Leftists love groupthink. It stands to reason, as they cannot cogitate independently. The groupthink came up with a unified gun control plan.
If you think I’m kidding/lying, find 100 Leftists, and ask them pointed questions about their talking points. If they can engage in the subject with reason and facts, you’ve found a good one. Treat them with respect. If they get a blank stare for a couple of seconds until they either repeat the talking point, or they start attacking you personally, you’ve found someone who has their cogitation done for them.
To illustrate this, in 2019 GVPedia came up with a unified and consistent policy to let anti-gunners in power across the US present a plan (I’ll never say this is a “good plan”) to combat “gun violence.”
This “Denver Accord” came up with four principles, three policies and suggested points for legislation or policies for politicians.
Their four principals are:
- Guns do not make us safer.
- Gun violence in America is a pervasive public health crisis that demands substantial policy solutions and well-funded programs that effectively reduce gun violence.
- Equitable and just enforcement of gun laws is paramount.
- Everyone has the right to live free from violence.
The three policies are:
- Improving safety
- Enforcing existing and passing new laws
- Protect communities.
First of all, as with any “gun violence” organization, they always combine accidental deaths, suicides and homicides in their numbers they use to make the “gun deaths” sound as horrible as possible. Without going too deep into this rabbit hole, YES, HALF OF SUICIDES ARE BY FIREARM. Their inference of “if no guns were available, they wouldn’t have completed their suicides” is utter bullshit. If a person is determined to end their own life, they will find a way. How many suicides would be prevented if there were no firearms? That’s an unknown number between zero and all of them, way closer to zero than all of them.
And to clearly exemplify the difference and prove without a doubt the falsehood “Guns do not make us safer,” I can point to a multitude of places where legally-armed and forcefully unarmed people congregate. A mass shooting (as defined by Pravda) is “four or more people wounded by gunfire in a single event.” With that criteria in hand, ask yourself “how many mass shootings have happened in the locations below?”
- Gun-Free Zones (Schools, Malls, Workplaces, cities with strict gun control laws)
- Gun-Expected Zones where armed people are concentrated (Gun shows, Gun stores, Police stations)
I’m pretty sure that the ratio of mass shootings over the past 20 years (starting with Columbine) for Gun-Free vs. Gun Expected zones is at least 1,000:1. And since Gun-Free zones are so effective at preventing gun violence (this is called “sarcasm”) Leftist logic can only envision “let’s make everywhere a gun-free zone.”
Firearms are not a “public health crisis.” The misuse of firearms that results in thousands of people wounded or killed every year is a social issue, brought about by a systemic inducement of poverty in minority populations. Young men, who are deprived of an adequate education to enable them to escape their poverty, express their anger by shooting each other and anybody else nearby.
Now, the “Equitable and just enforcement of gun laws” I can agree with. As long as those laws are minimal and not the plethora of stupid ideas that this accord proposes. I mean the default law should be, “A person may carry any weapon they deem as appropriate, open or concealed during their daily activities.”
If such an armed citizen discharges their weapon in public, an investigation should ensue. If the investigation determines that the armed citizen was appropriate and reasonable in the use of the weapon, they should not face criminal or civil liabilities. In other words, no criminal trial and no civil suit by the “victim” or his family. If the armed citizen injures/kills an innocent third party in the incident, that would be judged on its’ own merits.
The consequences of a malicious or negligent use of a firearm should by default be beyond terrible and make the Eighth Amendment cringe.
Everyone has the right to live free from violence.
Briefly, the difference between a “Big R” Right (free speech, secure in your homes and papers, no cruel or unusual punishment, etc.) and a “Little r” right (to have a place to live, free from violence, etc.) is simply this: a Right exists with or without a government, while a right requires government intervention and the labor of others to provide it to you.
The short answer to this right is, at no time in human history has there ever been a time or a “right” to live without some kind of violence. I agree, a life free of violence is a worthy goal to strive for, however I’m pretty sure you won’t get there from here as long as there are people with bad intentions in the world. Also, it is not the job of government to provide a total safety from violence, because the only way such a condition to be attained would be by the government maintaining the means and mandate to commit violence. And when it comes down to it, what is the difference (if any) between criminals who tell you what to do, or face dire consequences, or the State who tells you what to do or face dire consequences?
Under the policies part, here are several points that can be covered with one rebuttal:
- Licensing gun owners
- Total registration of firearms
- Imposing storage requirements of firearms
- Requiring private sales be made through a firearms dealer
- Maximize the number of gun-free zones
- Passing of “red flag” laws.
These are all in one group because they can all be addressed generally with the two related counterpoints:
First, intentional criminals won’t obey these laws. I used the term “intentional” because these people are already committing major crimes like theft, dealing illicit drugs, etc. and their “job” already violates the law. An “unintentional” criminal would be a person who inadvertently breaks a law, like not declaring a seashell in their suitcase when coming back from a trip to Belize. For this intentional criminal to be “prosperous” in such endeavors, one must be armed to deal brutally with rivals and the other inevitable consequences that arise from these felonies.
Considering the majority of the homicides are committed by these professional criminals, if citizens were disarmed, the number of their crimes will most likely increase, not decrease. Why is that you ask? Because there will be less legally armed citizens they have a chance of encountering. Ninety-eight percent of Defensive Gun Usage (DGU) incidents go like this:
- Criminal picks Potential Victim as their next target.
- Potential Victim notices criminal.
- Criminal starts to advance on Potential Victim.
- Potential Victim displays/draws legally owned weapon.
- Criminals hastily depart.
- End of encounter.
As Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC put it:
“If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.”
The bottom line for this point is, “If the citizens are not armed, they can’t protect themselves from criminals. Therefore, criminals will act with impunity.”
The second point is, an unarmed people cannot fight back against a repressive government. We see it time and time again. When the government is armed and the people are not, you have in essence, a dictatorship. It may be a benevolent dictatorship, however in the end, the government tells the people what to do and the people obey, or else.
Which is not the spirit, the ideals, or the heart of America. The very bedrock of the United States is the concept of, “the People tell the government what to do, not the other way around.” And this doesn’t work if the people are disarmed. This is why people want to come here.
And if Joe Biden’s “the military has F-15’s and nukes” comment comes to mind, an armed citizen does not have to stand up against the entire US (or UN) military. An armed citizen needs only to take out one occupying soldier. There are approximately 1.1 million people in the six branches of the US military, and less than 400,000 are active fighters. There are over 100 million people in this country that are armed. I see that as a 250:1 ratio. If 200 armed citizens shoots at soldiers and kills 1 occupying soldier, that’s a victory, albeit pyrrhic.
To tackle these points individually:
Licensing gun owners/firearms registration/private sales must be made through a firearms dealer.
Illinois’ and a couple of other anti-gun states has programs like a FOID, or Firearms Owner Identification card. This means you must have a FOID to buy, sell or possess firearms or ammunition. Sounds like a people registry so the government knows which law-abiding citizens have the means to resist them. And this is if the government makes it easy to get that FOID. Which they don’t, because the process to obtain an FOID is designed to discourage anyone from getting it in the first place. To further that end, the process takes a long time, is very expensive, and can be refused for any (or no) reason, usually when you’re close to the final step before approval, after you spent months of time and thousands of dollars to get that far.
If the government knows who has weapons and what weapons they have, it only stands to reason that if the government was going to do something the citizens might take up arms to object, that whole conflict could be stopped before it started by confiscating all of the people and their weapons.
To rephrase a popular RKBA saying, “People are safer when the criminals and politicians don’t know who’s armed.”
Imposing storage requirements of firearms.
This, like the FOID, is meant to discourage firearms ownership by making compliance with the law a lengthy and expensive progress. It will show up as “safe storage requirements” and have ludicrous requirements like:
- A minimum 1,000 pound safe
- The safe will be secured with ¾” lag bolts set in concrete at least 6” deep.
- All weapons must be inside that safe when not in use,
- All weapons will be field-stripped into at least three parts while in the safe
- A cable lock through the action/magazine well of the weapon while in the safe.
- Ammunition and the keys to the cable locks must be stored in a similar safe as the first, in a different room of the dwelling.
- Ammunition cannot be stored in a magazine ready for use.
The stated purpose of these burdensome regulations is to “prevent impulsive use” of the weapons. What it actually does is make it impossible to defend your home against attack, be it criminals or the police because it would take 4-5 minutes to obtain, assemble, ready and load the firearm. This is a punishment for having the gall to want to own firearms. For the simple reason it will cost more to retrofit your house to these requirements than the weapons you would own.
Maximize the number of gun-free zones
The SCOTUS oral arguments for NYSRPA v. Bruen the other day, there was a discussion on “sensitive places,” or (I’m surmising) “special and limited locations” where a citizen’s Right to RKBA is suspended. Nominally, they are government buildings, schools and certain Leftist-owned businesses. Imagine every building, every public gathering place to fall into this category.
Red Flag Laws
This kind of law violates not only a persons’ RKBA, but their Right to due process, the Right to be “innocent until proven guilty” and the Right to face their accuser.
Red flag laws gives police the power to confiscate a persons’ firearms based solely on a complaint by another person. If I lived in such a town and I called 911 and told them, “My neighbor was outside in his front yard earlier today, naked and screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs with a rifle in his hands,” the police would come, the man would be arrested, then maybe sent to the “Nervous Hospital,” and any firearms he has will be confiscated.
Then starts this mans’ journey through hell. He will have to prove a negative three times. First, he has to prove he’s not insane just to get out of the hospital. Then he has to prove he’s not a danger to himself or other people to clear his name. Then he has to prove that he deserves his weapons back and retain his RKBA. All because an asshole dropped a dime and lied.
If you want to know how difficult it is to prove a negative, about midnight prove there is a bright ball in the sky. You can’t, as there is no bright ball in the sky in the middle of the night. If you don’t want to be out that late, try proving at Noon the sun rises in the East every morning. These things are impossible to prove right then and there, because the evidence isn’t there at that moment when you need to prove it.
In closing, when the people in government want to exert power beyond the boundaries of law, they need to make sure that the people they want to rule are not equipped to remove them from power.