Three links from Stephen Wenger's Daily Digest. (His comments in parenthesis)
Commentary on the Compost Article: "White Men Have Much to Discuss About Mass Shootings" read the headline of a piece in the Washington Post's Outlook section Sunday. Having spent most of our adult life in the opinion journalism business, we are no stranger to the instinct for provocation. But really, Washington Post, this is embarrassing... To begin with, while it's true that all but a few mass murderers have been men, the twins cherry-pick their examples and simply ignore nonwhite killers. They leave out Colin Ferguson, the black man who opened fire in a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993, killing 6 and wounding 19. "He had a number of problems in his life, and every problem he was involved in he attached some racial motivation to the person and institution he was dealing with, regardless of their race," detective Mel Kenny of the Nassau County Police told the New York Times... As National Review Online's Robert VerBruggen notes, the twins also omit two nonwhite mass murderers of Asian heritage: Korean immigrant Cho Seung-Hui (32 dead, 17 wounded at Virginia Tech in 2007) and Laotian immigrant Chai Soua Vang (6 dead, 2 wounded at Meteor, Wis., in 2004). "Immigrants with mental health issues are not committing mass shootings in malls and movie theaters," the twins assert – a lie that is technically true, since Cho and Vang massacred their victims in other locations. In addition, including the Fort Hood shooting is a stretch. The defendant in that case, Nidal Hasan, is white according to standard racial taxonomy. But he is also Arab-American, which makes him a nonwhite minority by the conventions of contemporary identity politics. The facts of the case suggest the motive was related to a nonracial aspect of his identity that also puts him in the minority: his religion, Islam... (Then there was Omar Thornton – a “person of color” - who fatally shot eight of his co-workers and wounded two, in Manchester CT, in 2010, after being confronted with photographic evidence that he had been stealing beer from his employer. The death count is listed at nine because he took his own life as well.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323296504578398731336938160.html
--
Guns Save Lives: ...The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the OK Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger. If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull. Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year. Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate... More children may die in bathtub accidents than in shooting accidents, but you are not likely to read that in most newspapers or see it on television newscasts. Some in the media inflate the number of children killed by counting as children the members of criminal teenage gangs who shoot each other in their turf fights. Many seize upon statistics which show that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates. Yet they ignore other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, but which have much higher murder rates, such as Brazil, Russia and Mexico... (Great analysis by economist Thomas Sowell. This is an article you may want to share with friends and relatives who “don't get it.”)
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/04/02/creators-oped-n1554735/page/full/
What, Big Brother Lie?: For months we've heard President Obama and his fellow gun control zealots using the line, "40 percent of guns are purchased without a background check." We've heard anti-gunners make this claim under oath in congressional testimony and on primetime television. The problem? The 40 percent figure is an old and bogus statistic that was debunked a long time ago. In January, the Washington Post fact checker [second link] gave Obama two pinocchios for using the figure... Despite the figure being false, Obama has been using it to push for more gun control and will likely use it again today during his trip to Colorado where he we call for federal legislation criminalizing the private transfer of firearms... The oft-cited figure, it turns out, was pulled from a 1997 study done by the National Institute of Justice. In the study, researchers estimated about 40 percent of all firearm sales took place through people other than licensed gun dealers. The conclusion was based on data from a 1994 survey of 2,568 households. Of those, only 251 people answered the question about where they got their guns. PolitiFact tracked down the co-author of the study, Duke University professor Philip Cook, and asked him if he thought the 40 percent estimate is accurate. “The answer is I have no idea,” Cook reportedly told PolitiFact. (Note that NICS did not become operational until November 30, 1998.)
Commentary on various gun battles looming.
http://www.theoutdoorwire.com/features/227285
Ops, wrong house.
http://www.newsmax.com/US/colorado-shooting-prosecutor/2013/04/03/id/497602
Recommended best guns for concealed carry.
http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/the-top-10-ccw-guns
More news than I can handle.
--
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment