What's the Actual Number One Cause of Death in Children?

Is the right to bear arms responsible for
being the #1 cause of child gun deaths?
Is it time to abolish the 2nd Amendment?

Some people I like today said on camera that the number one cause of death of children was guns. First off, I would think that the number one cause of death was shooters. Secondly, it's a deceptive, manipulative lie. That's because the statistics are manipulated by changing the definition of "children".

Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century Prime Minister of England, once opined, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, the number one cause of death in children requires some serious manipulation of the numbers and definition. If you look it up in most anti-gun websites, gun related deaths in children top motor vehicle accidents, other sorts of accidents and individually each other cause of death such as illness, poisoning, murder, and manslaughter. Here's how you do it.

Infants seldom die of gun violence, so
they are not included in the child death
rate by guns statistics to avoid bringing
down the "numbers" of child gun deaths.

If you define a "child" as aged from one to nineteen, you arguably get somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand children's deaths. The reason they don't include age 0 to 1 numbers is because it would remove gun deaths from the number one spot. The death from natural causes is significantly higher as babies are fragile creatures and we caregivers don't get a lot of training before they are born. Meanwhile, even with the age of children being extended to include 18 to 19 years old the 0-12 month death rate from "other than guns" is pretty significant and not many babies often die from being shot. 

These guys have inordinate numbers of gun deaths,
so they are counted as children to inflate the
child gun deaths numbers.

The reason the definition doesn't exclude 18 to 19-year-olds from being counted as children is that leaving them out would cut the number of child gun death numbers in half. Including murders and suicide by depressed teens and teenage gang members from Chicago, LA and Detroit, runs up the numbers of so-called deaths by gun violence. The inflated numbers glommed onto the child death stats makes no allowance for kids killed in mass shootings in "gun-free" zones by 18 to 26 year olds using illegally obtained guns nor for the cops shooting the shooter. He gets counted as a child gun death. I don't know about you, but "children" age 18 and up don't seem much like children at that age. If you can be tried as an adult, I believe you ARE an adult. Don't be blowing smoke up my skirt by telling me that someone who shaves (face or legs I don't care) is a child. 

And yet well-meaning people get all in a twitter because they believe that toddlers are shooting each other in droves based on this statistical picture being painted by the anti-gun lobby. This is the picture such statistical manipulation is supposed to create in your mind. It's the same with adult gun death statistics. When our progressive friends talk about "victims" of gun violence, they cite statistics that are deliberately skewed to make you believe these are people who died at the hands of criminals or in gun accidents. What they don't tell you is that whenever a cop shoots a criminal caught in the act, when a homeowner shoots a home invader in self-defense, when a citizen with a gun puts a stop to a mass shooter, or when a father shoots a farm hand who is raping his daughter in the barn (true story), it is recorded as a death by "gun violence."  No one records statistics when a Florida grandmother chases off a pair of home invaders by waving her shotgun at them or when a young mother with toddlers fires a shot at thieves ransacking her home or when an 89-year-old man is charged by a 20-year-old thief intent on looting the house next door and cops are an hour away according to the 911 operator. In Texas, charges against the old guy are dismissed automatically based on the "he needed killin'" principle.

The thing is that half of the gun-violence-against-children gun death numbers are created by "kids" who look like the picture above on the right. It's not a true picture of those "gun deaths" but it certainly distracts Mom & Pop America from the true purpose of all the talk about massive gun confiscation going on in the halls of power and in the media these days. 

It's important to note that every tyrannical government in history first finds an excuse to disarm the citizenry. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The Communists disarmed the proletariat, the Chinese under Mao disarmed the peasants. Then they piled up the guns and burned them and came back the next day and piled up anyone who owned more than one ox and burned them. 

I'm not mad at the people who believe the lies, though. They think they understand and are appalled, accepting the lies that the politicians and media spoon-feed them. Who can blame them for  trusting that they are being told the truth? The sad thing is that the political party that has long claimed to be the party of the people, the party of the working man, has made common cause with wealthy individuals and corporations and conspired to dump the rest of us into a heap they call the collective. And they want to make sure we won't be troublesome or able to resist when our betters decide they need to visit a "reeducation" facility because they disagree with the new order and won't shut up about it.

Someone I respect described these collectives or "unions" as bound up in bundles to be burned at the end of time. Statistics like the phony gun death statistics are the matches and make no mistake. They will not hesitate to light the pyres.

And the number one cause of death for children 0 through 17 is motor vehicle accidents by a good bit. Oddly, enough no one has called for private citizens not being licensed to drive cars an activity demonstrably more dangerous to actual children 

As I'm wont to say, "I believe Jesus is loading up the bus to come get us from this crazy place and take us home."

© 2023 by Tom King

The Left Lies About Good Guys With Guns

This meme is a lie!

This meme is a complete lie. But then the left has never had any compunction about doing that. I believe it was Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf who said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” This idea that the ends justify the means is the cornerstone of the progressive agenda for bringing the USA to full socialism. These people do all the time.

I can name you several right off the top of my head.

1. San Antonio Mayan Theater shooter  - guy entered a theater bent on killing his girlfriend and anyone who got in his way. He wounded two before an off-duty copy who was carrying shot him and put an end to the would-be shoot-em-up. Doesn't count as a good man with a gun because he prevented any from being killed.
2. Ft. Smith AK shooter - shot and killed an 86 year old woman. A resident of the apartment complex retrieved his rifle, shot and killed the attacker.
3. The Sutherland Springs Texas church shooter - Neighbor chases mass shooter responsible for 20 deaths and 26 wounded and shoots him before he can carry out plans to attack another site.
   
4. The White Settlement Texas Church shooter - Church's security team takes out shooter. One volunteer church security team member loses his life. When the scene ended several church members were on their feet with weapons drawn and pointed correctly.
   
5. New Life Church in Colorado Springs, CO - Armed volunteer security guard takes out the heavily armed bad guy before he could get inside the church.
6. Moore OK rampage, knife attack and beheading kills one and wounds another. Attacker shot dead by off-duty cop who was carrying.
   
7. Garland Texas terrorists stopped cold by armed police protectors (good guys with guns)..
   
8. Price Middle School in Atlanta, Georgia, shooter captured and disarmed.
   
9. Blanchard, OK mom stopped armed home invaders, 
10. 2012 Florida Internet Cafe - armed 71 year old foiled violent robbery,
    
11. 69 year old Georgia grandmother stops home invaders, 
12. Armed 14 year old saves self and siblings from home invaders, 
13. Pregnant Ashtabula, OH mother of two opens fire on two home invaders, 
14. Media Madhouse in Indiana - armed employee saves two employees and a store full of customers and shot the robber. 
15. 72 year-old Jan Cooper saves her self and her 85 year old husband by scaring off an armed thug who tried to rob their home with her 357 magnum, Ft. Smith Arkansas apartment resident stops mass shooting in their apartment complex.

And that's a few. There are a lot more unstatisticized examples where bad gays get counted as poor poor victims by the gun lobby.

All of these incidents are thoroughly documented in my book "Give Guns a Chance" available on Amazon.  And those in the gun control lobby document few if any of these incidents where the bad guys are frightened away with any sort of context. And, heaven forbid that the criminal is shot and killed. The gun lobby counts defense against criminals as gun deaths - PERIOD. They do not document that the criminal was killed by a good guy with a gun. Instead the criminal goes down in those statistic as a tragic "gun death" without context. If you merely shoot one in the knees, it goes down as "gun violence."

The system is rigged that way, so don't buy the statistics without examining how the data was collected. Look at the context. In my graduate studies in psychology, I learned that statistics can be manipulated if you are not careful how you collect the data. Or, data can be manipulated if you want to guarantee an outcome that suits your ideology. 

As Benjamin Disraeli aptly put it more than a century ago....

© 2022 by Tom King

Vaccine Checks - Come and Make Me

 The Klickikat County Public Health director faced some questioning as a result of rumors from DC about door-to-door vaccine checks. Several citizens heard reports that people doing the checks will report Betsy Ross flags, Gadsen flags, personal firearms, MAGA hats and other evidence of right wing extremism to files about people the interview. Concerned Commissioners asked the Public Health Director if she had any plans to do door-to-door vaccine checks. Here was her response:

 © 2021 by Tom King

A Very Educational Holiday

Marching For Feelings

Lots of emotion. Very little substance!

Getting a wee bit tired of gushy articles praising the "emotional impact" of "March for Our Lives". This “spontaneous” march was little more than a heavily organized propaganda effort funded by Progressive political organizations who want to, as President Obama so delicately put it, "fundamentally change America,” as though the most civilized, wealthy and safe nation in the world needs to be made into something else. Like what? China? The Soviet Union? Cambodia? Vietnam? All those worker’s paradises built on lakes of blood?

These kids are given a microphone and coached to espouse a “solution” that, so far, has never solved the problem they want solved. These kids believe gun control will stop people shooting up schools. They cite places like Britain and Australia where massive gun confiscation ostensibly made things safer by reducing “gun deaths”. Mass killings and gun deaths are two different things. Will eliminating guns stop the killings is the better question. Let’s look at that shall we?” 

I've written two books on the subject, Give Guns a Chance (available on Amazon) and They Shoot Rednecks Don't They? (currently completing publication).  Great Britain's ban on guns in the 1920s is often cited as an example of how taking guns away from citizens makes them safer. That's deceptive. Britain’s gun confiscation was a thinly disguised effort by the upper classes to maintain control, because they feared a progressive socialist peasant revolution such as happened in Russia during the Great War. Several things happened as a result of the confiscation.

• Gun deaths did decline slightly. 
• Murder by other means like bludgeoning, strangulation, poisoning, stabbings, drowning, vehicular homicide, arson and bombing rose more than enough to cause the murder rate to continue rising more than making up for the decline in "gun-related deaths." 
• Criminals lives were saved and their profession was made safer.
• When the Nazis threatened to invade, the Home Guard was practically unarmed.

When Churchill made his brave speech about “fighting them on the beaches, fighting them on the landing grounds," he was bluffing.  After the speech, he reportedly turned to someone on the stage and said, “Of course we may have to fight them with broken beer bottles.” Had not America shipped millions of guns to the Home Guard (many donated by American private citizens), the nation would have been unarmed had the Nazi invasion come. About the only useful thing about Britain's gun ban is that mystery authors like Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle had to come up with more inventive ways to murder the characters in their novels. Criminals did likewise.

In Australia, the same sort of thing happened. Mass murders continued. Regular kinds of murders went on apace. The killers merely changed weapons and tactics. Mass murderers resorted to arson and bombing people when they wanted to pump up the death count up. In both places the actual murder and crime rates rose. The only class of people in that statistic whose death rate declined was that of criminals. Gun confiscation in both cases protected the lives of criminals while increasing the vulnerability of people to strong on weak crime like muggings, beatings, rape and strangulation.

During the Carter administration two studies were commissioned designed to show what kind of gun control best reduced crime. They chose two groups of reliable scientists who were liberal and supported gun control. To their horror Dr. James Wright’s study found that no gun law or combination of gun laws ever passed could be shown to reduce crime. To their horror he released the results of the study in a book titled Under the Gun.

A second study was also commissioned by the Carter Justice Department hoping, I suppose, for a more agreeable result. Florida State University criminologist, Gary Kleck, another self-described “doctrinaire liberal” conducted that study and found that two million crimes per year are foiled by citizens armed with privately owned guns. In most cases the guns were never fired. Kleck published Point Blank, a book that argued against the efficacy of the trademark gun legislation of the liberal left that had funded his research. The left was NOT happy!  Both studies showed in painful detail that gun control laws do not, in fact, reduce crime in any way that can be shown to prove a direct cause-to-effect link between gun control and crime rates. And yet these kids blithely claim that gun control will do precisely that.

Ultimately, these kids are tools in the hands of people who seek to disarm the citizens of the United States in order to make people "better" by writing laws. The assumption is that guns themselves are somehow, responsible for making people want to kill and that if you take away guns from everybody, and let the government protect us from bad guys, everyone will be safer. People believe this despite the government's notorious lack of zeal for enforcing those laws. But the kids believe the narrative. Gun laws will make them safer. The government will protect them if we just have the right laws.

Ironically, these are the same kids whose government failed them 39 times at the sheriff’s department, multiple times at the FBI, repeatedly at the school and by local authorities who failed to report the shooter’s previous history of violence so that his background check came out clean. There were plenty of laws on the books that could have protected these kids. The very people who are supposed to protect them failed massively and yet these are the guys they believe will somehow protect them from a determined killer who could just as easily have built a bomb or brought a couple of swords or a compound bow through the front door and done as much or more damage and death to his fellow students.

 

It wound up that the only protection they got was from people on the scene, not government. An unarmed football coach shielded kids with his own body as he tried to stop the shooter. He died in the process. A fellow student kept his head and held open a door under fire so his classmates could escape and was severely wounded for his courage. The government they want to be responsible for their protection, meanwhile, was waiting outside, guns drawn, but under orders from their commanders not to enter the building. Deputies had to listen to shots being fired inside knowing that kids were dying. That government failed them at every level.

And yet we are treated to a spectacle, organized and financed by progressive socialists who wish to disarm us all in order to safely create what CS Lewis describes as the “tyranny of omnipotent moral busybodies”.  This easy cure they devoutly believe in, despite the fact that the system they propose to adopt has failed everywhere it’s been carried out to its full power. In places where this system has been tried, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Venezuela where citizens were disarmed for their own safety in order to create worker’s paradises. The cost of those "paradises"?  Hundreds of millions of lives. 

The herd instinct is powerful in people and if you notice in the flood of articles being written in praise of "March for Our Lives", the appeal is not to reason and logic. Instead the articles talk about the good emotions and the sense of belonging to a great movement like all the really cool kids. The theme of marches like this is that somehow, if we just have the right laws, people will become “better.” To quote devout liberal Joss Whedon’s creation, Malcolm Reynolds from “Firefly”, “I do not hold to that…………I aim to misbehave!”

Liberals seem to be confused about guns, especially the leaders of this so-called grassroots movement. They buy into the feel good narrative, but down at the ground level the liberals know that for people who are not Jedi masters with their own light sabers, there’s nothing quite like a good blaster when you’re threatened by a corrupt government like the Empire or the Alliance………or by a criminal like Jabba the Hut.

….or Greedo.

If I’d been Han, I think I’d have shot first. He already knew where that conversation was going….

Just one man’s opinion.

© 2018 by Tom King
author of “Give Guns a Chance”
Coming soon,  "They Shoot Rednecks Don't They?"

Would Regulating the Media Stop Mass Shootings?

Mass shootings should be illegal, except where
the population has been safely disarmed first..

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS GUN CONTROL PROPAGANDA AS "SCIENCE"

A guy who commented on a Scientific American article complained that he didn't get enough of a "reaction" to his suggestion that we create laws to limit media coverage of mass shootings and suicides in order to reduce the number of mass shootings and suicide. To be fair, there is some research that seems to say that coverage of such events creates a kind of "contagion" that stimulates others to emulate the behavior. And it's true. Right after the recent Parkland High School shootings in Florida, police stopped four potential mass shootings and/or bombings aimed at high schools by disgruntled kids. The media pundrity's reaction was predictable. They covered the guns. They didn't cover the bombs. And they didn't give much time to the story if no one died. In the media, if it bleeds it leads they say.

In the wake of the Parkland High shootings, even the venerable "Scientific American" put up a pro gun control article entitled "Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns?" It was a blog to be sure but it lacked any pretense of being anything more than a politically motivated anti-white male hit piece with a lot of gun control and racist talking points. It made little effort to maintain the pretense that the article's conclusions were based on science. Some might object to my calling the article racist, since the racism was aimed at white guys. It could be considered sexist too as it absolved blame from women as well as non-whites placing the blame for gun fever directly on males. The blog was an incredible bit of white guy shaming for having been published in an ostensibly serious scientific journal. It basically intimates that white guys are (1) less intelligent (2) are fraidy cats and (3) racist and that's why they are stock-piling guns, a fact that should make you very afraid. That is to be expected. It's the progressive narrative after all. The guy who suggested muzzling the media is at least closer to a method of solving the problem than the traditional hand-fluttering gun control lobby.

The truly ironic thing about the guy suggesting that media were exploiting acts of violence to get attention was that his big complaint was that he wasn't getting enough attention for his comment, especially from the conservative right. He is, in point of fact, trying to get the same kind of attention he's complaining about the media getting. He utilizes a subtle kind of bullying hoping people will pay attention. Okay, he wanted a reaction from the right? Here I go, though not in the way that he'd probably hoped as it won't get him many likes on facebook or hits on his comments on Scientific American..

First off, mass shootings and suicides cannot be solved by making more laws. Both behaviors are already against the law. No one who commits a mass shooting or kills themselves cares what the law says about it. While I myself have railed against the media for encouraging copycat behavior with their nonstop coverage (i.e. glorification) of those who kill others and/or themselves, writing laws to prevent media coverage of these events will not solve the problem. At least it won't solve the problem without causing a whole bunch of those dreaded "unintended consequences" that central planners almost always cause when they try to create top-down solutions.

As soon as you begin to restrict the freedom of the press, you set in motion some very bad things. The rights retained by the people are not permitted to be infringed by the government. These rights are, according to the Constitution, rights we hold first and foremost. The government we formed is expressly forbidden to touch those inalienable rights. Touch one right and you set a precedent to infringing them all. Remember, lawyers and judges are very big on precedents.

Here's the deal. The US murder rate is dropping steadily in the United States (Except, of course, in stronghold Democrat Party run cities), but we are told we have a "gun problem" and need to "do something about it." In other words make some more laws. But the problem is not a legal problem. It's a cultural one, a social problem and even a religious problem.

In embracing progressivism's assumptions, we've wound up in a trap of our own making. While our attention-starved commentator is right, the media does exacerbate both suicides and mass shootings, if we as Americans (especially millennial-Americans didn't feel entitled to be catered to and paid attention to by our fellow citizens, we wouldn't feel the need to shoot them in large numbers. You could have said romantic poetry in the 17th century led to more suicides. It probably did. It's likely that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet led to more teenage suicides. The Bard went a long way toward making suicide attractive to teenaged star-crossed lovers. 

That said, this would not have been so had the cultures of the time not embraced certain foolish ideas about the relative value of emotion over reason. The old Renaissance romanticism had a pernicious effect on culture. It made us too trustful of our own emotions and far too easily swayed by emotion-based propaganda. Emotion became a tool for adjusting the beliefs of the gullible ignoramuses that make up the unwashed masses - Marx's "proletariat". So now the propagandists are suggesting that gun control laws, which make us feel good and morally superior about ourselves for supporting them, will somehow solve the mass murder and suicide problem.

It won't!  The solution to reducing mass murders and suicides is not to change people's feelings but to restore a cultural that values reason. Restoring reason to its former glory is something today's intellectuals really don't want to do though. Most of our post-modernist intelligentsia seem to firmly believe that cultural attitudes are going the right way. All is according to the progressive plan for re-inventing America. It is no surprise we've raised millions of youth to believe their feelings are of far more value than their reason. Obiwan Kenobi even told kids to "Trust your feelings, Luke!"

Perhaps if we could somehow address the cultural imperative that says your Facebook post needs to have a lot of likes lest your feelings be hurt, maybe kids wouldn't feel so deprived if they weren't the center of attention all the time. Perhaps if we created a culture where truth was valued above approval by your peers, where work yields rewards far better than just showing up for a participation trophy, then perhaps we might eventually get to the point where we have a media that values the truth above ratings.

Take the White Men story in Scientific American. The author makes this startling statement:

• A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight.

Okay, let's examine that. FBI data show that while 500 black-on-white killings and 229 white-on-black killings were reported in 2015, 2,574 homicides were committed by whites against other whites, and 2,380 by blacks against blacks. Somehow the author made it look like black-on-white killings were "extremely slight". And few of us will notice this pretty heavy shading of the truth. This is truly remarkable given that more than twice as many black men shoot white men as the other way round. The author leaves out the fact that these kill rates he dismisses as "extremely light" are not adjusted for the percentage of the population represented. Black men make up less than 8% of the US population. White men make up a good 31% and total white people more than 60% if you don't count Hispanics as white, which they kind of are.

So black men murder white men at a rate of more than two to one in actual numbers while being less than 1/4 as numerous in the population as white men. The narrative our kids are getting from the media, though is that white men are cowards (that's why they have guns in the first place), that they are slaughtering black people with their nasty guns and that they are pretty much more dangerous and more stupid than anyone else, especially if they own guns.

The truth is that it's the education system that needs to be "fixed", both at home and in schools. In CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", old Professor Kirk complains, "What are they teaching in schools these days?" Lewis himself pointed out the dangers of teaching young people that truth was about how they felt about it in his essay  "Men Without Chests". In looking at "modern" education Lewis complained that while the old system was a kind of propaganda, men teaching boys to be men. The new system is entirely propaganda, substituting a subjective standard of "whatever I feel about a thing" for objective reason. “Another little portion of the human heritage," says Lewis, "has been quietly taken from them (children) before they were old enough to understand.” 

If parents and educators will not teach children to think for themselves as individuals, if we role model slavish devotion to the herd in our own daily lives, we raise children to be lemmings and not American individuals. When that process becomes complete, the proletariat will become a tool for government to manipulate as it will. We will have exchanged one form of relatively ineffective mass murder for another form far more powerful and effective at slaughtering people in large numbers. Check the history of collectivist proletariats in just the past century. It's not a pretty picture. The rate of slaughter in these progressive collectivist states puts American school shooters and mass murderers in the shade. And I bet the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Venezuelans didn't think it could happen in their countries either.*

© 2018 by Tom King

* And by the way, in all those nations the media was regulated BEFORE the mass executions got to rolling along and usually after the citizenry had been disarmed.

To My Liberal Friends on this Merry Trump Christmas

At this blessed season, I feel compelled to warn all my liberal friends who might have received an "official Red Ryder Carbine Action, 200 shot, Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time" for Christmas or who might have purchased one to protect themselves from the ravening hordes of evil Trump Minions (not to be confused with actual conservatives) who are sure to descend upon them to take away their pot, food stamps, National Endowment for the Arts Grants, or to tell them who they can have sex with.

Guys..................

"YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT!"

© 2016 by Tom King

Common Sense About Gun Rights Just Ain't So Common

My latest book - Give Guns a Chance

It happens again and again. Someone always posts a list of mass shootings and then rambles off about kids accidentally being shot and how it "just makes sense that if you just got rid of guns, that all these senseless killings would stop. 

Well, they wouldn't. It's never worked before.

First of all virtually all of the mass killings they cite were committed by either kids from liberal families (Democrats), registered Democrats or Muslims. Perhaps we should ban Democrats and Muslims from owning guns. I could live with that.

The stats on numbers of accidental deaths by guns, for instance, are far outstripped by the numbers of accidental deaths by falls, car wrecks, knives, fire and other such things. Should we ban climbing ladders, driving cars, using kitchen knives, matches or flammable liquids? Should we stop drunk driving by taking the cars away from people who don't drive drunk? After all, a car can kill a lot of people.

No one can debate with liberals, because they already have these self-evident truths of theirs and have ready-made "logical" conclusions based on false assumptions. That said, I'll argue with them anyway. Banning guns will NOT take them away from bad people. Yes, it will reduce the number of deaths by guns, but in every case where it's been tried, the murder rate has risen, not fallen because deaths by stabbing, strangulation, poisoning, bludgeoning, and other such delightful methods have increased to more than compensate for the fewer gun deaths. Part of that is because gun confiscation increases the number of potential easy victims and reduces the risk for criminals and terrorists.

And can you tell me how a 5'2" 120 pound woman can protect herself from a 6'4" 280 pound man intent on raping her? Even if she knows karate or some martial art, she's toast against someone that size who decides to break down her door and come after her. Ask a self defense instructor or mixed martial arts guy. With a gun, the odds are in her favor or at the very least equalized. Guns are the only fighting chance the weak have against the strong and criminal who would attack them.

And peeing on yourself as Liberal Representative Joe Salazar airily suggested would NOT prevent rape. Likely it would only intensify the attack.

Gun ownership was always intended as a bulwark against government overreach. Because a militia is necessary to the public defense, the founders recognized that an army or militia can also be used to coerce the citizenry. A heavily armed citizenry is a lot more difficult to coerce. Will there be accidents? Yes. My brother was accidentally shot in the chest by a friend who was playing with a shotgun. He died. He was 16. That doesn't mean I have a right to attempt to disarm every person in the country. It means, someone's parents should have been supervising them. If they don't care enough to keep their guns safely locked away, why would they take other safety measures? Kids are going to hurt themselves because they don't think about safety. The think they are immortal. Kids are going to jump off roofs with bedsheet parachutes, swim in ponds full of broken glass and shards of steel, and break their necks trying to ride railings on skateboards. That's not about guns. It's about supervision.

A disarmed population is a herd of sheep ready to be loaded into boxcars and carried to the gas ovens. The reason most of the 15 million people slaughtered by the Nazis in WWII didn't resist was because they were disarmed and it never occurred to them that they could resist. Americans think about that because we have a tradition of being armed and prepared to defend ourselves. The second amendment does that.

If you're a proponent of gun control, please check out the book I wrote on the subject. It should answer all those "common sense" questions of yours.


© 2016 by Tom King

Marvin the Martian Issues Statement on Illudium P-36 Explosive Space Modulator Rights

NSA wiretaps Curiosity Rover transmission from Mars.

(6/22/2013 - Houston)  NSA wiretaps intercepted the transmission below from the Mars Rover "Curiosity:  As a result the Obama administration is pressuring the Martian government for more restrictive Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator Laws.

More Gun Laws / Fewer Gun Deaths / Safer Criminals

Think of all the criminals whose lives we'll save.....

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Call it an on-the-job safety measure for working burglars

A Yahoo News story this morning sounded the initial trumpet for a study that shows the stricter gun laws mean fewer gun deaths.  This study will become the center of an artificial media firestorm in favor of gun control over the next few days.  The study will be cited endlessly as "proof".  Note, however, that the headline carefully states that gun laws mean fewer gun deaths, not fewer murders. And by the way, they count burglars, intruders, muggers and thugs who are shot by citizens in self-defense or by police as "gun deaths".

A similar study in England also found there were fewer "gun deaths" after they enacted gun laws.  What they didn't tell you was that deaths by poisoning, bludgeoning, knife attacks and other means went up sufficiently to more than compensate for reductions in death by guns.  There is actually evidence that the murder rate overall either climbed or did not change. In addition, crimes with handguns have doubled, gang-related gun crimes have exploded to the point that formerly unarmed British Bobbies are now carrying guns in self-defense.  Ironic in that under the British gun laws, self-defense is not considered a good reason for getting a gun license.

I suspect if the American study had compared the "gun death" rate to the overall murder rate they would have found either no change in the murder rate or that murder rates rose (especially in more dangerous places like Chicago). 

Murder is murder and, apparently, if you take away one weapon, people simply find other means to kill.  So instead of being shot, you get bludgeoned to death.  Is that somehow a better way to go? Oh, and by the way, you can't shoot back.  So, if your attacker is larger than you, you will soon have no way to equalize things since you can't legally defend yourself with a gun.  Gives the bad guys a sporting chance, what?

I have wondered how long it would take the anti-gun lobby to gin up this sort of study.

As Benjamin Disraeli once noted, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics."

I'll leave it to you to determine which category this latest "proof" belongs to.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

Gun Control: The Afghan Conundrum

A liberal blogger recently made the statement that the death of Chris Dorner demonstrated once and for all the fallacy that a person can resist the government, so we might as well go ahead and give up our weapons.  She roundly criticized all those "nutty" pro-second amendment, knuckle dragging rednecks who resisted the perfectly rationale belief that if you take away everyone's guns it would put an end to gun violence.

So, let me pose one question. I'm a reasonable man and I have changed my opinions on things, so give me your best argument.  And my liberal friend's argument was nowhere near a "best argument". It was name-calling at best.  But give it a go, somebody.  I do listen to rationale arguments. That's how I went from being a leather fringe, moccasin booted, headband-wearing long-haired youth to being a member of my state's public transit advisory committee at the head of a massive bipartisan local rural transportation initiative.  Here goes:

My friend's argument as best I understand the argument, goes something like, "None of us could resist the government with private weapons if they want to take us down.  The Chris Dorner case proves it and proves we're nutty for thinking so, therefore there is no reason for us to cling to our guns."

So let me ask my pro gun control friends something.  Why did the Russians, arguably a very powerful nation, fail to subdue Afghan rebels armed with personal weapons and smuggled small arms?  Why also have American forces, arguably the most powerful in the world, failed to eliminate the Talaban resistance in Afghanistan.  If government can always subdue privately armed citizens, why haven't they done it?

For that matter, why did we retreat from Vietnam?  It wasn't the massed forces that beat us there.  We won every single military engagement we fought with Communist regulars.  It was the guerrillas that we couldn't beat. The citizen soldiers with private weapons (the kind that we would make illegal here if the President has his way.)

Are you saying that the United States government wouldn't have considerable trouble rolling into, say East Texas, and disarming or subduing the millions of armed East Texans living out in the woods there?  That it was only the Taliban that was capable of resisting government forces?  Americans, who whipped a nation ten times its size (TWICE) largely with private weapons, couldn't provide a creditable resistance?

I'm here to tell you that the only way the government could suppress a real rebellion in East Texas would be to nuke the whole region and what American soldier would willingly press the button to wage that kind of war against his own kin and his neighbors. How many would join them?  The only reason there hasn't been such a war is because these armed citizens are honest, hard-working law-abiding citizens. So why would you want to disarm the good guys is what I want to know?

An armed citizenry gives the government pause when it decides to use even what the president called for in a campaign speech "a constabulary force as powerful as the US military" to suppress disagreement.  That ability to suppress citizen disagreement with government policy is a two-edged sword.  It threatens both Democrats and Republicans, Green Party and Tea Party. 

It's all been done before.  In post-Tsarist Russia the citizens were first disarmed in the name of public safety and then they went for mental health-based crowd control solution.  If you disagreed with the Communist authorities, you were dubbed mentally ill and sent to the gulags in Siberia to get some fresh air and exercise. If you pulled out your old rifle from your days in the Army during WWII, you could be declared insane and off to the gulags you went.

This is not paranoia.  This is history. What conservatives fear, and rightly so, is a steady creep toward full-fledged socialism and historically, full-fledged socialism has never ended well for anyone.  We believe the President and his advisors when they say things about what they want to do.  We don't dismiss them as liars just because we can't really believe they're saying when they talk about collectivism, nationalizing industry, and collapsing the economy deliberately to provide an avenue for the establishment of socialism as the law of the land. When they talk about redistribution of wealth, getting rid of guns, universal housing, healthcare and taking over the energy industry for our own good, we conservatives believe them.  We think the insanity is not to.  We recognize the pattern we see here and we look at societies where the things they are talking about have been done.  Russia - 56 million dead, China 160 million dead, Cambodia - who knows how many million dead and the list goes on and on. 

"Ah, but..." the socialists argue. "We'll never choose leaders like Stalin and Mao and Pol-Pot.  We'll choose wise leaders like Obama, Biden and Clinton."  They can be trusted.

Is that right?  Remember, the Russians trusted Trotsky and he wasn't a bad guy.  Stalin had him killed.  They trusted Lenin and he was only a bit more dictatorial.  He died rather younger than expected and Stalin maneuvered himself into place and started making deals with Hitler and later, slaughtered anyone who disagreed with him.

"Power does not corrupt," wrote Frank Herbert. "Power attracts the corruptible."

I've never understood how the left can talk about how our government cannot create democracies nor deliver justice at the point of a sword everywhere else in the world and yet be so eager to take away our own swords and deliver them into the hands of the government in our own country.

"Insanity," pointed out Albert Einstein, "Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Under the US Constitution, our nation has become the wealthiest, most powerful and free nation on Earth.  People risk their lives to get here for the chance to live in freedom and to have the opportunity to make their fortunes.  We are the last refuge for them.  If we fall, the free peoples of the Earth have no place else to go.  If we fall, I believe human liberty falls.  The corruptible are lurking at the gates waiting for the first opportunity to seize power over their fellow man.  If we fall, it will be a long time before we can win it back our freedom.

Just one man's opinion...


Tom King

What Next? Road Control Laws?



Without roads people wouldn't be able to drive
cars anywhere so they wouldn't have car
accidents anymore and the middle class would
be preserved - right?



I took two graduate courses in statistics and research. One thing I learned is that Benjamin Disraeli’s purported comment about statistics is true.  There are, in fact, “Lies, damned lies and statistics.”  Used properly statistics can be quite useful. They show us which medications work, what problems our society needs to solve and Mark Twain’s overall negativity at different stages in his life.  The study was based on the number of times he used a form of the word “NO” in Huckleberry Finn vs. Tom Sawyer.  It’s burning issues like that now that really show off the power of statistics. 

We are constantly showered with meaningful statistics on the news, in books, magazines and even in our Sabbath sermons. For some reason we accept cold mathematical statistics as proof over almost any other form of persuasive data. After all, how can math lie?

Well you might ask.  The truth is, math doesn’t lie.  People lie. They just use math as a tool to support the lies.  One group uses statistics to prove that gun control doesn’t work.  Another uses statistics to prove that it does.  Throw in a few logical sounding anecdotes and you’ve got enough proof for your average drive-by consumer of information - whichever he happens to hear that most closely meets his already preconceived notions.

I stumbled across an interesting set of statistics from the WHO today that I’d like to throw out there for your consideration and to point out how you can get a wrong-headed conclusion from any statistic.  I was looking at worldwide causes of death as parsed out by the income levels of the country in question.  Of the top 10 leading causes of death, the first nine are all forms of disease. The slaughter caused by so-called “natural causes” runs to a staggering 28.32 million deaths annually. We don’t get to the first non-natural cause of death till we get to #10: Road traffic accidents.  More than 1.21 million people die as a result of road-related accidents.

These roads must be stopped.  Ah, but “No!” says the chairman of the American Automobile Association. “Roads do not kill people.  People using roads kill people.” 

Immediately the chairman of the Amelgamated Society to Stop Highways and Open Lanes from Existing shoots back, “Well that’s just absurd. Everybody knows that when the nation of Lower Bulemia banned roads altogether, road-related accidents dropped by 46%.

Next thing you know, you’ve got some fool in Congress sponsoring a National Roads Limitation Act, especially after he sees polls that say that 52% of people in his district support the idea.

Or better yet, let the progressive socialists get hold of it.  Did you know that according to WHO, road accidents are highest among middle-income nations; ranking seventh in total deaths in middle income nations. Road accidents don't even show up in the top ten causes of death among poor and rich nations.  So, now roads are obviously a threat to the middle class.  Amid much hand-wringing and cries of “What shall be done to save our middle class from all the road-related carnage?”  The media starts pouring on stories about how roads are at war with the middle class and they lay the blame at the feet of the construction companies that build roads.  If it wasn’t for their incessant greed which drives this road-building madness, thousands of innocent middle class people would still be alive and actually going to the polls themselves to vote for Democrats.

“I know,” some bright would-be member of central planning says. “Let’s get rid of roads and we can all ride trains.”  The reasoning is like this.  Poor people don’t drive so that’s why road accidents are fewer in poor nations.  Rich people don’t need to go anywhere on roads, the central planner reasons, because everything gets brought to them by the middle class and the poor, so they don't need to drive on roads. Either that, or they fly helicopters, take their yachts or hire chauffeurs. In any case, the top 1% don’t need to use roads which road accidents don’t make top ten list. 

Therefore, using our best Socratic logic, as learned watching David Letterman on late night TV, road accidents makes the top ten death toll in middle income nations because:

1. Using roads is what kills so many middle class people. 
2. If these roads didn’t exist, middle class people couldn’t use them.
3. If middle class people could no longer use roads and used trains instead then…..
4. The death rate by road related accidents would go down if we passed a law banning roads.

Voila!  Something gets done. A law is passed.  Passing a law is always the solution step on any progressive's list of logical reasons we must do something about anything that shows up in the news. Remember the progressive creed. Never waste a good crisis! And to the progressive socialist, passing a law is always the thing that must be done since passing laws, according to their creed, solves everything.

Of course, nothing ever actually gets done about reducing the number of roads cause to the surprise of central planning, people actually need roads and trains are too danged expensive.  A new federal bureaucracy gets created, however.  It becomes more costly to build roads what with all the new paperwork.  The existing roads deteriorate because instead of maintaining them, the funding is going toward paying for the new road reduction regulations.

And the final kick in the teeth - death by train wrecks rise.

But, what about the dingbat who thought the whole thing up? Well he gets himself re-elected because the media trumpets said dingbat’s spectacular success at getting “important” legislation passed and nobody bothers to ask whether any of his legislation did any actual good.

And civilization careens merrily on down its poorly maintained roads toward a certain destruction of its own making.  God save us all – or at least the 52% of us who want to be saved according to a recent Gallup Poll.

© 12/22/2012 by Tom King

Let's Write Some MORE Laws - That's the Ticket!

(c) Tom King

License  Some rights reserved by jurvetson


After a week like this one, we're sure to see a string of teary-eyed politicians telling us we've got to do something to prevent these kinds of tragedies from ever happening again - as if politicians have the power to stop anything bad from ever happening or causing anything good to happen for that matter.  Politicians live to make laws.  It's the politician's raison d'être. A politician does not feel like he or she is a politician if there's not a law passed with that politician's name on it.  The media encourages that by remarking sagely as to the number of laws named after a politician when the pundits and political hacks are evaluating said politician's career (usually after the former senator, congressman, mayor, etc. is safely dead).  Passing law is the mark of political success.  I've never heard of a politician being praised on the six o'clock news for getting rid of laws, have you?

It makes sense then that in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings that politicians would feel and overwhelming urge to pass a law. And you can bet it will be a gun control law.  The thinking is that if you get guns out of the hands of these people, then they can no longer go on shooting rampages. Only they won't go that far because the NRA is too powerful.  They'll just reduce the legal size of magazines, figuring criminals won't be able to kill as many people if they can't shoot so many without reloading.

Problem is, these guys aren't criminals that shoot up schools and shopping malls. They're people who should be in a mental hospital.  Virtually every one, from the guy who shot Gabbie Gifford to the autistic kid who felt no pain in Connecticut, virtually every one was identified as mentally ill at some time prior to their shooting rampages.

Making the gun harder to get is not going to stop them.  Making magazines smaller or doing away with semi-automatics isn't going to help.  Charles Whitman killed 13 people, an unborn child and wounded 32 others. He seemed normal enough, even exemplary in his behavior. He was an Eagle Scout and ex-Marine.  He used only bolt-action rifles, a shotgun and some pistols. He had no automatic weapons. 

A gentleman with a handgun stopped a man this past week who attacked people with a knife and was set to start a mass slaughter. He didn't have a gun.  An off-duty cop working as a movie theater security guard at a San Antonio mall stopped a man who was planning to shoot up the place.  The people who do this kind of thing are not generally working with both oars in the water.  Sweden has the most restrictive gun laws in the Western world and a terrorist managed to kill 70 unarmed people at an island resort there.

Even though these things are horrific, they aren't really getting more frequent.  We just hear about them more often because we have 24 hour news and, as political commentator Armstrong Williams aptly noted, "If it bleeds it leads." Still, when we hear about this stuff, all of us are seized with a desire to make it stop.

The problem is, you can't stop it. Evil and lunacy exist in this world and will, on occasion, strike.  We decided almost three decades ago that putting people willy nilly in insane asylums was a bad thing to do.  Government-run asylums, we discovered, were terrible places.  So we turned them all loose - or at least most of them.  That's how the government solves a problem. If there are people locked up unjustly and you demand they stop doing it, the government just lets everybody go. Big government is not subtle We had an explosion of homelessness after the great release experiment in the 80s when all those who had been in institutions hit the streets with no place to go.

The problem with the folks at the government being the ones to stop school massacres is that the government always takes a sledge hammer approach to any problem it tries to solve.  You don't get a lot of nuance in decision-making when it comes to laws being written in Washington and designed to provide a one-size-fits-all solution for 350 million people.

So, they jump on gun control as the easy fix for what is actually a mental health problem. People can't get help for mentally ill loved ones who need it.  I know. In my own family I've had to watch loved ones with mental illness deteriorate to the point that they attempted suicide quite spectacularly. I've got a loved one living in a storage building 3000 miles away and I'm too broke to help him.  The system tries to do as little as possible and only helps when they absolutely have no other choice. Any kind of even temporary committment is next to impossible because they fixed that in Washington back in the 80s after a Mickey Rooney movie about the subject of unjust mental incarceration.  It was widely viewed and in true Washington fashion, laws were passed to "make it stop".

Our mental health system is a wreck. In working with therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, I've experienced first hand what they go through in trying to help patients. I spent two years in a graduate rehab psych program and worked in mental health programs for 25 years.  The average mental health practitioner walks among his patients like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (occupied by lawyers).  They are so hemmed in by regulations and potential lawsuits that people who should be taken off the streets for their own good as well as the safety of the community can't be.  Sometimes a mentally ill person volunteers for a stint in the hospital, but if they volunteer, they can check themselves out whenever they want to, like when the killin' urge comes over them.

I worked at a treatment center for kids and watched severely disturbed kids turn 18 and be turned out into the world with virtually no supports. That's how the law worked. Some places tried to provide them help - usually faith-based facilities with church partnerships to help the kids integrate into the community. Most such programs operated without public support and under the disapproving eye of state mental health authorities.
In the past 30 years, we've learned more about the human brain and how to treat it and what to expect of various types of brain diseases.  Yet with all this knowledge, we find ourselves prevented from doing the very kinds of things that would prevent people from going berserk and shooting up an elementary school.

But that's what happens when you get politicians doing hip shot law-making. You want to prevent mass murders in our country?  Two things:

1. Protect likely targets.  If a movie theater can hire a sharp-eyed security guard, a school can.  Off duty cops have the training and are always looking for extra work. Ex-military guys can be trained for the work and lots of them come home looking for jobs. Protecting kids is a job they were trained for.
2. Get those with violent mental illnesses off the street.  Yes it will cost money, but not nearly as much as the massive bureaucracy needed to manage the highly restrictive gun control laws that are being proposed right now.  And hospitalization is not a life sentence. Proper treatment and medications can help unstable people cope and learn ways to avoid going out of their minds and committing these heinous acts.

Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Sniper, left a note. In it he said if his life insurance was any good, to pay off his debts and give the rest to mental health research so they could find out why he was compelled to kill all those people. 

Everyone asks why this happens every time it does. Some blame it on the devil. Others blame it on God.  Some, like the president in his memorial speech in Newtown, do both. Obama remarked that evil exists in the world and then qualified that by saying "God called them home". So we've assigned blame to both God and the Devil.  Throw in Republicans and the NRA and that should spread the blame around even more.

We look for a reason for the unreasonable, when these things happen. There is no reason other than the obvious one.  When you ask God to leave you be; when you tell Him you want nothing to do with Him, He goes away and leaves you alone.  We've no excuse for asking where God was.  We've asked Him to stay out of our schools.  We've left the crazy people out on the streets, uncared for till they lost their minds altogether.  And worse, when the angels left along with God, we didn't replace them with security guards.

If we're not willing to open our schools to God's protection and if we insist on trying to solve this problem in Washington instead of in our communities, homes and churches, where things like this happen, then the carnage will continue unabated. We cannot keep waiting for the government to do for us what can only be done by us.  We do not have to wait for permission to fix our own communities; to make them safer.

God will make things right in the end, despite our best efforts to muck it all up. While I don't believe He chose how those kids would die - that He "called those children home" as the President suggested - I do believe He will take them home one day when He comes back to clean up our mess. 

God help us all when He sees what we've done to this place.

Tom

 

How's That Gun Control Working Out for You?

Restrictive Gun Laws in Mexico Make It Open Season on Women and Children
(c) 2012 by Tom King

This past weekend, a large band of armed men (some of them law enforcement officers) descended on a church youth campout near Mexico City, raping 5 women and girls and sexually abusing and brutalizing an unknown number of youth in a lengthy rampaging attack on the camp. Seventeen of the attackers have been rounded up so far - cold comfort for the traumatized kids and their sponsors. 

Mexico's constitution, like ours guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms, but no one at the camp had any means to defend themselves. Despite its constitution, Mexico has already done what progressives want to do in the US.  They have piled on such heap of restrictive gun ordinances that owning anything larger than a 22 caliber popgun is nearly impossible - unless you're a gang member or drug cartel member of course.

Mexican citizens who obey the laws are sitting ducks for the heavily armed and increasingly brazen gangs of thugs that roam the countryside raping, robbing and murdering ordinary Mexican civilians. The death toll has been horrific. It's little wonder so many Mexicans are willing to risk swimming the river to escape.

With recent rash of mass shooting in the US, there has come the predictable calls for new, more restrictive gun laws ostensibly to prevent such events. As groups like the NRA continually point out, taking guns from the innocent leaves only the authorities and criminals armed.  A liberal friend of mine pointed out it only takes minutes for police to get to you if you call 911 for help.  Unfortunately, most shootings are over in just seconds.  The Colorado theater shooting was over in less than two minutes including time for the perp to reload.  While it's nice to catch the bad guy, catching a mass murder as he attempts to run away doesn't help the dead much.

If advocates of restrictive gun laws would like to see the consequences of a government legislating disarmament of its citizenry, one need look no further than Mexico. I don't know about your church, but when mine takes its kids camping, we take along our men and many of them go well-armed - just in case there are bears, you know.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King