Just Making a Comparison...

A friend of a friend posted this picture a few days ago -
The picture itself is fairly offensive - showing our current sitting President, elected by a majority of the voters, alongside a list of some of the worst dictators of the last century. In fact, the poster got called out on that, but defended herself with the claim that this was only showing leaders in the two categories. It wasn't meant to imply that Obama himself is a murderous megalomaniac...it just happens that his opinions and policies regarding personal weapons place him in the same group as all those horrible people.

Yeah, right. Just a coincidence. Okay, let's look at this a bit.

First, of course, is the obvious - these names and faces were not chosen at random. If we're looking at world leaders associated with gun control...where's Tony Blair, who got the 1997 Firearms Act passed in the UK? Ronald Reagan, who endorsed the Brady Act? Angela Merkel, who signed a measure in Germany that even bans Tasers? I'm guessing that they weren't considered scary enough - especially Reagan. Including him on the list would have confused the target audience severely, I suspect. It is fairly obvious that this list was designed to provide a group of absolute villains specifically for the purpose of ranking Obama alongside them. Showing that some reasonable people support certain gun control measures would have been counter-productive to this Orwellian hatefest.

Second, to be a fair comparison, Obama's policies have to actually qualify him as a leader looking to strip citizens of their right to own guns. Does he have that sort of record? I haven't seen much on that from him. Back in June, he apparently put out some executive orders that would result in computerizing background checks, increased enforcement of existing laws, and improving interstate cooperation. None of which sounds quite like prying guns out of peoples' hands - and I haven't even found confirmation that the orders were issued. Even the NRA says he hasn't done anything on the issue - though of course that only means it's a conspiracy to do more later. But before you go lumping our President in with a bunch of dictators...shouldn't you be able to point to something he's actually done?

Third, the others in the group really ought to belong there, too. Some of them, sure. Stalin, yep. He instituted gun control in the Soviet Union. Amin, Castro? Couldn't find anything on them. Though Uganda seems to me to have been a failed state under his rule, so I wonder just how effective any gun laws really were...and I suspect that it isn't all that relevant in Cuba, where most of the populace can't afford food, let alone a handgun. But Lenin? Gun control in the Soviet Union appears to have started under Stalin, not Lenin. And Hitler? It turns out the 1938 German Weapons Act completely DEregulated long guns and ammunition, as well as liberalizing the rules on licensing. (In fairness, it also made it illegal for Jews to own any guns at all - but considering all the other antisemitic legislation of the time, it hardly seems fair to characterize that as gun control.)

So tell me again - is this really a picture showing the category that Obama's actions have placed him in, alongside all these historical villains? Or is this yet another attempt to demonize the President with lies, half-truths, and innuendo?

Of course, if you wanted to do it right, you could leave the picture exactly the same, and merely change the captions - the pictures in the bottom row are all leaders who believed that they had the right to murder their own citizens purely on their own word. But the people who put out this sort of thing seem to be just fine with that.

Ghoulish Principles

It is truly sad how nearly every tragedy in modern society is immediately twisted to serve the purposes of ideologues.

The horrible shootings at Virginia Tech are a perfect example. Within hours of the story hitting the news, I saw arguments on both sides.

On one side, unsurprisingly, there are calls for additional gun control. If it had not been so easy for the killer to acquire guns, the activists say, then this terrible tragedy never would have happened. I suppose that might even be true, since it turns out that he did indeed purchase his weapons legally. But considering the amount of planning that he apparently put into this, and the ease of buying guns ILlegally, I really doubt that an extra law would have stopped him. Most of the laws I’ve seen proposed would CERTAINLY not have stopped him. Let’s assume that he stayed within the law. A ban on semi-automatic handguns would have forced him to use a revolver. A restriction on magazine sizes would have forced him to reload more often. Even a complete ban on handguns would merely have forced him to bring in a rifle or sawed-off shotgun…which could have been easily carried and concealed disassembled in a large book bag - then reassembled after he chained the doors shut. Would any of those changes have actually saved anyone?

On the other side, activists are calling for increased gun ownership and more freedom to carry them concealed. They point out that one sane person in the building carrying his own pistol could have taken the gunman down before he killed so many innocent people. Maybe it would have worked out that way. Or maybe it wouldn’t – I’ve seen multiple sources that claim that 50-75% of soldiers in a battle do not fire their weapons. Those numbers are for World War II and earlier – the military has since then added desensitization and conditioning to their training methods, and by the end of Vietnam got up to 90% of their forces firing when needed. That means that even in trained soldiers under direct fire, 10% of them are too frightened to pull the trigger. Maybe that one person with a pistol would have shot the murderer and saved lives…or maybe he would have missed and got shot himself…or maybe he would’ve missed and killed another bystander…or maybe he would have hidden somewhere and hoped he wasn’t found.

Or maybe there would have been several people in the building with guns. That increases the odds that some of them would have taken action…which leaves several people roaming the building with handguns out, looking for a shooter. What happens when two of these good citizens come around a corner and spot each other?

And in the meantime, if the pro-gun activists have their way, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of college students running around armed. It’s been awhile, maybe college has changed since I went – but I remember seeing numerous relationship breakups, the stress of Finals Week, depression and homesickness, and lots of drinking. How many additional murders and successful suicides would result from adding handguns to that volatile mix?

Obviously, there are good arguments on either side of the issue. But is this really the right time to argue it and the right example to use for support? Good public policy comes from a careful and rational examination of the issues and consequences. The immediate emotional reaction to single event is hardly the right mental state in which to design that policy – and the activists’ ghoulish attempts to use this tragedy to further their own causes makes me want to reject them all.

Edit - From what I've seen in the news, the Virginia Tech gunman was clearly an attention-seeker. I've seen two separate sources suggest that publicizing his name only encourages such behavior. That makes sense to me - accordingly, I have removed his name in favor of anonymous terms - "gunman," "killer," and "murderer."

The Price of Stupidity

The city council in New Bedford, MA is pushing the state legislature to ban anything that looks like a gun unless it is made in bright colors and clearly a fake. Pellet guns, BB guns, toys, water pistols, gun-shaped lighters, replica guns – a red plastic tip on the end is no longer enough, the entire fake gun has to be brightly colored so the police know at a glance that it isn’t real.

This is the result of a fatal police shooting some time ago – a New Bedford police officer shot and killed a man who drew a pellet gun. Does anyone but me think that the city council is trying to solve the wrong problem?

A police officer is in a peculiar position. He may interact with dozens or hundreds of citizens every day – traffic stops, routine patrols, investigations of minor crimes – and never have to draw his pistol throughout his entire career. But any one of them, no matter how routine, could instantly turn into a life-and-death situation because he happened upon a hardened criminal, a psychotic, or an armed fool. Is it any wonder that they tend to develop a paranoid streak?

The public needs to keep that in mind. If I get pulled over, I try to get all my documents out before the officer comes up to the window. Once he’s there, I keep my hands visible, move slowly, and avoid grabbing anything that might be mistaken for a firearm. If I had to get out and be frisked, and I had anything in my pockets I thought might make him nervous, I’d say so – especially if it was shaped like a gun. And by the way, if I felt my rights were being violated, I’d still stay as polite and calm as I could manage – the time to complain is later, during the lawsuit, not right away, when a nervous armed man is ready to react to any hint of resistance.

The late idiot in New Bedford not only pulled out something shaped like a gun, it was in fact a weapon, capable of causing permanent damage or even death to the officer. Admittedly, that’s unlikely – you’d have to use a pellet gun at very short range and get a lucky hit in the eye or the temple to do any serious harm. He drew the weapon when threatened with arrest after being found in a crack house. I suspect the mandatory investigation on the officers came back with a verdict of “justified” – and it probably didn’t take very long.

Banning fake guns is not going to fix the problem. In the heat of the moment, almost anything can be mistaken for a gun or other weapon – a pipe, a pen, a pair of scissors. It won’t make the cops any less nervous when somebody hurriedly grabs something out of their pocket. And spotting bright colors won’t make much difference, either – how many criminals will paint their pistols bright orange or yellow to try to get the police to hesitate? And how many officers will get shot that way before the rest of the nation’s police start reacting to those bright colors as evidence of a REAL weapon instead of a fake? One, maybe two?

Let’s not write another law to fix the wrong problem. Instead, let’s allow all those fake guns – but stop sympathizing with idiots who pull them on police officers. Stupidity SHOULD be a capital crime – and pulling a water pistol or a lighter on a cop is stupid.