The NRA and Dallas

[ET]

[ET]

Sorry, folks, but since Keith likes charts, I thought I'd put a relevant one here even if he is off on vacation. First time I've seen these two trends on the same chart.

[William Thornton]

Nice chart.

[Sandy]

[David Flick]

[Sandy]

It's irrelevant because individuals continue to be able to have ease of access to weapons which they they then use in mass shootings. The homicide rate may go up or down, and statistics can be adjusted by any number of variables and factors to look like something is happening when it is not. All the statistics and reasoning of the NRA and gun advocates regarding their idea of how shootings can be prevented went down the toilet with the Dallas shootings. In an open carry state, with some of the loosest gun responsibility and accountability laws in the country, five police officers were killed by a shooter who couldn't be stopped because none of those statistics stood between the bullets and the police officers. That's a nice graph, but it won't stop bullets.

If you want to call it an argument, go ahead. It's going to be hard to convince the families of those five dead Dallas policemen, or most of their colleagues, that it is.

[Ed Pettibone]

[ET]

So, Sandy, a graph of FBI statistical date of the U.S. homocide rate overlaid with data on the increase of firearms in the U.S. is "crapola propaganda"? If you don't trust FBI statistics to measure crime rates, then please reference the article I posted above about why folks who own gun don't trust you when it comes to regulating firearms. I suggest you also check out the FBI stat that back in (sorry, haven't bothered to update the bookmark to more recent data), only 325 or so homicides were committed with a rifle, less than with blunt objects (496) OR bare hands/feet/fists (796). Maybe you need to be regulating hammers, clubs and bare fists before you worry about semi-automatic rifles.

What does an open carry policy have to do with the Dallas shooting? The guy was shooting from an elevated position, not walking in the crowd and then drew his "open carry firearm" and started shooting. Again you bring up an issue that played no role in the Dallas incident.

Another fact of the Dallas and Orlando shootings: Both criminals took time planning their crimes. What makes you think that any of the regulations you can come up with are going to prevent someone from doing harm if he displays enough patience to acquire what he needs to inflict death? The Dallas police found explosives in the Dallas shooter's home, but he didn't use them because he moved up his timetable. The guys in Boston didn't need an AR and used a pressure cooker. What's your plan for dealing with pressure cookers and explosives? Anybody can buy a pressure cooker. Do you have regulatory schemes for those purchases?

Besides, with Keith on the board, what's a good debate without at least one chart?

The chart disproves two rhetorical points of the left:
1) More guns does not lead to an increase of violent crime (NOTE: I don't necessarily agree that more firearms leads to less crime. The crime issue is more complex than that.)
2) America does not have an "epidemic of gun violence". That is, unless you consider the early '60s to be a time when America had an epidemic of violence. That's how far back you have to go to get about the same homicide rate as what we do now.

We do have an "epidemic of hysterical media willing to repeat hysterical claims".

[Sandy]

Same old argument. You can't prevent all shootings, so why bother to do anything that prevents any? Then obfuscate the matter with a bunch of irrelevant, slanted statistics and circular reasoning. First of all, you argue that open carry prevents mass shootings, and cite statistics from states where they have it about specific and particular kinds of shootings, ignoring the whole picture. Then you argue that you can't prevent planned shootings like the one in Orlando, or Dallas, and cite some more irrelevant and unrelated statistics. That, combined with outright lies, like "Obama is going to take your guns away," and "Hillary wants to do away with the second amendment," and you generate a wave of gun sales that produces enough revenue to buy enough congressmen and senators to prevent any change from occurring. Congratulations. You have proved my point, that the NRA needs to own this Dallas shooting, because they are responsible for it, regardless of whether one of their members pulled the trigger or not.

The Black Lives Matter movement has credibility, because there is a problem, which needs to be resolved, when it comes to over-aggressive police officers, and a combination of a lack of understanding, racist attitudes and racial profiling, to which too many people are turning a blind eye. By no means does that mean all police officers are racist, but not all of them are perfect public servants, either. Putting your life at risk on a daily basis for the protection of the community is laudable, but it is also an expectation of the career that you have chosen, and it doesn't entitle you to a pass when it comes to bad behavior or selective enforcement of the law depending on someone's race. You can cite statistics and post graphs and charts, but that doesn't change the perception when an African American man is shot by police, and there wasn't a legitimate reason to even detain him. The increased frustration caused by those kinds of events, combined with the ease of availability of guns, is going to make for increasingly hard times, and lots of grief for those involved in law enforcement, if something is not done about both problems.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Sandy]

[Ed Pettibone]

[ET]

[Sandy]

Even more subterfuge, and no relevant information to the argument.

Ask the law enforcement people who are now dying under fire, and their families, how they feel about the private ownership of unrestricted and unlimited weapons.

[ET]

[Sandy]

ET has dodged the issue here in virtually every post. Always goes to some other aspect of gun ownership, and gets away from what the NRA and its congressional cronies have done. Subterfuge. Avoidance. Same tactic over and over again. Get away from the issue that the availability of guns and their proliferation is a major problem, and is exactly the reason for what is happening. It has nothing to do with hunting, or firepower, or anything except the culpability of the NRA.

I hold them responsible. End of discussion.

[ET]