one choice left if they want to preserve the ban — to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

Court speculators are as divided as the Supremes would likely be on the outcome.  Most court watchers believe that the Supremes would sustain the lower court ruling (i.e., kill the gun ban) by a 5-4 margin.  This is significant because if the Supremes thus anointed the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, it would be the foundations for widespread deconstruction of state and local gun control ordinances from coast to coast.

And this is why I doubt the city will appeal to the Supremes.

Elected henchmen in D.C. are widely Democrat, largely liberal, and collectively beyond comprehension.  By nature and affiliation they are politically connected, and specifically connected to dishonorable outfits like the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center.  Neither of these organization wants the current court to decide the issue because the downside is too big to risk.

How can we know this?  One indication are their web sites.  Within an hour of the news breaking on the VA Tech massacre, both outfits had updated their home pages with veiled hints that the killings could have been stopped with more gun control.  Yet a full working day after the circuit court denied an en banc hearing, their home pages say nothing about their position on the appeal.  This is dirty laundry they prefer to keep indoors.

Which leads us back to D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, the man who will decide to appeal or not.  Like all politicians, Fenty has aspirations for higher office, which requires the support of friends.  If Sarah Brady and her hordes of developmentally disabled supporters apply pressure, and if that pressure is amplified by party loyalist from Diane Feinstein to Chuck Schumer, Fenty faces a big problem:  appeal against party will and lose the case, and he’ll be lucky not to be found floating downstream in the Potomac.  Abandon the appeal and he loses nothing except the local gun control issue, which may annoy some city residents, but is in the list of “forgivable” sins.

I don’t know Fenty personally, but surface reports position him as a man lacking stones large enough to forsake party and profit for principle, and I expect him to fold and cash in his chips on this particular gamble. It is better to annoy a town than a party and a country.

The cheerful upside for Fenty is the likelihood that he can, and will, turn this to his advantage.  In states that have liberalized and loosened their gun control laws, violent crime has gone down.  With the District being one of the most violent cities in America, Fenty has little to lose by allowing the ban to die.  If crime increases, he blames the courts and distant rednecks for the city’s ills, which is not far removed from his current talking points.  If crime goes down, he claims credit, hanging the results on inconsequential action he took.

If gambling were legal, I’d have an open $20 bet that this is as far as D.C. pushes the issue.

Bookmark to:

When Charles Gibson — the latest serial talking head on ABC’s evening news — reported that they had collaborated on a new gun control public opinion poll, I knew there would be ample buncombe.  Having dug into details about gun control surveys over the years — and oddly enough having both education and experience with survey design — I had grown weary of how such polls are misconstructed, misquoted, and misused.

I wasn’t surprised this week either.

When aired, Gibson or whatever corporate puppet master yanks his strings, spoke of the post VA Tech shooting spree survey (for the bored or terminally curious, the ABC gun control survey, results and canard can be had here).  Gibson and proto-yuppie George Stephanopoulos reported that most people wanted government to keep guns away from lunatics (though they did not name Congress specifically), and that “most” favored strong gun control (see the video here).  This caught me as odd since polling from multiple competing services over the last decade had shown a steady decline in support for stricter controls, except those that would disarm Congress Critters.

In a sound bite astonishing for its brevity, Stephanopoulos did state that more people favored enforcing existing laws as opposed to new laws.  You would have missed the blurb had you blinked.

The first problem with this poll was that it was rushed through immediately after the VA Tech shootings, with the goal of hopefully capturing a shift in public sentiment following a tragedy of such magnitude.  That’s like polling women leaving an abortion clinic on their attitudes toward unprotected sex. 

Strike one on sound survey methodology.

The survey itself lacks the fundamental “opposing question” test, where a question phrased from the opposite angle is used to filter out biasing in responses.

Strike two on sound survey methodology.

The survey then serially asks respondents if they would favor banning pistols, mythical “assault weapons”, and concealed carry.  This biases respondents by presenting a slate of draconian controls and predisposing the respondents to reply to subsequent questions with that bias.

Strike three — ABC, you’re out!

What is more important than ABC’s inability to conduct an honest poll even if Charlie Gibson’s life depended upon the outcome, is the Sin of Omission committed by Gibson himself.  This survey had been conducted, in various forms, for many years proceeding.  In fact, the stack of “should we ban this, that and the other thing” questions has been consistent going back to 1999, when Bill “Zipper Problem” Clinton and the Million Mom March were trying to dismantle individual freedom, with ABC assisting. 

What Gibson and his co-conspirators did not mention is that even in the wake of the VA Tech shootings, public preference for more gun control (even in their sloppy survey) was down six points from where it was in 1999.  In other words, despite a zero-percent increase in gun control support since the last time this poll was conducted (the year before), it was reported as if there had been a huge change in sentiment on behalf of Mr. Smith and Ms. Wesson.  Gibson also failed to note that opposition to stricter gun control had risen five points in the same time that support for the control had dropped by six.

One polling item that received mention, but only in passing, was that Americans by a 52-29 margin favor actual enforcement of existing laws instead of enacting new and equally unenforced ones.

Most egregious of their reporting — and Lord, we have much to complain about — was their omission of what people felt caused gun violence.  It wasn’t lax gun laws.  It wasn’t the availability of guns.  It wasn’t fear and self preservation every time Dick “Shotgun” Cheney’s face appeared on TV.  Nope, people felt it was culture (40%) and how other folk raised — or didn’t raise — their children (35%). 

Smith’s First Law of Adulthood is “Never trust a politician.”  The Second Law may become “Never trust a network news anchor.”

Bookmark to: