Gun poll

[Scooter]

Wayne LaPierre shoots himself in the foot on background checks:

Wayne LaPierre on background checks now:

The NRA's Wayne LaPierre said on "Fox News Sunday" that background checks for all gun purchases would lead to a national registry of gun owners.

LaPierre said that requiring checks for all gun purchases would be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Wayne LaPierre on background checks then:
a

Let us know when your head is facing front again, Wayne, if you ever manage to pull it out of your ass.

[Lord Jim]

I've been meaning to post about this...

LaPierre is a real piece of work; he's utterly shameless...he points out, (correctly) that the government has failed to prosecute hundreds of thousands of felons who attempted to get guns but were stopped by the existing background checks..

And then turns right around in the next breath to say that only law abiding citizens are affected by background checks....

He calls for the creation of a national database to track the mentally ill, but then opposes having 40% of the gun sales in this country checked against that data base...

I don't know why he goes on the Sunday talk shows; he certainly doesn't do himself, his cause, or his organization any favors...

Last Sunday, it was Chris Wallace's turn to make Wayne his bitch:

[liberty]

My suggestion to help keep guns out of the wrong hands is this: Tie the right to own weapons to militia membership. Membership would only be available to adult citizens of good character who are sober and mentally stable. Once an individual has qualified for membership he or she is added to a national data base with biometric and is issued an identification card. He would also have pass words he would use to purchase guns and ammunition. A psychological evaluation may also be required. In order for individual to purchase guns and ammunition he would have to prove militia membership by being identified in the data base.

[Sean]

IIRC there is already a school of thought which interprets the 2nd Amendment as referring to a state militia as a collective rather than individuals...

[Lord Jim]

That is now a settled issue. We've had two fairly recent SCs decision that have made clear that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right.

The militia folks lost that debate. If they want to eliminate the right of individuals to own firearms, they will have to build sufficient support for the idea to have the Second Amendment repealed, and there's a better chance that I will head up the "Draft Michael Moore For President Committee" than there is of that happening.

[liberty]

IIRC there is already a school of thought which interprets the 2nd Amendment as referring to a state militia as a collective rather than individuals...

As I read the Second amendment and as the Supreme Court has ruled the right to bear arms is an individual right. I don’t see how anyone can read it and come to any other honest conclusion. The second amendment is divided into part the first describe why the right is needed and the second protects the right to own weapons. I believe that you are thinking of the National Guard; today’s National Guard is not a militia. A militia is a civilian organization; in my country it is an organization where the membership elects their leaders and is governed by civilian law not military. I can assure you that is not military.

[Sean]

I am not thinking of the National Guard. I am thinking of a 'militia' as described by your 2nd Amendment. I actually do know what the word means...

The conclusion that anyone comes to regarding the aforementioned Amendment will always be coloured by personal opinion. That works both ways.

[Econoline]

I don't think we need yet another gun thread, so I'll post this here.
And PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter says:

[dales]

How many people "killed by guns" were suicides?

[Joe Guy]

In spite of the fact that suicide is illegal, more active duty military personnel in 2012 died by suicide than in the fighting in Afghanistan.

Making an AR-15 illegal will accomplish what, exactly?

[Lord Jim]

How many people "killed by guns" were suicides?

And how many were perps killed by people defending themselves?

If you follow the link you'll see that the number refers to all people killed by gun fire in the US over for whatever reason, over that period. It does not just refer to, (as I initially thought when I first looked at it) people who had died in "domestic" disputes. It uses "domestic" in the broad sense.

We've seen a lot of assertions in this discussion about how this or that number is "meaningless"; here's an example of one that truly is. Without knowing how many of those deaths are suicides, (which the country-to-country data that I posted here shows has no correlation to the availability of firearms) and how many of those deaths are good guys shooting bad guys versus bad guys shooting good guys, this number is truly meaningless.

That's on top of the fact of course, that the the whole thing is a complete apples and oranges comparison that was obviously complied by whoever compiled it purely for dramatic affect, and that the comparison really tells us nothing....


But aside from those factors, it's a wonderful graph...

[Econoline]

I don't know if it's possible to determine from the existing statistics how many of the "domestic gun incidents" during that stretch of time were suicides, how many were homicides, and how many were accidents. Why does that really matter?

As for the numbers "killed in wars"...when researching this statistic PolitiFact says that they "used the broadest definition of 'death' -- that is, all war-related deaths, not just those that occurred in combat" so presumably suicides by military personnel during any war were counted on the "War" side of the ledger.

Isn't anyone else appalled--or even surprised--by these statistics?

ETA: Jim- the only statistics I could find readily were from the FBI for the years 2006-2010, and that listed a total of 1963 "justifiable homicides" by law enforcement officers and 1304 by private citizens for that 5-year period, in which there were a total of 156,732 gun deaths.

[Guinevere]

Marking

[BoSoxGal]

My stomach is in knots with worry about tomorrow’s rally in Richmond.