Apr 18 2009

Touchstone for anti-gun, universal healthcare true believers

Category: guns,healthcare — harmonicminer @ 8:27 am

With the recent spate of shootings,  false allegations about how the Mexican drug wars are being fought primarily with guns directly obtained in the USA from gun shops, and the Left’s ambition to institute universal health care of some kind, it seemed good to repost this from last September.

____________________________________

A lot of folks believe themselves to be very righteous because they care so much about the children (even though they’re pro-choice on abortion). They want you to believe that they care more about human life than you do. So they’re really big on universal health care, and they’re anti-gun. In the first instance, they want you to be forced by government taxation to pay for it. In the second instance, they want to remove your right to self-defense (only meaningful if you have the tools to do so, correct?).

Is it clear yet that they don’t care about you? I hope so. If you don’t grasp that, reread the first paragraph. Their concern is for other folks, not for you. Not even for your children, because, you see, your children are yours, and the universal health care/anti-gun true believers don’t really care about them, just the children of those other people, more or less in the abstract. Otherwise they would not try to take away from you the tools you need to defend them, and the money you need to take care of them.

A few facts to set the table:

1) Auto accidents are the single biggest cause of death in children (and, for that matter, adults up to age 30 or so). At least 40% of those are alcohol related.

2) Since 2004, the next biggest cause of death is poisoning, according to the CDC.

For at least the 40 years prior to 2004, the two leading causes of injury death were MVT deaths and firearms. Beginning in 2004, poisoning deaths outnumbered firearm deaths and have increased at a greater pace than firearm deaths since then. Unintentional drug poisonings are the largest component of poisoning deaths; they are primarily related to drug overdose and their rates of increase have outpaced those of all poisonings. Physicians who prescribe narcotics (e.g., opioids such as methadone or oxycodone) should be aware of the risks associated with the drugs that are contributing to these deaths. Whether the drugs are not prescribed correctly, are not taken according to the physician‘s directions, or are diverted from a patient to someone else cannot be ascertained, but all possibilities must be considered (3)

3) Of the firearms deaths, despite anti-gun accident-fear propaganda, the biggest causes are suicide and homicide. Of the homicides, most are below age 30 or so. Estimates of the number of gang related murders run from 10-50%, depending on who is asked, and the methodology of classification. There are far fewer firearms “accidents” than the anti-gun industry wants us to believe, and some of those “accidents” may be murders that cannot be proved. (“Yes, officer, I accidentally shot him while cleaning my gun.” Nearly unbelievable to anyone who knows anything about firearms.) Men are more likely to be murdered by strangers, unless it is gang related. Women are somewhat more likely than men to be murdered by someone they know.

What does all of this mean? Among other things: the causes of death up to early middle age are overwhelmingly not precisely “medical” or “health” related, but are related to accidents, poisonings, suicides and murders. If one was deeply concerned about the health status of children and young adults, the single biggest place to start is those causes of death, NOT whether or not they have “health insurance”. And in the case of poisonings with prescribed medications (the second largest cause of death of younger people after auto accidents), it could reasonably be argued that those deceased would have been better off with LESS medical attention….. Note that drug-overdose with illegal drugs seems to be much less a cause of death than overdose with prescribed drugs.

To the biggest cause of death, auto accidents: the leading cause of death of people under age thirty is traumatic brain injury in a vehicle accident. And outside of fatality, the leading cause of disability and enormous medical expense for young people is the same. Who among us does not know, or know of, a young person with such an injury? It is exceedingly common, sadly. Just in my circle of friends and family, I know of perhaps a half dozen such injuries in young people in just the last couple of years. I personally knew of only two people who were murdered in the last 35 years, one who was the child of a friend (murdered by her new husband), and one who was the brother of a former student (murdered by a jealous rival in a love triangle). People who live in gang-ridden neighborhoods will have a different experience, of course. Over those same years, I have known, or known of, more young people than I can remember who have died or been very seriously injured (often permanently) in auto accidents.

Again, a reminder: 40% of those vehicle deaths are alcohol related.

Regarding medical insurance coverage, according to the CDC, in the year 2007:

…the percentage of persons who were uninsured at the time of the interview was highest among those aged 18-24 years (27.5%) and lowest among those under 18 years (8.9%) (Figure 4). Starting at age 18, younger adults were more likely than older adults to lack health insurance coverage. [emphasis mine]

That 27.5% is about TWICE the national average for uninsured status (around 14.5%), which includes all ages, races and sexes. Why is the rate of uninsured status lowest for children under age 18? Simple enough: they tend to be covered on their parent’s insurance until they are 18. The implication of this is straightforward: about 8.9% of adults with children do not have health insurance themselves, and so do not have it for their children.

Even before age as a consideration, the CDC had this to say about race/ethnicity:

Based on data from the 2007 NHIS, Hispanic persons were considerably more likely than non-Hispanic white persons, non-Hispanic black persons, and non-Hispanic Asian persons to be uninsured at the time of interview, to have been uninsured for at least part of the past 12 months, and to have been uninsured for more than a year (Table 7). Approximately one-third of Hispanic persons were uninsured at the time of interview [emphasis mine] or had been uninsured for at least part of the past year, and about one-fourth of Hispanic persons had been without health insurance coverage for more than a year.

And now, as promised, I present the touchstone to determine whether a true believer in univeral health care actually “cares about the children”, or is simply pursuing a political agenda for which such poses are convenient.

One touchstone is very simple: more children die of head injuries in auto accidents than any other way, certainly HUGELY more than die for lack of health insurance, or by firearm. If a person is not willing to demand and campaign for a law requiring everyone under the age of, say, 18 to wear a protective helmet when riding in a car (cost, maybe $50 per person), they have no moral standing to demand and campaign for universal health insurance (cost, maybe $3000-4000 per person per year). It is clear that the helmets would save FAR more lives and reduce FAR more suffering than any amount of health insurance.

What is more evidence of your compassion and concern for human beings?

1) your willingness to take a cheap step to reduce the NEED for medical care, and the liklihood of severy injury or death? Or,

2) your willingness to spend a very large amount of money to try to fix problems after they have occurred?

I think the answer is obvious.

Another touchstone: since 40% of fatal auto accidents are alcohol related, we should adopt very radical anti-drunk-driving laws, sufficiently toothy that almost no one will take the risk. Curiously, people who are FOR universal health care (again, requiring tax payer money) are often heard to recommend that we should be more like Europe in our health care policy. I wonder if they would resist our adoption of the drunk driving laws of, say, Germany? Or, we could make it really simple. Drive drunk (defined as a minimum percentage, and/or obvious impairment), and you lose your license for five years. Do it again, and you can never again have a license, and driving without a license in this circumstance is punishable by serious prison time. There would surely be less drunk driving, and MANY lives saved.

Either of these approaches, the helmets, or zero-tolerance drunk driving laws, would save far more lives than covering the uninsured, and also avoid many greivous non-fatal injuries. Together, they would dramatically reduce death and injury in the USA, for HUGELY less money than universal health care.

To be blunt: if you’re for the universal health care, and not for both of these policies, you’re a fraud, pretending you care for people’s health, when what you really care about is some kind of political agenda.

It won’t do to say that society wouldn’t put up with requiring helmets in cars, or with more radical drunk driving statutes. People said that about seat belts, and motorcycle helmets, but the laws exist in most states. And people DO modify their behavior when legal penalties are severe and certain. I don’t remember the last time I saw a cigarette lit in a restaurant in California.

By the way: the same argument applies to being for gun control because you think it will save lives. Either, or both, of these other policies will save MORE lives than removing all guns from society (as if that were possible), and without infringing on the Second Amendment and the basic right of self-defense. Again, you’re a fraud if you’re for gun control, and against helmets in cars and far more stringent drunk driving laws than we have now.

Tags: ,

Apr 15 2009

Most weapons in Mexican drug wars are not from the USA

Category: guns,Mexico — harmonicminer @ 8:42 am

Golden Lies Too Good To Ignore

April 5, 2009: The mass media were embarrassed recently when someone did the math and revealed that the hot headline “90 Percent of Illegal Guns In Mexico Come From The U.S.” turned out to be false. However, the real story was not that the actual number was 17 percent. Nor was it that the “90 percent” number came from someone (accidentally or purposely) who misread the data (90 percent of the guns identified as of U.S. manufacture were, using their serial numbers, indeed traced back to the U.S., and not some other country they had legally been exported to.) The real story was that there were so many sources of illegal weapons in Mexico, with the U.S. being one of the more difficult places to get weapons from. It’s much easier to get a load of weapons in via ship, in a container labeled as something else. Port officials in Mexico are easier to bribe, than U.S. or Mexican border guards. South America is a magnet for international gun runners, many of them now swing by Mexico regularly, to take orders and make deliveries.

Like I said.

As usual, don’t believe ANYTHING the major media says about guns in the hands of US citizens.  They simply have an agenda, and it is to cancel the 2nd Amendment, one way or another.  And they count on the general ignorance of the non-gun owning populace to tell their lies.

Tags: ,

Mar 15 2009

Nothing like encouraging free expression in class

Category: guns — harmonicminer @ 9:52 am

Of Arms and the Law: Prof. calls police after student discusses guns in class

“Last October, John Wahlberg and two classmates at Central Connecticut State University gave an oral presentation for a communications class taught by Professor Paula Anderson. The assignment was to discuss a “relevant issue in the media,” and the students presented their view that the death toll in the April 2007 Virginia Tech shooting massacre would have been lower if professors and students had been carrying guns.

That night, police called Wahlberg, a 23-year-old senior, and asked him to come to the station. When he arrived, they they read off a list of firearms that were registered in his name and asked where he kept them. Guns are strictly prohibited on the CCSU campus and residence halls, but Wahlberg says he lives 20 miles off-campus and keeps his gun collection locked up in a safe. No further action was taken by police or administrators.

“I don’t think that Professor Anderson was justified in calling the CCSU police over a clearly non-threatening matter,” Wahlberg told The Recorder, the CCSU student newspaper that first reported the story. “Although the topic of discussion may have made a few individuals uncomfortable, there was no need to label me as a threat.””

This is pure harassment, of course. Nothing but.

But, to get into the spirit of things: if anyone in the good professor’s class had referred to the use of a controlled substance, would the police have been called? How about underage drinking? What if the class presentation had been in favor of legalizing currently illegal substances? Grounds for police intervention?

Somehow, in the professor’s mind, anyone who even speaks of firearms in any non-derogatory way is automatically suspect.

I bet the professor is on the Diversity Council, and preaches far and wide about tolerance and accepting people who have different perspectives than yours.

Any takers? It seems that more and more, the following equation is true:

professor = hypocrite

I wish it was true less often than it seems to be.

Tags:

Mar 04 2009

USA Gunshops Arming Mexican Gangs?

Category: guns,media,Mexico — harmonicminer @ 10:27 am

U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels – NYTimes.com

The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them.

When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns.

Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.

Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and wielded in horrific crimes.

Maybe some of this is true. But some fundamental facts:

1) It isn’t an “assault rifle” if it isn’t capable of fully-automatic fire. It doesn’t matter if it is a “military style” weapon, or “looks like” an assault rifle, if it only fires one round for each pull of the trigger.

2) No American gun store can legally sell fully-automatic weapons to anyone who has not cleared VERY high hurdles of authorization under existing federal law, as well as state law. No one can just walk into a gun shop and buy one after filling out some paperwork. Most gun shops don’t have ANY automatic weapons for sale, because their opportunity to sell them is so limited, and the process so cumbersome, that stocking any would just tie up cash in inventory that is almost never sold.

3) It appears that no new law is required, because the gun shops that are knowingly aiding “straw purchases” are already breaking federal and state laws.

4) No weapon that is really an “assault rifle” can be purchased easily, and the chances of a “straw purchase” of such a weapon are exceedingly slim, because by definition it is fully automatic and requires extreme levels of authorization and qualification.

5) Articles such as the one quoted above usually omit these facts, using the term “assault rifle” to mean anything that simply looks “military style” and is semi-automatic, like many modern hunting rifles. They also tend to tar an entire legal industry with the misdeeds of a few. On that grounds, of course, the New York Times should be closed, permanently, given the number of lies it tells, and laws it breaks (even when they cannot be prosecuted for political reasons).

6) If you hear of Mexican shootings involving “machine guns” (i.e., fully automatic weapons), those guns were not bought using “straw purchases” from American gun stores.

7) The level of corruption in the Mexican police and military is so huge that many automatic weapons that are used illegally probably came directly from military stores.

8) Mexico has an enormous coastline, mostly very lightly patrolled.

Does anyone have any doubt that large numbers of weapons enter Mexico that way, including fully automatic assault weapons? What would make a smuggler take the risks of bringing South American drugs into Mexico, and not the illegal weapons necessary to defend the trade?

So: while no doubt some USA weapons have made their way into Mexico and been used in crimes, this kind of report has only one clear aim, and it is to add to the drumbeat for yet more restrictive USA gun laws.

But what else would we expect from the New York Times?

Tags: , ,

Jan 22 2009

Will the USA have to learn Britain’s lesson the hard way?

Category: Europe,freedom,guns — harmonicminer @ 10:44 am

Freedom has eroded in Britian, bit by bit, for 20-30 years now. Britain does not have anything approximating our Constitution… essentially the Parliament can make nearly any law it chooses, subject only to whatever the politicians believe will keep them in office.  It is a true tyranny of the majority, with little in the way of checks and balances, or constitutionally mandated protections of minority positions.   Britain has laws against certain kinds of speech, laws that would never stand under the First Amendment of the USA, it has banned most guns (and had an enormous rise in crime as a result), it has sold out many aspects of its sovereignty to the Europeans, and so on. At the same time, Britian is in real danger of losing its very identity as a nation.  Here’s a window on how some middle class British are feeling about it now:

The British called – They want their guns back!

Will we make the same mistakes?  I’m not optimistic, given how the recent election went, with Democrats winning big by promising to do the very things the British now regret, from nationalized health care to gun restrictions masquerading as crime prevention.

Tags: , ,

Dec 09 2008

A nation of pistoleros? Well, maybe.

Category: guns,Islam,terrorism — harmonicminer @ 10:16 am

Knowing my neighbors, it might be good not to try to stage a terrorist takeover in my town.   But there are lots of “gun free” zones in Los Angeles, meaning that only criminals have guns.

Of Arms and the Law: Massacre in Mumbai

It’s hard to envision hundreds of American civilians or dozens police standing by while four guys shot up a hotel full of people, encountering no resistance.

Continue reading “A nation of pistoleros? Well, maybe.”

Tags: ,

Nov 26 2008

Trying not to laugh at ignorance, but it’s hard

Category: guns — harmonicminer @ 6:10 pm

The state of Delaware has a large deer population that has to be kept in check or it will overpopulate, threatening habitat for other species, and perhaps reaching Malthusian numbers itself. There weren’t enough deer being taken in the traditional deer season, so the state recently created an extension of the season specifically for handgun hunters. By definition, these people have to be skilled stalkers to get close enough to take a deer with a handgun, and very skilled shooters as well. But there are always nitwits in the woods, or the journalistic woods, at least:

Continue reading “Trying not to laugh at ignorance, but it’s hard”

Tags:

Nov 12 2008

Could we, like, concentrate on CRIMINALS?

Category: guns — harmonicminer @ 5:35 pm

Orange County sheriff’s crackdown on gun permits comes under fire – Los Angeles Times

Hutchens said she was concerned that more than 1,100 people held concealed carry permits issued by the former sheriff — nearly three times the number of permits issued in Los Angeles County.

Let’s see: the population of Orange County is about 3 million according to the US Census people. So that means that roughly 1 person in 3,000 in Orange County has a concealed carry permit. 

It is, of course, risible to compare permit numbers to LA County, as if it was some kind of standard.  LACounty is one of the most repressive districts in the USA in the matter of firearms ownership and lawful carrying.  If your county only has three times the number of LACounty, it means you’re pretty repressive, too.

Run! Run! Save yourselves! People without criminal backgrounds might be carrying guns! Run!

Now, just for laughs: take a guess at how many criminals in Orange County are carrying guns around? Somehow, I think the number is quite a bit higher than 1100…

Tags:

Sep 22 2008

Touchstone for anti-gun, universal healthcare true believers

Category: guns,healthcare,legislation — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

A lot of folks believe themselves to be very righteous because they care so much about the children (even though they’re pro-choice on abortion).  They want you to believe that they care more about human life than you do.  So they’re really big on universal health care, and they’re anti-gun.  In the first instance, they want you to be forced by government taxation to pay for it.  In the second instance, they want to remove your right to self-defense (only meaningful if you have the tools to do so, correct?).

Is it clear yet that they don’t care about you?  I hope so.  If you don’t grasp that, reread the first paragraph.  Their concern is for other folks, not for you.  Not even for your children, because, you see, your children are yours, and the universal health care/anti-gun true believers don’t really care about them, just the children of those other people.  Otherwise they would not try to take away from you the tools you need to defend them, and the money you need to take care of them.

Continue reading “Touchstone for anti-gun, universal healthcare true believers”

Tags: , ,

Aug 25 2008

Does Joe Biden hunt?

Category: election 2008,guns,humor,Obama,politics — sardonicwhiner @ 9:00 am

A couple of folks have pointed out that, in some ways, Joe Biden is Obama’s Dick Cheney

Joe Biden is Barack Obama’s Dick Cheney. Biden’s age and experience stand in stark contrast to Obama’s lack of both. Like Cheney, Biden is unlikely after two terms as vice president to ever seek the presidency in his own right. That will give him the freedom to be the power behind the throne. And if (God forbid) Barack Obama is elected president, he is going to need a lot of guidance. His reckless, naïve foreign policy initiatives at this crucial point in history could put the entire free world at risk.

Well. In the spirit of bi-partisanship, it’s time to ask a central question. Exactly which influential Democratic operative or donor will Joe Biden go hunting with?

Herewith, my list of hunting buddies for the wanna-be vice-prez:

William Ayers
Tony Rezko
Jeremiah Wright

George Soros
Nancy Pelosi
Harry Reid

Since they’re probably all big supporters of gun control, I hope they’ll be very careful.

Hillary or Bill, if Slo-Joe asks you to go hog huntin’, I’d suggest you just go to Vegas and sleep it off. No one knows for sure just how pliant Bitin’ Biden will be in the hands of his new boss… but prudence is indicated.  And Jesse J…  don’t even THINK about it, man.

Feel free to suggest other hunting buddies for the man who would be almost the king.

Be safe, everybody.

Tags: , ,

Next Page »