Merry Christmas, Folks!

A very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Kick back, relax, and enjoy.

We'll see you back here after New Year's Day.

(photo: Talis Source Blog/scottfeldstein)

Gun Control Advocates Say: Comply With Rapists

The Gun Control Crowd loves to tell us that all you have to do to defend yourself against a violent assault is to comply with the criminal. If a mugger wants your wallet, give it to him.

On July 19, 2009, Isaiah Kalebu crawled into a Seattle couple's open window then raped and repeatedly stabbed Teresa Butz and her partner.

According to a police report, neighbors on South Rose Street were awakened shortly after 3 a.m. by the terrified pleading of Butz and her partner, who had just escaped from their home.

Butz told neighbor Albert Barrientes before dying, "He told us if we did what he asked us to do, he wouldn't hurt us. He lied, he lied," according to the Associated Press.

Now think about it. Especially you Ladies out there.

The Gun Control Folks are telling you that you must comply with a rapist.

Pretty nice of them, right?

A Modest Proposal to Fight Gun Violence

Want to know how best to fight gun violence?

Try these recommendations:

1. Make programs that track and prosecute convicted violent felons with guns a feature in every major city.

2. Support mandatory hard time for criminals who commit gun crimes.

3. Support legislation that sends career criminals to finish their careers in prison as well as measures like truth in sentencing and the abolition or restriction of parole.

Like it?

Then thank Wayne LaPierre and James Jay Baker.

It's from their book Shooting Straight*.

Pick up a copy. It's an excellent book to have in your gun rights library.

*This is an affiliate link

Who The Hell Are You Calling An "Outlier"?

Over on Sean's blog, he's got this post on how to argue gun control and quotes from a CDC report on the effectiveness of firearm laws.

I wanna focus on something rather interesting I found in that report.

Toward the end, the report notes:

This is a critical period for focused research on the effectiveness of firearms laws in reducing violence in the United States. International comparisons indicate that the United States is an outlier among developed, industrialized nations in rates of firearms violence

and cites a 1998 article from the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Hear that?

We're an outlier.

Now I don't have access to that article to check the data.

But, that same article is quoted in a report from the Firearm & Injury Center at Penn called Firearm Injury in the U.S.(PDF):

Compared to other industrialized countries, violence and firearm death rates in the United States are disproportionately high. Of the approximately 50 upper- and middle-income countries with available data, an estimated 115,000 firearm deaths occur annually and the U.S. contributes about 30,000.

Figure 4 on page 8 of the report then lists the countries in question.

If we take the top 5 high income countries from that list, in addition to the U.S., and look at their number of homicides and homicide rates for 2008 (data taken from this spreadsheet from the UN Office of Drugs and Crime), we get:

U.S. 9,484 (3.1)
Canada 196 (0.6)
Austria 18 (0.2)
Belgium 70 (0.7)
Denmark 6 (0.1)
England/Wales 38 (0.1)

(NOTE: Data for Austria was only available for 2006, 2004 for Belgium)

Yeah.

Based on the numbers above, the U.S. rate runs some 3 times higher.

Outlier.

But--

But--

Let's also look at Brazil and Mexico. According to Figure 4 from the report, both countries are classified as "upper middle income countries."

Data from the spreadsheet gets us the following for number of homicides and homicide rates:

Brazil 34,678 (18.1)
Mexico 5,095 (4.6)

Whoa! That's interesting.

The U.S. is an outlier? At 3.1?

What does that make Brazil and Mexico?

"But wait!" you say. "Mexico has less homicides than we do. 5,095 versus our 9,484."

True.

But Brazil still beats us with 34,678 homicides. Over 25,000 more than us.

And, here's something else interesting--they have strict gun licensing and registration requirements.

Given that, how exactly will stricter gun laws lower firearm violence?

Because that is the point of the CDC report. Finding better gun laws--better than the some 20,000 already on the books--to reduce firearm deaths.

But looking at Brazil, how exactly with even stricter laws work?

And how exactly are we outliers?