More on Democrats and guns
Even Nicholas Kristof, who is your typical uninformed scaremonger when it comes to guns, is telling the Democrats to give up on gun control:
Nothing kills Democratic candidates’ prospects more than guns. If it weren’t for guns, President-elect Kerry might now be conferring with incoming Senate Majority Leader Daschle.
Since the Brady Bill took effect in 1994, gun-control efforts have been a catastrophe for Democrats. They have accomplished almost nothing nationally, other than giving a big boost to the Republicans. Mr. Kerry tried to get around the problem by blasting away at small animals, but nervous Red Staters still suspected Democrats of plotting to seize guns.
Actually, I wouldn’t say it was the Brady Bill but the assault weapons ban portion of it that killed the Democrats in the 1990s. After the ban, they lost the House and Senate. And Kristof is right, it is a non-starter. But Kristof is still a scaremonger in this article:
Moreover, it’s clear that in this political climate, further efforts at gun control are a nonstarter. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the 30,000 gun deaths each year, about children who are nine times as likely to die in a gun accident in America as elsewhere in the developed world, about the $17,000 average cost (half directly borne by taxpayers) of treating each gun injury. But nationally, gun control is dead.
So, he advocates giving up gun control by (wait for it) advocating gun control:
So it’s time for a fundamentally new approach, emblematic of how Democrats must think in new ways about old issues. The new approach is to accept that handguns are part of the American landscape, but to use a public health approach to try to make them much safer.
The model is automobiles, for a high rate of traffic deaths was once thought to be inevitable. But then we figured out ways to mitigate the harm with seat belts, air bags and collapsible steering columns, and since the 1950’s the death rate per mile driven has dropped 80 percent.
Similar steps are feasible in the world of guns.
“You can tell whether a camera is loaded by looking at it, and you should be able to tell whether a gun is loaded by looking at it,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Professor Hemenway has written “Private Guns, Public Health,” a brilliant and clear-eyed primer for the country.
We take safety steps that reduce the risks of everything from chain saws (so they don’t kick back and cut off an arm) to refrigerators (so kids can’t lock themselves inside). But firearms have been exempt. Companies make cellphones that survive if dropped, but some handguns can fire if they hit the ground.
This is the shift from gun control to gun safety that they’ve been trying to implement for a while now. It appears moderate, but it has the same goal. And, for the record, you should assume every gun is loaded so you shouldn’t need an indicator telling you whether it is or is not. This is the same thing that happened when the gun control lobby invented assault weapons. Semi-automatic firearms were always just called guns. In the late 1980s, Handgun Control, Inc. (now the Brady Campaign) knew that it was and will lose in its bid to ban all handguns. They needed an issue they could win. So, they invented one. The began referring to guns that looked like military weapons as assault weapons, even though such guns function identically to your dad’s hunting rifle. The media bought (and still peddles it) and now people think there was actually a ban on military guns that has expired.
Also, this gun safety idea can be particularly dangerous. As an example, look at New Jersey’s smart gun. The mandate certain safety features for handguns and those features do not exist. Or, essentially, it rules out the possiblity of people who can’t afford the expensive things to buy them. In general, it’s not a good precedent. If you want to address gun safety, then teach people the four rules:
All guns are always loaded (until you establish whether they are or not).
Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. Keep your gun pointed in a safe direction at all times: on the range, at home, loading, or unloading.
Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target (and you are ready to shoot).
Be sure of your target. Know what it is, what is in line with it and what is behind it. Never shoot at anything that you haven’t positively identified.
November 16th, 2004 at 1:08 pm
[…] |
Follow up on Gun Safety
|By SayUncle|
In the comments to this post where I stated that gun safety was a code word for gun control […]
November 15th, 2004 at 9:30 am
“[Y]ou should be able to tell whether a gun is loaded by looking at it.”
I guess looking in the chamber isn’t good enough?
November 15th, 2004 at 10:13 am
Sorry guys, a gun is product like anything else. Gun ownership is what some liberals have been trying to abolish, no matter how much they protest. However, if the Democrats focus on reducing gun deaths in this manner, I think they’ll be successful in implementing many of these measures. Most gun owners are not also gun enthusiasts. Gun enthusiasts will object to anything that interferes with the romanticism attached to their fetish objects. They’re no different than car enthusiasts in that respect.
I certainly don’t blame them. My dad was a gun enthusiast for years before he discovered golf . We went to the shooting range nearly every week, and gun shows were a frequent weekend destination when I was a kid (let me tell you they were a lot more free wheeling in the 70s and early 80s)
BUT… Your average person won’t view this approach as an infringement on the right to keep and bear arms. The guns will be just as lethal against an intruder. They just might not be as cool.
Just wait and see.
November 15th, 2004 at 10:16 am
Or, essentially, it rules out the possiblity of people who can’t afford the expensive things to buy them.
Yeah, just like requiring air bags, seat belts and emission controls put cars out of reach of the poor.
November 15th, 2004 at 10:21 am
So, you see a lot of poor people driving new cars? I don’t.
But the fact is if you establish these measures as a matter of law, it will be used to infringe the right to arms by any variety of overzeaolous folks.
And treating guns like cars is a bit silly. A car, at the end of the day, is not designed to fire a bullet and do damage to something. There is no magic bullet other than basic gun safety in the sense that you teach people how to handle guns.
And the public may buy it. Hell, the public bought the lie that the assault weaposn ban affected machine guns. That, however, doesn’t make it true or right.
November 15th, 2004 at 11:04 am
The gun safety argument is definitely a backdoor approach to gun control. If saving lives is the goal, there are more worthwhile avenues. Check these stats on accidental deaths. Out of 100,000 deaths, less than 1,000 are attributable to firearms. Frankly, some of those deaths are unavoidable no matter how many geegaws you tack onto the gun.
But, yeah, I’m mystified why so many Democrats hang on to the gun issue when it’s so obviously a losing issue. A majority of U.S. households own guns, and there’s a large block of single-isse voters who only vote for pro-gun candidates.
November 15th, 2004 at 3:38 pm
I think he has the right idea, though possibly the wrong tactics. Lets go forward on the basis that gun ownership is legal and look at how we can reduce gun deaths (and other preventable deaths for that matter). We could do things like teaching gun safety in schools and stuff like that.
SU: A lot of poor people may not be buying new cars, but they are buying progressively newer used cars which incorporate more and more safety features. As I see it, as long as there is a healthy market for used firearms, it mitigates the backdoor gun control argument within reason.
Les..I’m seeing 11,348 firearm related deaths on the link you gave.
November 15th, 2004 at 4:28 pm
Manish: the 11,348 is for assaults, not accidents.
November 15th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
Okay… here goes…
This message coming to you from the far right (which, apparently, is where I generally reside).
I have to take a second here… I’m about to partially agree with lobbygow and Manish and I’m not sure I can do it…
Okay, what’s wrong with legislating ways to make guns safer? Or with making it harder for criminals to use guns for crimes and get away with it?
For instance… thousands, perhaps millions, of police officers use Glocks. But at just about every television station I’ve been at, we’ve investigated safety problems with Glocks firing when they shouldn’t, or being so easy to fire that the slightest mistake could cause it to fire. Can’t it be made safer? Or should our cops use a safer gun?
I’ve never researched the subject, so I’m just throwing this out there as an example. I won’t even get into the “fingerprint-resistent” gun because I know gun owners like shiny grips…
Bottom line: Finding ways to make guns safer, and less likely to be used in a crime is a good thing, whether gun owners like it or not.
November 15th, 2004 at 5:17 pm
CJ the problem is that it is gun control disguised as gun safety. As i said, education is the key to gun safety. I don’t know what you mean by “making it harder for criminals to use guns for crimes and get away with it.” If you’re referring to ballistic fingerprinting, for example, it won’t work generally because after 100 – 200 rounds (a Saturday afternoon for me) the barrel changes due to wear.
And in 99.9% of the cases where a cop’s glock just “went off” it was the cops fault. I don’t say 100% merely because it is possible that mechanical devices fail but I know of no case where the cop’s gun just went off all by itself (i know of one case where a poorly designed holster had a protrusion that hit the trigger). In damn near every case, Mr. Cop should have kept his finger off the trigger. Hence the need for training in gun safety.
No gun is made to be fingerprint resistant. Most modern guns have grooves or a checkered pattern to make them easier to maintain a grip (a real safety feature to keep it from slipping from your hand) that isn’t conducive to catching prints but the gun is not made to be print resistant. You’ve probably been reading up over at some anti-gun site to come up with that one.
And I agree making them safer is a good thing. If by ‘them’ you mean people. A chamber indicator has never saved a life that gun safety wouldn’t have saved.
And BTW your site feed doesn’t seem to be updating.
November 15th, 2004 at 5:20 pm
The problem, CJ, is there is no substitute for following safe gun-handling practices. People like Dr. Hemenway call for “loaded indicators” because idiots take a gun they THINK is unloaded, point it at their buddy, and pull the trigger.
That’s simply unacceptable, and I suspect that such things would become MORE likely if the gun had an external “loaded/unloaded” indicator. And I betcha some fool would look at the indicator and misread it, and we’d STILL have people shooting each other by “accident.”
Now, making a gun that doesn’t go off when you drop it is one thing. Gun manufacturers are (and I agree, should be) doing things like that—for example, Ruger’s new single-action revolvers have a transfer bar, so you can carry them with a round “under the hammer.”
As for Glocks, the way I understand it is that they are safe in the sense that they won’t go off if you drop them. However, they do go off when you pull the trigger, which you’d think would be a feature, not a bug, for somebody who’s liable to get into a gunfight.
Finally, as for making guns “less likely to be used in a crime,” well…I suspect that’ll happen the day after phasers are invented, making guns obsolete.
November 15th, 2004 at 10:16 pm
CJ the problem is that it is gun control disguised as gun safety
Look. Nobody expected committed protectors of the Second Amendment and gun enthusiasts to boot to buy in to most of this stuff. I also agree that some people will use this as a back door to get some measure of “gun control” (an extremely elusive term).
However, I don’t think the approach should be dismissed out of hand. I grew up in a family that owned over numerous handguns and rifles but never hunted. Dad subscribed to “Guns & Ammo” and “American Rifleman” magazine for ten years (Now it’s “Golf Digest”). He sent me an NRA decal every year I was in college and grad school. I appreciate how much guns mean to a lot of people.
However, the main thing I’m interested in is not collecting or hunting or marksmanship. I am interested in guns (or conceivably other arms) as one option for defending oneself against whomever we need defending against. I think a holistic, non-confrontational approach to the “problems” of our gun culture might actually lead to more gun ownership, not less.
The only gun I own is a 16 gauge Remington wingmaster that my grandfather used as a squirrel gun. However many of my women friends and family (including my wife) own S&W .38s. Why? Because they were all single women when they purchased the guns traveling to and living in areas with relatively high assault and rape rates. My wife to be carried her gun illegally in Chicago and San Fransisco. So did my friend who was a Special Ed teacher in Knoxburg. Most of these women took self-defense classes as well. All of them said their biggest fear was that an intruder or attacker might get the gun from them and use it against them. They would have given anything to have some sort of technology that prevented anyone but them (or other authorized users) from firing the pistol.
Hell – the detectives on Law & Order would love that little feature, it would sure make determining who the prime suspect was a lot easier.
I think we need to have an open, honest discussion about gun ownership and gun safety in this country. I would give anything for their to be a moderate or even “liberal” alternative to the NRA. Right now they are the only game in town and it’s a zero-sum conflict between them and the “let’s be like England” types.
If we did this right, we might see an increase in responsible gun ownership and even carrying permits in the Blue States.
It’s a longshot, but I think people are tired of the oversimplification of the issues.
November 16th, 2004 at 1:05 am
Never shoot at anything that you haven’t positively identified.
Gee, my old boss told me the rule was “when in doubt, empty the magazine.”
November 16th, 2004 at 11:23 am
lobbygow: the problem is that there’s no reliable, proven technology for ensuring that only the gun’s owner can fire it. I’m with the people who way that before such a technology should be required for everyone, the police should have to use it, meaning that it has to be so good that the police will bet their lives on it.
CJ: believe it or not I tend to agree about the Glocks. I even wrote about it here. No thumb safety + light trigger pull = dangerous. If I buy a Glock I’ll install a New York trigger to give it a heavier trigger pull.
November 16th, 2004 at 1:38 pm
Hmmm.. feed not updating… and I have no idea how to check it or fix it 🙂